Maybe don’t try to sell your paid mod to the company whose Terms of Service you appear to be violating?
While the idea of paying for mods has long been taboo in modding circles, there’s always the occasional modder who tries to cash in. One popular way of monetizing mods these days is via Patreon and similar sites; instead of directly charging for a mod, developers make download links available to people who support them at a given subscription tier.
One such developer is Luke Ross—not his real name, apparently—who makes a startling amount of money writing VR ports for games without VR support. Until recently, Ross’s software supported Cyberpunk 2077, but no longer—largely because Ross himself contacted CD Projekt RED, the game’s developer, and offered to license his VR port to them. The company’s response was presumably not what he was hoping for: instead of a big fat contract, he got a big fat DMCA takedown notice.
One of the reasons the whole idea of paying for mods is that many modding communities are perpetually nervous that any suggestion that anyone was making money from modding would result in blanket copyright strikes and takedown demands. This is because most publishers’ Terms of Service specifically forbid third parties from making money from their IP.
CDPR is no different: the company has an entire section of their Terms of Service document dedicated to what they term “Fan Content”, and the first paragraph of Section 2 (entitled “The Golden Rule”) states that “you cannot do anything with our games for any commercial purpose.
