Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
At first they tried to give passionate content providers
a way to also make some money.
Edit: It doesn't matter if it's Valve or Bethesda or the tooth fairy that takes the remaining 75% - the fact is this system does little to accomplish the goal of "giving passionate content providers a way to make some money" - indeed it's so wide of the mark it's hard to believe that was seriously the intention.
It's due to perceived "fairness"
This 75/25 split by Valve reminds me of the psychology experiment the Ultimatum Game: "'Inequity aversion' is so strong that people are willing to sacrifice personal gain in order to prevent another person from receiving an inequitably better outcome." https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-brain-work/200911/...
Different cultures respond differently to the Ultimatum Game. Be wary of those studies that only use "Anglo-Saxon American College Kids" as test subjects, which is a group of people that isn't even representative of America in general.
http://bigthink.com/praxis/are-americans-the-weirdest-people...
>>> The revelation that rural Peruvians handle the ultimatum game so differently from American respondents led Henrich on a MacArthur Foundation-funded research trip to more than a dozen more locales around the world, where he found wide variation in the average offers of player #1 and this curious result: “in some societies — ones where gift-giving is heavily used to curry favor or gain allegiance — the first player would often make overly generous offers in excess of 60 percent, and the second player would often reject them, behaviors almost never observed among Americans.”
Monkeys do it:
http://www.livescience.com/2044-monkeys-fuss-inequality.html
Valve taking a cut I understand as they handle the sales and distribution platform. I'm not sure I think 30% is fair, but that's a different issue.
As a revenue split I'd be much more on board with the modder getting 75% and the rest being to everyone else.
Of course, then you need to consider how mod dependency is handled. And you have to look at how long term mod support is handled. What happens when the modder goes away or Bethesda releases an update that breaks existing mods.
The whole thing is a big nasty ball of problems.
They produced the game engine, and are letting people develop on it for free. And them getting a cut from people piggybacking on their work and making money from it was distasteful to you?
Hell, why don't musical instrument makers get a share of royalties for music made with their instruments?
Hell, why don't game engine developers get a share of royalties for games made with their engines?
...oh, right, they do.
Game engines do. And they used to tack on $100,000 up front, to boot.
So yes, 75% is high, but the conversation should be, what cut should everyone receive, not, why does Bethesda deserve a cut at all, which most of the conversation actually is.
Also, are they going to have different percentages based on amount of usage of game assets? So far I haven't seen an indication of that.
As I have said before, if Skyrim had been free then I could understand the position. In this case I feel it is in the best interest of the company and game to let the modders go forward without interference. But hey, that's just my opinion, it's their company and their game so they can do whatever they want.
I paid full price for the game and all of the DLC.
Part of the reason I did this was due to the ability of the game to be easily modded. I knew with modding the lifetime of the game was much greater.
Why should they get 40% of mod sales for doing nothing? They already got paid for making the game.
Now, if they are still providing good customer support with timely bug fixes around the mod system, then perhaps I can see a small portion going to them. Otherwise, why do you think they are entitled to a share of the mod revenue?
> Part of the reason I did this was due to the ability of the game to be easily modded. I knew with modding the lifetime of the game was much greater.
So you paid full price for the game because you knew people would spend their time and effort making things for you for free... and now that there was an option for them to get paid for their work, you get pissy?
Did I say I never donated to mod authors? Did you ask?
I'm not pissy, but it sounds like perhaps you are.
What difference does it make? Even if you were a good citizen and donated, there aren't enough people donating for it to be a dependable income stream.
> it sounds like perhaps you are
133,000 people who claim to represent gamers signed a petition saying that modders should work for free, how dare they think they should get paid. I'm not a mod author. I'm not even a mod user. But I'm someone who believes in paying people who make the things I like, so that they can keep making more. This was an opportunity for a new marketplace, a new way for people to start making content for games—and for some, support themselves by making that content. An opportunity for anyone to use the IP of another company—which I don't think exists in any other industry. Can you imagine what it would take for Disney to allow anybody to legally make and sell their own Mickey Mouse cartoons? But no, it had to get shat on by entitled assholes who want people to make and make and make and give nothing back. You say it sounds like I'm pissy? Damn straight I'm pissy.
