How realistic would be making money just by modding? Created 3 months ago2024-08-29 20:15:09 UTC by RoJAn

I got this idea in my mind, when i saw popular mods opening Patreons to continue development. Well yes, these are big projects and is required a lot of time for their final realese, but i was thinking... what about a freelance job? like, someone ask you to program a weapon, an entity or a NPC in their mod for a few bucks (of course, for a very very cheap price).
Tho most of the projects i've saw where made by a lot of people with no financial motivations, i see a few cases where someone was willing to pay money just to code a few things (at least on Moddb), so my question is: How probable is to find people who is interested in your coding habilities and wants you to do a commission in the Source engine? or even more... in the Goldsrc engine? They are very old engines and i don't think there's that much demand for coding of these like in Unreal or Unity. (Also because most of the people who moddify very old games do it for their own projects istead of economic reasons, just like i do, i don't really want to tie my projects with monetization)

As you say, there is not much demand.
Though there are people out there still willing to pay for getting modding work done, it's just a matter of finding them (or getting found by them) and prove to them your skills are worth it.

A good start would be building up a portfolio, a collection of work you've done to show off your skills.

A portfolio would be interesting, gonna check on doing that one day.

In my 10 years of modding, I think I've earned up to 400€, most of which was programming, a small percentage of it being mapping. And keep in mind, this was GoldSRC.

On the other hand, I got way more by getting involved in a couple commercial projects, Source and idTech-related.
So it's definitely possible and it definitely happens, but very rarely so, plus you gotta be exceptional and timely. After all, it is professional work you'd be offering.