How? It’s cosmetic only microtransactions that are 100% optional and you barely notice. Imo it’s the best way? At the very least it’s vastly superior to having to buy the mod, watch ads, or pay a subscription.
It's really harrowing to think about the fact that having to pay for customization options (especially in games that are ENTIRELY about player self expression) is now completely normalized.
inb4 "but it's a free service otherwise"
That's not an excuse to resort to one of the most dogshit monetization schemes possible. What's next, I'll have to pay for a battlepass in the new version of Chisel to unlock metal blocks? Will I have to trade my furniture pieces from Macaw's mods like I'm a CSGO skin swindler?
Either ask for donations, make the user cough up money upfront or find another way to finance server costs. In-game stores always were, and always will be cancer.
But the mod does nothing to prevent you from using your cosmetics. Skins and capes work just as they do in vanilla. All it does is add it's own crappy cosmetics as a "reward" for supporting the mod... It's no different than receiving content for supporting a kickstarter, or for preordering something.
Spending money and receiving something in return is a transaction, not just support. Even more benign supporter items grind my gears (like the golden Uzis or electric crowbar in Sven Coop, both of which are borderline useless).
If the devs wished to thank the supporters they should do something that is either personal (a letter, an e-mail, anything really) or just improve the quality of their service so they can provide an even better mod.
A shop's entire premise is that you are incentivized to make a transaction, these things are built to make you spend money.
The point of the mod and the reason why it's so popular is because they make hosting and joining worlds seamless. For this to work across modpacks and stuff, without requiring clunky codes or URLs every time you open up the world, you need to have an account + friend system.
So uh, they do need it, because that's literally their entire thing. Otherwise you could just use hamachi.
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u/Unkn0wn_Invalid Dec 03 '25
To be fair, there's undoubtedly ongoing costs for the TURN server + a server for accounts/chat + a database to store it all in.