You don't buy the mod, and get the game to run it. You have to buy the game, then buy the mod. If they want more money for the game, they can increase the price.
That still doesn't get the mod developers any money.
Same thing for Bethesda - it's not their value-add and they don't have a moral right to take a cut. On the other hand Steam is providing a value-add here - a market and financial transaction services.
So, you agree that Valve should get some part of the sales, because they are the ones (Steam) actually taking the payment and assuming some of the upfront risks of processing payments (fraud) and, because of the network effect and the customers they bring (read ... marketing)
But Bethesda who developed the actual game that brought the modders and gave them a platform to derive their work on, not to mention creating the actual game and game engine and putting it in the hands of the actual customers; they should just get nothing out of this whole deal?
I agree that the whole thing is a big hairy mess, and as a developer and an underdog myself I agree that the split should be approximately reversed, but I'm not sure there's much else we agree on.
Do they deserve more than that?
If you want game developers to promote a helpful environment for mod developers, grab some money and pay them something out of it. Definitely!
A proper response to this is to give all the remaining money after Valve's cut to the mod maker as a thank you to the community.
But this doesn't even address the other problems that people have been pointing out.
Mods represent value added to the game that wasn't provided by the original publisher. Each mod "fixes" a deficiency in the game, adds, changes, or removes something the original developer did not do from the baseline game. The changes add value to the publisher's bottom line by increasing the value of the game, thus stimulating additional sales.
Thus the idea that modders both increase demand for the game, increasing the publisher's sales, AND want the lion's share of the money paid for mods is repugnant.
If any of these three parties declined to provide their own involvement, a sale does not happen. So all of them are reasonably entitled to a share. But not necessarily a whole third.
I agree that Half-Life developers should not be the ones getting the majority of the sticker price of CounterStrike, insofar as those people are disparate parties and the popularity of CounterStrike drives sales of HL and even surpasses Half-Life in popularity. But it is impossible to deny that CS does not have a game to sell at all without HL.
They did sell "CS-Only" discs without the ability to play Half-Life in single-player mode, didn't they? And, Valve still got a cut? (What's that? They never did? Hmm...)
Edit: There is obviously some risk for Valve, too. Maybe more than Visa in the long run, but I think they will pass on the risk to those who they pay, just like Visa. They do get to hold the money, and they can decide who gets paid.
If you don't understand they 30% is reasonable, then you haven't tried to sell a game in the last 5 years.
That 30% you're paying increases your sales by a factor of 50x, and game developers are quite happy to take 70% of a much larger pie.
We were talking about the mod sales. Nobody is taking 70%, unless you counted the original game sale as part of the pie. Maybe we should.
The split as I understood it to be defined was: Valve takes 30% (arguably OK, but I'd argue for less), Game dev gets 45% (passive income hacker, woo!) and the Mod dev gets 25%.
I think it would be perfectly reasonable for Mod devs to get 45% of the sales of their own mods, but Valve asked Bethesda to define the split. What self-respecting PIH is going to give themselves or their own company less than 50%, really, if they are unilaterally the one making the decision about who gets paid and how much?
You are also right about one more thing, I don't have the first idea about selling games. But I would argue it's more work to build EITHER or BOTH a game engine and a mod than it is to sell it. In other words, Bethesda's cut should not be less than Valve's, in my humble opinion, and those mods would NOT have been for sale (or for free) without Bethesda and their game engine.
(Or at least, we would have entirely some other developer and game to thank for their share in this controversy.)
I played GRID a lot and found the "any car any track" mod which was awesome. Codemasters didn't do that for some reason. There are mods that add Ferraris, Codemaster aren't licensed to include those cars. They were even in the trailer for the game and got pulled.
