Well said. A few overly-angry trolls here seem to be singling out this one "magicono" guy, yet reading the modders own workshop forum, there were many concerns expressed by almost half the people involved that the GOG release wasn't done very well, from bad communication, several modders not even knowing who this "gamerzahk" Youtuber guy is (despite GOG's PR release making it sound like he was orchestrating the whole thing with the modders), to GOG taking the modders inclusivity mindset "We provide Windows, Mac & Linux" to arbitrarily denying access to the Mac & Linux builds for zero good reason (they're literal zero-effort pre-made binaries), to GOG literally putting "GOG" in the developer field despite playing no part in development. The attitude of "Totenglocke" though towards the modding community of even demanding they be "drummed out of the community" unless they give him 100% of what he wants 100% of the time, is exactly why a GOG Workshop would sink like a stone if it were released here the same way tomorrow to the same toxic "audience"...

Once again, you're going about this the wrong way. The issue was never that the modders didn't want people using their mods. They only cared whether their IP was being abused. There's a huge difference, and you yourself are exposing yourself as a fool while blaming others for having an "attitude".

That's only you, bud.

I do agree with most of everything you said, except for the semantics part. Semantics do matter. Do you know the Jack Valenti testimony in 1982. "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." It will make the film industry "bleed and bleed and haemorrhage".

Let us put aside the veracity of his prediction and focus on how he, and the media industry, exacerbate the threats of media copying. Associating this practice with "thieves", "pirates" and "assassins" paints a picture in the mind of the public that is very, very different from reality. So allow me to be precise.

If I distribute copies of your painting, perhaps I may erode its commercial value somewhat. If everyone has a copy of it at home, who will pay to see it or why should I offer more to buy it? The impact is, therefore, mainly proportional to the number of copies I made.
If I steal your painting or your car, then the impact is absolute! You cannot use it and you cannot sell it. A single nasty theft can ruin a person, a family or a company; but a single act of copyright infringement... it is not likely to be that harmful. Even if the monetary impact is difficult to calculate (it is not the number of "assumed lost sales"), financial ruin due to illegal copies are the result of cascading infringements.

It is for good reason that legally these crimes are treated differently. Their nature is different, their impact is different, their reach is different. Let us call things their real names. Copyright infringement is a crime with meaningful financial impact in multiple industries and calling it by its name does not diminish it.

The point of the theft of physical objects is that it liberates it from the owner's rights to control it. Copyright infringement is a theft of the owner's control. They both are theft, and they both reach the same result. Duplication is not less severe than stealing the original object itself. I literally just explained it to you. You're trying hard to attempt to use a narrow definition of theft and making broad assumptions to justify your remarks, but this ain't it. In fact, you're making it sound like copyright infringement is not a big deal.

Tell that to Bowser.

BTW, Valenti also lobbied against the DMCA, fearing it would destroy the industry. In fact, the DMCA served as a boon for the industry today for all its might, sometimes to the point of abusing it, even though it is wildly more costly for them. It paid off, and Valenti is not in fact the best example to pick off from a Wikipedia article.

Having read through this thread I felt like weighing in as one of the mod creators involved.

* I made the mod "Darker Dungeons" which was included. I had no idea about the GOG Cut before it released and someone posted about it on the DFWorkshop forums. No one had contacted me. They did contact me the next day and blamed a limit on Nexusmods PM system which caused PMs to not be sent out to all mod creators.
I gave them permission to use my mod in their pack as I did not want to cause a fuss and honestly, being listed as a mod creator on GOG is pretty cool.

* I see a lot of claims about how the mods are free, with the implication that there is no cost to mod creators when their mods are re-hosted on other sites. I just want to point out that I earn points on Nexusmods based on download numbers. These can be used to buy stuff in their store, like the infinite premium subscription I used most of mine for, productkeys for a bunch of games or cashing out the points via PayPal into dollars. Also, more downloads mean higher ranking leading to more visibility and downloads.

* This modlist was made by GamerZach, which I and most other people in the DFU mod creator community have no idea who is. I am sure he is a nice guy and makes good vieos, but from a quick glance at his YT channel he seems like a guy that makes videos about applying graphical mods to elder scrolls games. The small community of mod creators for DFU has a lot of experience in creating mod lists and between us have an encylopaedic knowledge of what mods are incompatible or simply do not fit with eachother for visual or gameplay reasons. If asked, this community could have produced a mod list in a matter of an hour or two if GOG had asked us and given us some indication of what kind of result they wanted from it. Heck, mod lists for all kinds of different playstyles and graphical upgrades are already made and readily available.

