O you could say people want mods made with passion, not with monetary gains in mind.

How are let's players monetizing games? Isn't it based on commercials?
you get plenty of those when you download mods outside of steam workshop.

We already have kickstarter and early access for projects that require money to complete a vision.
Monetizing mods in the way of direct pay opens a whole new can of worms, support, copyright, plagiarism, cheat mods.
I can already see a company forming that does nothing but repackage other people's mods and make a quick buck befoe the author finds out.

agreed.  if people are doing work and i want that work why shouldn't that worker be able to ask for compensation.   let the free market figure it out.

i mean for fucks sake a mod is nothing other than dlc, which costs money.

$1 at most but even then, it is iffy... Modding is supposed to be a passion project, not ur whole life. They are supposed to do it as a hobby cause they like doing it so it certainly shouldn't cost him that much money.

With that being said, there are plenty of people on the internet that are willing to donate to the modders and on top of that, mods have always been free and its not like for the last 20+ years, modders couldn't live without getting paid... Sure they would need an actual job but modding is supposed to be something they enjoy doing so it really should be optional donation method

Probably nothing.

I know you didn't say he did, but if the guy EXPECTS to make the money back from donations, he wants his head looking at. And spending $15k on making it would be dumb.

i have a woodworking hobby that i'm passionate about.  should i not be allowed to sell the furniture i create?

Here's how I see it:
Example #1: Beyond Skyrim: recreating all of Tamriel in Skyrim's engine. I would donate massively to this.
Example #2: Fishing mini game which was listed at $2 on the mod workshop when it existed: No donation.
Example #3: Everything in between, such as new quests, armor, graphical improvements etc. My donation method would be dynamic depending upon what kind of effort I thought they had put in. I would reward effort and talent.

I guess I didn't exactly answer the OP but if you extrapolate this answer you see how I would see it.

If it provided a pretty significant amount of extra gameplay and I wanted more from him, I'd probably throw him five bucks. I'm not quite sure why everyone's being so harsh about it. It might not technically be his game, but you pay for what you want; if they can get paid for mods, they can afford to spend more time making awesome mods.

I'd give him an "attaboy".

If he wants $$ he can create his own original game.

I never said you shouldn't be allowed to sell something or make money from it but if it has been free for the last 20+ years and when you do try to sell it, there is a large outcry that it shouldn't be sold, then if you want to make money, you should try a different method such as donations or don't bother at all. Because if you don't, not only will you not be selling many units if any at all, but you would also lose the people that like your mods and who you make the mods for cause they would go to someone else who does it for free.

20 years of free mods where a vast majority are utter shit.

allow monitization to exist and more high quality mods will exist.  the question is do you want more high quality mods to exist?

you can buy software these days and that hasn't prevented free-ware from existing.  there will always be free mods.   ..but there could be some really great ones if a way to recoop investments made existed.