I'll never understand why Steam Workshop didn't take off as the de facto mod delivery platform over NexusMods or other random sites. It seemed perfectly positioned to do so.
Sure it makes it easy for people who own the game on Steam, but what about everyone else?
Also, as popular as Steam is, their workshop section is pretty awful. The search seems to have been cobbled together and has awful matching, the discoverability of mods is dire, and they're still using the same antiquated poor UX for discussions as they were over a decade ago.
It works okay, but it's a little clunky. Discoverability is weird. It's concept of "recently trending" etc produces some dubious recommendations.
Actually installing mods is kind of okay, but it doesn't handle pre-requisites very well. It'll tell you that you're missing pre-reqs, but it doesn't offer to install them.
It's a positive feedback issue, where because games don't tend to use workshop, it doesn't get much love from valve, and therefore games avoid it.
I don't know how much workshop allows developers to do curation either, so perhaps games would rather partner with a platform they can better influence mod curation.
It's definitely preferable as a user compared to the worst-of-all-worlds that is Stardew Valley modding. There you have a combination of "Here, download this exe, it's fine we promise" (SMAPI), and nexus mods for the discoverability / install / updates of the mods themselves.
I'm usually opposed to Steam on principle, opting instead for DRM free options for my games, but it's basically impossible to maintain any decent amount of mods without a manager like what Steam Workshop offers
There is a bigger question that is unsolved, both ethically and legally. If someone makes a Skyrim mod: (a) should the creator of the mod be allowed compensation and (b) should the game developer be entitled to garnish some amount?
I have my own opinions, but I think the community doesn't really trust that a mod put on Steam will be available tomorrow for the price and under the conditions the mod creator envisioned.
I doubt any game developer would want the burden of being liable to maintain backward compatibility for old mod APIs to support third party mods, but if they take a cut of any money then they ought to be responsible for maintaining that.
Part of the reason KSP has ironically had a modding renaissance is because the community knows that there won't be any updates which could break some of the more ambitious mods being made.
b) no, why? does the carmaker get a cut from the unbranded accessories? If anything, it should be the other way round as the Oblivion reboot proves.
At least I didn't found a way, and that one reason alone is enough for me to avoid the Workshop.
I made the mod for the Divinity: Original Sin that changes a few bytes in the game XML files to allow for 4 players in game instead of just 2, since it was mostly supported but probably removed for console porting simplicity. This is a braindead simple mod that just needs to find some XML tag inside the embedded EXE/DLL file and update it. I didn't even have to update any checksums, etc.
When I published the mod I chose to target the hashes/offsets of the Steam EXE since that was what everyone had. So, while I didn't target the workshop (as this modification could not be done with it) I did target Steam end-users.
There are lots of ideological and practical concerns with DRM, I won't list them here other than to say game players want to be in control of their machines and their experience, not let game publishers control their machines.
2. Steam policy is that you can only run the very latest release of a game (it will update when you go online, and you can't remain offline forever). It takes away your choice to reject publishers bad updates - for example, when 2K forcibly added their marketplace/launcher malware to Bioshock games, breaking them on Linux, Steam was their henchman/goon forcing it on everyone.
[*] Not everbody! https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...
You don't actually need a steam account or the client - with SteamCMD you can have CLI access to all the mods there, as well as download any mod (or, for example, dedicated server hosted via Steam) to a custom location.
As for what's bad with Steam Workshop: - No built-in way to host multiple versions of a mod or to revert to an old version.
- Very unreliable reinstalls (you might think you deleted a mod, and yet there are leftovers - and at least historically they liked to remain even over fresher files).
- Somewhat arcane directory structure (that makes fixing the above harder than it should be).
Not 100% correct, some are restricted to accounts that have licenses for the game. Same with some dedicated servers, you'll get an error ("Failed to install app "xxxxxx" (No subscription)" ) if you try downloading anonymously
Nexus doesn't help you to manage your modlists, but at least it is smart enough to step back and let you manage them however you want to.
Saying that only half jokingly.
The truth is that Workshop is worse and aimed ONLY at Steam. So why would anyone bother.
Steam as a platform is very open in many ways. Likely not intentional, just holes that never got plugged.
Most of the pirated steam clients just lie and say you're always playing a free Steam game that everyone owns and use that to backchannel all of the steam features like messaging, p2p, etc.
Last I checked they even had some rigged up system for achievements since some games interact with them in ways that are needed.
I don't have an oar in this fight - my comment about pirated games was mostly tongue in cheek - but I am glad the main mod site isn't tied to owning the game on one particular store.