* The GOG Cut is pre-loaded with not only mods but also settings. For game/graphics but also keybindings and mod settings. This makes it so if you try to change the setup of this build and then GOG updates it, stuff will revert back. You will probably keep new mods you added, but what if you updated a mod to a newer version that GOG does not have? They'll likely downgrade it back to their version. If you rebind key and update, they pop back.
This is not the case with regular Daggerfall Unity. However, regular DFU has one folder for all this info that is shared across all builds, which can mean that the GOG Cut will also affect regular Daggerfall Unity as it shares some of the same files.

* Daggerfall Unity is still in beta. It keeps churning out new versions fairly often, which breaks mods. Most active mod creators update to fix this, or update just to be sure, by rebuilding the mod for the new DFU version. Sometimes mods are left behind or two mods who used to be compatible no longer are.
How is GOG going to keep up with this? This is labour-of-love level of work to keep on top of. Not something where you can quickly check a website to get it all right.

* Nexusmods recently launched their Collections system, which is basically mod packs. So instead of selecting individual mods, you just select the collection. The difference between that and GOG Cut is obviously that the Collection just links to the mod files on Nexusmods and downloads them from there. If GOG Cut did something similar there would have been a lot less problems and probably not any need to contact mod creators for permission.

So to sum up: This could have been a great thing that would have benefitted GOG in exposure, mod creators in exposure and GOG users in getting to play Daggerfall Unity with mods. Instead GOG for some unfathomable reason were in an extreme rush to push out this mod pack which to the DFU community read like "a random gamer picked some mods he thought looked cool" and this was so prioritized they completely stumbled on the landing and created a bunch of bad feeling on all sides instead of us all just being happy fans of GOG, Daggerfall, DFU and the mods for it.

Edit: Oh yeah and I forgot: I see the argument "it is not illegal" bandied about in these discussions. We are not lawyers. This is not a court room. No one is suing eachother. This is at the moment purely a question of doing the decent thing and not offending people for no reason. The only time I see people use the argument "it is not illegal" is when they act like an asshole and the only defense they have is that they are not legally obliged to not act that way. It is about as good an argument as "it's just a prank bro" and makes you look about as sympathetic.

Ralzar's post is the best singular summation of this whole thing put out so far I would say.

Thank you for this informative post.
It's a pity that Gog managed this so horribly.
At this point it's probably better to avoid this pack and use Nexus Mods directly.

Thanks for sharing the work of your talent and passion Ralzar.
You may request the developer status (as the rest of the modders) as I suggested to magicono here

gog.com/forum/general/get_your_copy_of_the_daggerfall_unity_gog_cut_8e8e7/post164

That may give you an idea folks the level of seriousness of gog to credit your work...

Very happy my mod was included in the GOG pack. A lot of you defending GOG not contacting mod authors cause its free is really selfish. Do you also steal the entire bowl of candy that was set out Halloween night cause it was "Free" and you "have all the rights to it" and you also just happen to be massively overweight?

People put a lot of time into these mods. They get very easily upset when their work is taken off a site where they can earn some nice bonuses, statistics, feedback, or even make some cash. The exposure is nice but lets be real here. GOG is the one getting the goodie points on this. We aren't mentioned on socials. A lot of news websites posted about how this was entirely made by GOG. (Wow journalism being bad as usual)

Hell, I was contacted and approved the idea in literal hours before it went up. Which is a a shame really cause if I knew about this before hand I would have updated the mod used to be better than its current state with extra bonuses. Unlike most mods here, I clearly state people don't have the right to upload and redistribute on other sites, or modify my files without my permission. So I'm unsure if I would have requested it to be taken off.

My overall take on this is that my mod is re-uploading works is problematic without authors permission. I have an issue where users are re-uploading a specific mod of mine that is no longer listed on nexus cause it simply doesn't work and I'm too busy on other projects to fix at the moment. However bug reports from other mod authors keep coming in to tell me "Hey why does mod x not work with mod y and my game is corrupted". It's because you downloaded an unauthorized re-upload of my work that just so happens to ruin your game due to it.