There's mods to include stuff the publisher couldn't even care[1] to sort out. Why should they get any cut of money for that. Would they even be allowed to take a cut? I assume this kind of stuff sits in a grey zone at the moment.
I think this will always be a problem if you couple the distribution and the day-to-day service in the way steam does.
Unless a deal could have been worked out with Ferrari. But good on you for asking something different!
Maybe a better example is Red Alert 2, I still occasionally LAN play that and there's a community patch to replace the IPX stack with TCP/IP so it can still work. as IPX is completely gone from windows 8+ I think.
It's clear that this game is abandoned and there's no further support coming from Westwood Studios for it, not to mention that it won't be coming available on Steam any time soon. As troubled as this analogy is, ...
I think it's still clear that in a hypothetical scenario where Steam gets the rights to distribute RA2 and Westwood (EA? who owns the rights to C&C series now?) has still washed their hands of support for it long ago, it would make sense for Steam to give the mod authors the option of sending back some percent of the gross (1-10%) to the rights holders for the game. Sort of a "vote with your dollars" kind of thing.
Of course if we are really talking about sending "extra money" to EA to say thanks, as a mod author or gamer I'm probably going to need to vomit right away, but replace EA with some other hypothetical not-shitty company (the ghost of Westwood) and I think you've got a deal.
This whole scenario just makes me reflect on the relatively recent development of Apple deciding that they can't allow any apps in their phone store that mention support for any products competing with Apple Watch (misfit, fitbit, etc)
The way this played out just goes to show who really owns the greatest share of the attention of Valve and Steam (it's the game companies, not the mods or the community.)
As with the Store or Greenlight before outsourcing tasks to the community (reviews/greenlight votes) doesn't mean Valve isn't responsible for the stuff they offer in their store. A 24h hour refund policy is simply laughable when non-waiveable EU consumer rights regulations require 14 days.
The other thing is the quite astronomic payout cap at $100 which means any hobbyist has to sell $400 ore more, depending on taxes before he see any of his efforts compensated. This further shows that Valve was not interested in amateurs but this was all about professionalizing the modding scene to a few contributors.
I don't think this is true in the case of purely digital products. As far as I am aware of the german implementation of this regulation it explicitly allows to waive the rights before the first download. Like many companies steam does this during checkout ("I agree..").
http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/consumer_affairs/consum...
«In the case of digital content, the cooling-off period expires when the downloading or streaming starts.»
Says you can't waive it; for digital downloads the 14 day period get's annulled once you start downloading/streaming, not at checkout. Since many more things can go wrong with software(games) then compared to linear media (books/music/video) that implementation is still questionable.
Untouched by this, at least in Germany every product sold (including Software) comes with two years of warranty ("Gewährleistung") which is established between the consumer an the reseller (at point of final sale, in this case Valve SARL) which first requires the reseller to provide a working product ("Nacherfüllung") if that's not possible the customer is entitled to a refund. Not that that this is found in many online shops in Germany, but those are the regulations that Valve has to follow by when selling software (games) to German customers.
Valve was charging 30% for operating the storefront, handling payment, the value of having spent years building a site where people are willing to come and pay for things, the value of having built a service that would allow modders to make money building off of another company's work, and so on. Valve's 30% was well deserved.
It should, certainly, and it's not, but I didn't claim that it was.
Are people really more in favor of modders getting 100% of $0 rather than 25% of $X?
Is there more to this debate that I'm missing?
Especially when there's still no requirement for the original developer to have made the modders lives any easier to get this benefit.
Most gamers are aware of how Valve became so big and it's through the modding community in HL1 and eventually HL2. Can you imagine how prohibitive it would have been for Counter-Strike to grow if they charged $10 for the mod (obviously when it was till a mod =< v1.6)?
On top of that, some mods were genuine improvements over the original. For instance, there is a huge Skyrim UI mod that is a vast improvement over the vanilla. Some people were actually afraid that game companies would use this pay for mod system as a way to double dip. "Let's release a half-assed UI, let some modder charge for his better UI and take 45-50% of his sales."
