Earn from your mods

Coming soonThis is not available yet. The page below explains what it will be and why it is not open — nothing here can be used or bought today.

This is not open, and nothing on this page works yet. Nobody can upload files to modsdrop.com. There are no author accounts. No advertising runs on the site, so there is no money to share and nobody is being paid anything. Right now the site holds one library, mine, the files behind crashmods.com. What follows is the plan and the open questions still in it. It is not a promise of a rate, a payment, a feature or a date, and I have no date to give.

The idea

modsdrop.com is a file host. The plan is to let other mod authors upload their files here, get a link, and use that link wherever they publish their work. Once advertising runs on the download pages, an author would get a share of what the advertising on their own files earns. What that share would be, I have not worked out.

Several file hosts already work roughly this way, so the idea is not original. The hard parts are not in the idea. They are in counting downloads honestly and in paying out fairly, and that is what most of this page is about.

Why it might be worth an author’s time

These are intentions, not terms. Proper terms would have to be written and published before anyone could upload anything.

• The file would stay yours. I have no interest in exclusivity or in taking any rights over a file. You would be free to host the same file anywhere else, and to remove it from here whenever you wanted. None of that is written into terms yet.
• The download page would stay clean. If adverts do run, I want one real download button and nothing dressed up to look like it: no fake buttons, no boxes pretending to be virus warnings. Players who feel tricked do not come back, and that would cost an author downloads. I have not chosen any ad placement, because there is no advertising on the site.
• No account needed to download. Nobody has to register to download a file here, logged-out visitors are given no cookies, and there is no analytics on the site. That is how it works today, and I would like to keep it that way for visitors whatever happens with author accounts.
• Downloads already work properly. This part exists. Download links are signed and last six hours, a download resumes if the connection drops, and one visitor can run four at once. The first 25 MB come at full speed, then each stream settles at 6 MB/s. Those are the current settings for my own files, not a service level I am promising to anyone.
• Files are scanned. The VirusTotal scan state is shown on each file page, so a player can see what they are getting before they download.

None of it works until advertising does

A share of advertising revenue needs advertising revenue, and there is none here. I will not open payouts before adverts are running and I can see what real traffic actually produces. Anything I told you before that point would be a guess dressed up as a figure.

Counting a download is the difficult part

A download should only count when a real person asked for it. That sounds simple and it is not. Crawlers and archiving bots pull files. Mirrors re-fetch them. A player clicks twice because the first click seemed to do nothing. A resumed download is the same download carrying on. On any file host a share of the traffic is worth nothing to advertisers and must not be paid for, and the line between that and real demand is a judgement call.

My preference is to count conservatively and explain the rule in public, rather than count generously and have to revise the figures downwards later. If I settle on rules, they go on the site in writing.

What an author would earn depends on where the players are

Advertisers pay very differently depending on the country a visitor is in. The same file, with the same number of genuine downloads, would be worth a different amount depending on who downloads it. That is outside my control and outside yours.

I am not publishing a per-country table. I do not have one, I have no advertising income to build one from, and I am not prepared to invent it. If adverts ever run long enough to produce real numbers, I would rather publish what the site actually earned over a stated period than a projection.

What I have not decided

• What share of the advertising money would go to authors.
• Whether there would be a minimum before a payout, how payments would be made, and how often.
• Any limit on file size, on storage, or on how many files one account could hold.
• Who would get in at the start, and whether uploads would open to everybody at once.
• What would happen to earnings on a file removed after a copyright complaint.
• Whether any of this opens at all, and when.

Each of those depends on what advertising pays, what the hosting costs, and what payment processors will let one person in Hungary do. I would rather leave the blanks visible than fill them with numbers I would have to take back.

Who you would be dealing with

One person. I am Máté Geszti, I run crashmods.com, and I do this alongside everything else. The servers and the file storage are at Hetzner in Germany, and traffic goes through Cloudflare. Being one person means I move slowly and cannot offer the service level a company would. It also means the money has to genuinely exist before I can share any of it, and that you always know exactly who you are dealing with.

In the meantime

If you want your mods in front of players now, crashmods.com is live and takes mod submissions. If you have an opinion on how any of the above should work, or you want to hear about it if uploading here does open, get in touch or email [email protected]. I would rather hear from authors before I decide than after.