At the end of the day I care about my work but I also understand why people would be upset about their re-upload use. Yes, I seen most of the mods listed on nexus as "Re-upload idc :D" until this GOG fiasco. A lesson learned I assume for those mod authors. My work will be staying. I support this release. I'm happy to provide any more of my mods to this pack.

After I let that out, let me say this. GOG, lets make this a better package. Instead of dropping all these mods on top of the project pre-modded, why not offer the mods as "DLC" packages to the game?

You can ask mod authors in a timely manner. People still get their ease of use from GOG. You can even add more mods over time after proper contact. Instead of downloading and installing 5 gigs, you can instead download base DFU and just download the "DLC" you want. I could cut off 3 gigs from this pack alone if I just choose not to use one certain mod. Its just bloatware if I don't want it through GOG cut. Would be nice to have that DLC option. Opens up for more mods to the end users, and more time for you not to screw up. Also throwing up my paypal on the DLC page might would allow me to maybe make some small $, live, and continue my modding efforts in DFU.

Well said, and thanks for the detailed information.

Alas GOG are often in a rush, maybe all the time. And it seems they do some of the things they rush, to gain positives over the constant negatives, and sometimes it just backfires.

They get these thought bubbles it seems and go for it, and one presumes the resulting positives are greater than the negatives otherwise they would stop doing it. I guess it's a case of it's easier to get forgiveness than permission mentality at play.

GOG are reportedly well under staffed, and they seemingly bite off more than they can chew regularly. You could equate it to GOG being the doer of almost everything, game wise, but the master of very little, if anything. It's not good and rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

All that said, I am grateful and love that GOG exist, despite their many failings. Long Live GOG!

P.S. I also note they do try to improve things now and then ... in their rushed way.

Yeah, this honestly feels like it is not a "GOG Cut", so much as a GamerZakh Cut. As he is about more or less extreme graphical modding of games it is... not the mod list many users would prefer. I assume GOG pretty much approved GamerZakhs suggestion and set up the framework for it, trusting him with the actual modding.
GOG would have been a lot more served with offering up a couple of builds, where this one could have been a graphical upgrade and then you could have had a Classic+ for retro look and QOL and then finally a more heavy game mechanic modlist.

The creator of DREAM actually mentioned having twice, in his correspondence with GOG, suggested he take a look at the modlist for them to make sure it would correctly display DREAM as intended. He never got a response.
So this whole thing ended up a bit weird for the community where many are not sure what to feel about it, as on one side it made DFU more visible, but on the other side just muddied the waters of what DFU actually is.
In comparison, the release of classic Daggerfall on Steam caused a large influx of new users, people struggled with the original and got told to switch to DFU whenever they ran into a problem. While GOG Cut just caused us to get a bunch of tech support questions that are hard to answer as they are not using normal DFU and have little understanding of what mods or settings they are using.

I'm not the troll son, you are. You're trying to prevent more people from experiencing this game just to be a jerk and then lying and claiming it's because it's "stealing" to play a free mod. I really don't understand why a toxic minority are being such assholes that GOG tried to make an old game more accessible to new players by simplifying the install process of FREE MODS. Stop trying to prevent people you think are "unworthy" from playing a great classic game, stop lying and saying downloading something that's posted for the intention of free downloads is "stealing", and stop being an awful person in general.

Yes. Yes you are. Putting fake words into people's mouths then attacking your own made up projections is exactly what trolling is. Several modders have posted above. You can read their (entirely valid concerns) or even speak to them directly, but you don't. You merely sit on your over-entitled ass, issuing demands and slinging sh*t at people behind their backs. If you still do not understand why GOG removed a couple of mods, then I suggest you contact GOG and ask them directly, to whom presumably you'll be far less likely to hurl the same insults at that you have towards other community members here. The rest is chronic "I'm a 12yo Edgelord, pls like" style attention seeking that I'm simply not going to feed any longer.

That's exactly what they've done though. Looking at the list of mods, there are Mac / Linux versions for most if not all of them. Example for DREAM on Nexus. It's GOG who arbitrarily excluded mods that already existed for platforms that are already supported, not the modders for refusing to support them.

We've also seen this before with DOS games missing Linux versions even though it takes 5 mins to add DOSBox / ScummVM, eg, Flight of the Amazon Queen, Myst Masterpiece Edition, Crystal Caves & Secret Agent (non HD), and of course original DOS versions of Arena & Daggerfall. There's no technical limitations there. It's simply a GOG thing to be very bad at cross-platform support even when all the work has already been done for them by others for free.