As far as donations, there is no way you can assume that. Sure, a vast majority won't pay, but I'm sure there are those out there who are generous enough to throw a dollar or two out there to support the modder. Shit, it works for server admins.
Edit: Donations also work for people who contribute nothing and just stream themselves playing games. Some do very well, so I would venture a guess and say a modder putting out quality content could gather a few bucks.
1. Modders are hobbyists, not professionals. Many modders came right out and said they would no longer make mods under this system, because the pressure to charge means it becomes a job. They no longer would have the option to just walk away from the mod. 2. Piracy. Modders have explicitly made their mods available for free. Once you have a system where they can be charged for, you have freeloaders putting someone elses mods on steam to make money. Steam provided no protection against this, the only resolution would be filing an individual complaint or invoking DMCA, and Steam was leaving that entirely up to the mod owners to figure out. 3. This was seen as a hostile move towards Nexus, the biggest provider of mods for the games in question. As soon as this was announced, mod makers began removing their products from Nexus out of concern that they would be dishonestly put on the Steam store. As Nexus is an ad-supported service, fewer mods means less income, and it would not be due to a capitalistic business reason.
In the end, most modders don't WANT to be paid for their mods, because it's not a profession. I saw plenty of support for a donation system, however.
Make that possible and you'd then have some professional modders and some amateur ones.
So in the end, most modders don't WANT to be paid for their mods, except they do WANT to be paid and call it a donation?
Ah, the ol' "look I want you to get paid for your work, I just don't want to have to be the one paying you. Don't worry, I'm sure tons of people will. Just not me."
If you are the seller, and you got paid, that means work. Give support or get shouted at by dozens of angry customers. Reply to emails for months to come when a competitor modder added your mod features to his mod and why the hell are you charging 4.99 if it's worth 1.99 and now you need to refund your costumer.
Donations, on the other hand... explicit intent and different expectations from everyone involved.
Also, it might be neither "most don't want to be paid" nor "most want donation", and both sets might have a very small intersection.
The beautiful aspect of this compared to selling products is that everyone involve know what is expected from each other, the responsibility to fix bugs is established in the beginning, and its very hard to sell someones else mod as your own.
It would be a great thing if Valve implemented a Patreon model for modding instead of direct pay. That would let people get the attention their great work deserves, streamline donations, and not change the nature of the modding community in the process.
A black and white webcomic I read runs a patreon page, and get $3k a month with only 800 patrons. The author was previously unknown, and managed to reach this point purely on the quality of his/her work and the readership it gathered. Looking at some of the major skyrim mods with millions of downloads, I suspect they could easily gain more than 800 patrons.
That's an interesting perspective. Sounds like there are some valid criticisms of the system Valve has put in place.
To me it seems that gamers have cut off their nose to spite their own face in this regard. It seems to me that a paid modding ecosystem would be a big win in favor of gamers.
If lone hobbyists can improve a game so much, can you imagine if a studio of 5-10 could make a viable living from modding?
And some mods do end having a "studio" backing... For example the Network Addon Mod for SimCity 4, it started with several individual modders solving their own problems with the game, and now it has a official "NAM Team" that act as a professional team (they give release dates, have deadlines, make their own installer, etc...)
There are some cases where companies have been overly greedy and compromised the core game to sell mods, but the general hatred toward expansion content seems to come mainly from a desire to get things for free rather than a rational complaint about harm they've experienced from expansion content. You'll also see a lot of gamers suggest that charging $60 for a game is morally questionable (unless you're Nintendo). The freak out over paid mods seems to be that variety to me — it's really hard to say that the existence of community mods devalues the core game. People just don't want to pay money for things.
