It is not a site a frequent with any regularity these days, but in years passed, it was a trustworthy repository for mods for some of my favorite sims, primarily, the Strike Fighters series. i had long moved on from this game, but recently thought it might be a great sim-lite for my Legion Go. This prompted me to look into reacquiring some of the best mods from the series. I was surprised when I logged into my combat ace account and saw that I was only permitted to download 1KB...you read that right...1KB per day. This prompted me to dig deeper and i discovered that starting this year (ie. January 2025), all downloads require some form of paid subscription ranging from a trial membership for a few bucks for a day or two of access, to close to $100 for an annual membership.
The decision seems to be quite controversial, with some long time supporters abandoning ship. The main issues appear to be (1) free mods are now locked behind a paywall with the developers of the mods not receiving any of the pay; and (2) the fees are extremely/prohibitively high for some located internationally due to the value of the dollar against their own currencies.
In any event, I'm still trying to decide what I want to do. :hair:
On the one hand, I get it. On the other, I worry that those prices will be prohibitive to a lot of people.
The authors of the free mods will find a new site.
I have often thought that most things that are valuable services will need to go back to paid business models. The free everything model is just equating to companies working against their consumers best interests because of the high cost and need for eternal profits if they are corporations.
The main barrier to this of course is people not wanting to pay anything for privacy and protection from viruses, scammers etc. So that splits a community. I'd love it if some large corporate run social media platforms went paid just to stop the bots and trolls and to some extent be able to identify fraudsters.
The other emerging threat is A.I. Models scraping your whole website. I am not exactly sure at the moment if ai simply sucks web data onto a data centre and holds it as part of it's model or scrapes a website like a search engine every time a query is made.
But who would be left if only some things went paid?
Quote from: Destraex on January 06, 2025, 04:19:03 PMI have often thought that most things that are valuable services will need to go back to paid business models. The free everything model is just equating to companies working against their consumers best interests because of the high cost and need for eternal profits if they are corporations.
The main barrier to this of course is people not wanting to pay anything for privacy and protection from viruses, scammers etc. So that splits a community. I'd love it if some large corporate run social media platforms went paid just to stop the bots and trolls and to some extent be able to identify fraudsters.
The other emerging threat is A.I. Models scraping your whole website. I am not exactly sure at the moment if ai simply sucks web data onto a data centre and holds it as part of it's model or scrapes a website like a search engine every time a query is made.
But who would be left if only some things went paid?
Difficult topic once you start to think about it. But I guess I would be willing to pay a nominal fee for good, non-intrusive hosting that is reliable.
Quote from: Destraex on January 06, 2025, 04:19:03 PMI have often thought that most things that are valuable services will need to go back to paid business models. The free everything model is just equating to companies working against their consumers best interests because of the high cost and need for eternal profits if they are corporations.
The main barrier to this of course is people not wanting to pay anything for privacy and protection from viruses, scammers etc. So that splits a community. I'd love it if some large corporate run social media platforms went paid just to stop the bots and trolls and to some extent be able to identify fraudsters.
The other emerging threat is A.I. Models scraping your whole website. I am not exactly sure at the moment if ai simply sucks web data onto a data centre and holds it as part of it's model or scrapes a website like a search engine every time a query is made.
But who would be left if only some things went paid?
I don't think any of that has relevance here. Combat Ace is a website not unlike Grogheads, as I understand it. Its a bunch of guys who love flight sims. Not a corporation with a bottom line. The key difference being that they decided to host files for games, mostly mods. They imposed a 5 download per day limit to keep the hosting costs down, but apparently, people circumvented the limits by simply creating multiple accounts. This raised their hosting costs to the point where they can no longer continue to pay the expenses out of their own pockets.
I think they should be more transparent. Go public with what it is costing per month to host the files. At least show that the subscription is intended to simply cover those costs rather than profit off of other peoples' work.
For free mods you could go full open source and then host on github. No more download cost.
Quote from: Jarhead0331 on January 06, 2025, 04:48:46 PMQuote from: Destraex on January 06, 2025, 04:19:03 PMI have often thought that most things that are valuable services will need to go back to paid business models. The free everything model is just equating to companies working against their consumers best interests because of the high cost and need for eternal profits if they are corporations.
The main barrier to this of course is people not wanting to pay anything for privacy and protection from viruses, scammers etc. So that splits a community. I'd love it if some large corporate run social media platforms went paid just to stop the bots and trolls and to some extent be able to identify fraudsters.
The other emerging threat is A.I. Models scraping your whole website. I am not exactly sure at the moment if ai simply sucks web data onto a data centre and holds it as part of it's model or scrapes a website like a search engine every time a query is made.
But who would be left if only some things went paid?
I don't think any of that has relevance here. Combat Ace is a website not unlike Grogheads, as I understand it. Its a bunch of guys who love flight sims. Not a corporation with a bottom line. The key difference being that they decided to host files for games, mostly mods. They imposed a 5 download per day limit to keep the hosting costs down, but apparently, people circumvented the limits by simply creating multiple accounts. This raised their hosting costs to the point where they can no longer continue to pay the expenses out of their own pockets.
I think they should be more transparent. Go public with what it is costing per month to host the files. At least show that the subscription is intended to simply cover those costs rather than profit off of other peoples' work.
I see. So this new information indicates it was simply an data hosting expense thing. One that now could also be a profit motive.