After playing multiple games by Bethesda that have been relatively unpolished compared to what the modding community has done, I see the move as a cash grab by Bethesda in releasing a game and cashing in on people who just want the game to be more playable by selling the mods to other players as free generated DLC content. I understand that the modders have a lot of a headstart on the work as well, given to them by Bethesda, which is why I wouldn't support modders selling mods on their own. I think the free + donate model has worked very successfully in the past in both motivating and (I assume, but can't be sure in generalizations) compensation.
My last note on the issue is that at the very least this move should not be implemented on a fully developed modding ecosystem where the mods have already intertwined to a degree that this causes a single person decisions to need to be made by multiple mod developers. With mods using other mods, it would be acceptable to have to buy the used mod if that was a design decision by the original modder, but that information was not present as the ecosystem developed and I think it introduces a great deal of harm. As a source I cite all of the trauma that Nexus experienced in the wake of this system being released.
I think the worry is that the move would have killed the lone hobbyists. Even though you could argue that this feature is pure value-added as it doesn't stop anyone from modding the same way as before, it would have reshaped the community. So you'd have a few great mods by semi-professional studios but it could also discourage the hundreds of passionate modders who enjoy putting quality before marketability. In my opinion, the Android and iOS app stores are a good example of this.
If this was viable, you'd think that studios would consider paying small teams to continue patching and generating content for games for some years. </?>
Obviously this has happened with a few games, but one minor argument I've seen put out over the weekend was something along the lines of "why don't $studio just hire these guys?", and some sadness that it might happen even less often.
If you're Bethesda then maybe you don't get out of bed for less than $10,000,000. This leaves the door open for small teams that will be more than happy with a much smaller pay day.
Unless I'm missing something, nothing happened that would have forced mod makers to start charging, right?
It's an app store. The question comes down to: would you rather have an ecosystem of only free (or donation-driven) mods, or would you rather have some mods be paid mods? I really don't think the move to paid mods is as apocalyptic as reddit was making it out to be.
Honestly, they could have pulled this off. If they made a new game with the option to sell mods and had some sort of review process doing due diligence that would have been something else. Or even some sort of auto check for conflicts. But, this seemed like a horrible money grab where they wanted to extract 75% of the income without doing anything.
What I was more concered about was the 'quicksilver' effect. When apple hired the dev who made the tool, it just stopped getting updated.
Everytime a game was patched or updated, what % of the mods would then become unusable, despite paying for it? Can't complain when it's free, but if you paid for the mod is there an expectation of it being working for a period of time? What was that period of time?
Many gamers feel [1] where in the past you paid $a for a complete game, today you pay $a for a fraction of the game then an extra $b and $c and $d and $e through these extra mechanisms.
I suspect some people saw the 75% profit margin, and felt this was more about adding on $f, a new mechanism to transfer yet more money from gamers to big publishers, rather than anything to do with rewarding mod creators.
If you read Gabe's responses he starts poking at the "Wow wow wow, why is this bad?" and learns a few things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
It also appears to have created quite a feud among moders which were or weren't going to charge for their work, since some mods are quite intertwined.
So it was a combination of effects. I do think the basic idea is worth of discussion, but it's certainly debatable if anything other than pay-what-you-want actually fosters the moding community.
75% is not to the mod developer, 75% was to Bethesda, and 25% to the mod developer.
This is what pissed people off. (Also, the developer would only get paid if he got 100 USD to receive, meaning that he needed 400 USD in sales, meaning that probably most developers would never get any money).
This all seems like an attempt to app-storify mods. I really didn't think it was a bad thing.
Using a mod does. These two things are in no way comparable.
Developers should be ecstatic that modders want to build off their game as a platform. It can only bring them additional money as people buy their game for access to hugely popular mod. I can understand the desire to monetize this, but too much and you freeze out your modders and you get nothing.
I feel like Arma 2 saw the Project Reality demographic and said "Lets go for that"
One wonders how that could have evolved. Someone should do experiments where they deny access to three company episodes to chimps, to see if they freak out as badly as the internet generation does when they can't get their favorite things.
True however market rate for platform/store is 30% + 20% royalty if you use an IP + 5%-10% for engine or more for publishing dollars.
Many regular game breakdowns are the game developer only get 40-60% revenues, 70% if they have no other costs on most stores including Steam.
With the paid mods Valve took 30% (industry average although it should be challenged -- set by Apple), Bethesda took 45%, 25% for royalty and 20% for their take. Leaving 25% for the content creator.
Other developers could have given up to 50% to the content creator which is as good as many developers get on an original title. Valve probably wants to give more but they can't because other developers would be scared away due to unfairness since Valve owns the platform. 25% is low yes but it is more than people make at a crappy job or more than anyone gets at their day job in terms of ownership or points on profit/work.
I think with the backlash it is good that people can influence companies but much of it was black and white. Mods will always exist with or without Steam. Free mods would only grow with a paid mod side market as any economy grows when money is added in, the free side would have grown. Many of the sharing issues could have been alleviated with a shareable license the creator could add. Pay what you want with a simple breakdown could have been default like Humble Bundle. They also should have launched it with a better breakdown on the initial developer and game chosen.
The mod market will get money invading it again as it is immense and we live in a capitalist system where nothing of sufficient size evades money, but it will be smarter next time. Over the long term, it will make mods more prevalent and overall quality will go up at the top. There may even be a mod professional job someday, I think it is good when people can make income from making or playing games. If you can make money doing what you love then you can spend more time doing it. And donations aren't enough for good mod makers to keep doing it when there are other things they can do.
> A man asks a woman if she would be willing to sleep with him if he pays her an exorbitant sum. She replies affirmatively. He then names a paltry amount and asks if she would still be willing to sleep with him for the revised fee. The woman is greatly offended and replies as follows:
> She: What kind of woman do you think I am?
> He: We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling over the price.
The important bit here is that mod developers can get paid. How much is a matter of negotiation and revising.
Note that 25% is pretty generous when you're creating a derivitive work off of someone else's IP. See Kindle Worlds http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1001197421 for an example of the kind of deal you'd be lucky to get.
Your opinion is in the minority, I'm afraid. By and large,the gaming community (on reddit at least) has spoken, and Valve took heed.
Honda doesn't get a cut if I have my car modded at an independent shop.
Not yet at least. However car (and tractor) manufacturers are moving to make such activity illegal using encryption and intellectual propertly laws.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, just that our current regulatory regime supports this model.
Yikes.
The first - obviously didn't align well with the community's (more like the mod users) intentions. The canceling - Upset quality producing modders who think they should be compensated for their time and effort, and now makes them part "part of valve's greediness" in the eyes of users.
Seems like they didn't think all the way through in both moves.
Yes, it looks pretty bad, and it makes Valve look like a bunch of amateurs. And this is coming from someone who generally likes what they do.
Sure, but they are not like in the early days, they have experienced people now, and tons of cash, and should not be making the same mistakes over and over again like they were beginners or something. It just reflects badly on the whole company.
Valve has not ended the paid mods programme. They've only turned it off for Skyrim.
From the Valve post:
> We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop.
They're very explicitly removing it only from Skyrim.
Personally, I'm completely okay with the paid mod system - and I think the reason it failed so spectacularly was because of Bethesda and the invisibleness of the "Valve takes 30%, Bethesda takes 45%" - But it is important to note
The Skyrim community was just a bad fit, and Bethesda a terrible overlord.
Only 25% going to the content creators? Really?
And a poor returns mechanism, getting a refund gets you banned from the steam store for 7 days to stop abuse. That's a poor returns policy when you're buying things like mods that might be of really poor quality once you start to use them.
edit: And maybe Bethesda would've taken their ball and gone home for any less, but I'm sure Valve could've found another developer. They probably should have ,given Bethesda's bad reputation for making games that need bug-fixing mods, terrible DLC, and the vastness of the FREE modding community.
EDIT: Actually, they will get a favorable reaction to a much more reasonable compensation (say 25%) to content creators now that the community has gotten the worst of its reaction out. It might even be calculated.
Once they start charging for something, the entire payment infrastructure is now part of the picture. They need to pay merchant fees, assume risk for disputed transactions, arrange for the money to be split up and transfered to stakeholders, etc. This may not account for 30% (who knows) but it does make sense to charge something.
I really don't have an issue with paying for good mods and in fact I was really excited by the initial announcement because I would have totally gotten into game modding if I could earn some significant supplemental income doing it.
I think the number of people buying a game because of a mod is rather small, so business people will see things more from the second viewpoint.
Better yet - from another post here:
> "How many copies of Arma 2 were sold explicitly because of DayZ? How many copies of Half-life were sold because of Counter Strike? Warcraft 3 and Dota? etc."
Valve claims that 30% share is fair while having one of the highest income per employee of any company. That means that their share is too high.
It's more than what the government demands from you, while the government is _much_ more important than Valve is for any business.
The CEO of Valve argues that money steers the community. That's true, and it leads to slavery, drug trafficking criminal organizations and war if the government doesn't regulate. Commercialization does not only have good consequences. Though being able to extort more money out of the masses might skew your vision on that.
Just because it sells doesn't mean people like it. It might be lack of alternatives.
I'm not in principle against money. If you really think that you should, offering a service to make payments to the authors easy might be good. But among many things, DON'T BE RIDICULOUSLY GREEDY.
Let's suppose now that to develop the infrastructure for your service was really expensive and the market volume is not big enough to get the investment back with small percentages.
This is an interesting situation because even if you are "forced" to offer it with 25% share for the author some authors will use it due to lack of alternatives.
Right now I don't have a good solution to this problem. Maybe lower your cut according with the return you already got until you arrived at a fair share? Maybe the best would be if you didn't offer your service at all...
Hah. If only that were true. The government's only positive role in commerce is ensuring political stability. Lots of times, they fail hard at that one job.
Once you have political stability, then the government becomes a power broker. The tax system is really an elaborate financial instrument for big business, has been ever since the dawn of mercantilism. The value you gain from the government is proportional to how close you are to the giant sums of money being funneled through it.
Sure, there are things like welfare programs that ensure an adequate baseline of minimum prosperity, (i.e. the homeless in the US won't starve to death, and might get a bed to sleep on a couple times a week) but you only really benefit from them if you really need them, and relying on them is no fun. And we only have those because those of us close to the poor, who can't just shut them out, threw enough of a fit to force the elites to.
The rest of us, lower and middle classes, small and medium businesses, including entities like Valve, don't get squat from the government. We have to earn our own keep, we can't rely on the government to bail us out.
The government is entirely too small to help out the rest of society in any meaningful way. They can try to pass laws, but laws breed loopholes and suck for the same reason Valve's lofty initiative failed, it's impossible to consider the incentive structure of the new world you're creating with a law until you actually enact it and see what's going on, and there's only so far hiring experts will get you. Legislation is a long, slow slog towards a saner world on the aggregate, and a vehicle for pork in the particular.
The only thing worthwhile the government provides US businesses is in just being there. Great that we have one, but extremely hard to point out specific things it does that aren't already being far better done by other commercial entities.
As for the 25% to the author of the mod, that does seem unfair, but I don't think that was Valve's decision. I think they left that up to the game producer, Bethesda in this case. Bethesda chose how to split the remaining 70%.
As an aside, Valve's income per employee is totally irrelevant. Their 30% fee is set by market forces. If they lost billions of dollars this year or if they hired 10,000 people to handle support calls, the "fairness" of a 30% fee is not affected. It wouldn't become more fair just because their income per employee ratio changed.
That 30% is set by market forces. It's what we've all generally agreed a marketplace can charge for operating the infrastructure. In this case, Valve has a challenge, because there are multiple parties splitting the remaining 70%. So they might need to lower their fee to let the game producers and the modders take larger slices of the pie.
That's obviously a remarkably stupid definition of fair.
Free market value is a common measure of fairness. You might disagree (eg, you could argue Steam has a monopoly on PC gaming, likewise non-official app stores are rare on cell phones, so it's not a free market), but you should state why.
I focused the problem with his argument into one sentence that made it intuitively understandable. Then I stated my opinion. I thought that'd be enough explanation.
Free market value is often obviously unfair.
For example, in many companies the highest managers receive a hundred times the average salary in the company. Nobody works for one hundred persons. They just get so much because they can take it.
Prices in the market are heavily distorted by - among many things - incomplete information, time delay, entry barriers, racism, stereotypes and criminality.
That digital distributors agreed on taking 30% doesn't make it necessarily fair. It is fair if it includes so much work such that so much money is necessary. However, I doubt they have so much cost to make their income per employee fair.
Why is it not fair if they earn so much? Because they don't do so much more for the society than for example the average firefighter and therefore shouldn't earn so much more money.
I don't think anyone's actually making that argument. Rather they'd say the highest managers may be providing 100x or more value to the company.
Free market value is a fantasy. No market is really free. No value is set by a free market.
If what you are saying is that in theory under certain completely fantastical assumptions that market value is fair and otherwise it's not, then yea, I agree.
I explained why the 30% is a reasonable rate as compared to other marketplaces.
And as an aside, I argued that income per employee is not a good metric of fairness. I never argued that 30% is fair or unfair, as I think that is frankly a pointless debate.
But I did say that, to me, 25% going to the modder feels unfair. So, I get why you might think I was arguing 30% is fair – though that was not my intention.
Yes, there might be situation where you can only decide between two unfair solutions and one is less unfair, and one could argue that that one is the reasonable choice. This is because reason-ability and fairness are not binary. Still, the tendency remains: if you say X is reasonable you imply X is fair.
Income per employee is not a good metric, you are right. However, if your profits are very high you must raise salaries if they are not already too high, lower your prices or invest to be fair.
- Fairness is a moral judgment.
- Reasonableness is a logical argument.
That's why I argued that Valve's taking 30% is reasonable but not necessarily fair.
Let's assume reasonableness were equivalent to logicality. Then, for a decision to be reasonable, it must satisfy some logical conditions. I'd argue that is in our case maximizing a fixed metric in relation to all other possible options. One either doesn't value fairness in the decision-evaluation metric, the 30% cut is fair enough or it's unreasonable.
So, putting it all together, we get
(1) 30% is fair (enough),
(2) one doesn't value fairness prominently in decision making metrics or
(3) the 30% cut is unreasonable.
I'd say the 30% is _not_ fair (enough). That leaves one to pick (2) or (3).
Steam is arguably still the most permissive of all of those since it allows redeeming keys purchased directly from the developer or places like Humble Bundle Store which are reported to take a smaller cut.
Like seriously, have those people been paying attention? If anybody is going to listen to their userbase, admit their mistake, and do a 180, it's Valve.
- the automated system solve your problem, or
- you have enough influence to generate bad press for them, or
- your problem will most likely be ignored.
I count myself fortunate to have never needed to interact with the customer support. <knocks on wood>
"We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating."
Translation: "We'll let it go this time". It wouldn't surprise me if the next Bethesda game had that very same system baked-in right from the start.
The particular problems I have are:
* Developers are already shipping less and less finished games knowing that they can pile on some more content afterwards in DLCs, for a steep fee. Knowing that they can just provide modding tools and let the users create the content themselves and still get a huge part (45% in the case of Bethesda) will just encourage the release of even more broken games.
* That's not even considering the fact that it encourages modding to go from a relatively open thing (you can open any mod in the mod editor software which you can get for free and add stuff to it yourself, and even redistribute it with the permission of the author) to a closed thing: there would be a big incentive to tack on some DRM to stop other people from "stealing content" from paid mods and create their own.
* Finally, it would turn the Steam workshop marketplace, which is already a mess, into the same thing that different app stores have become: a complete mess filled with garbage copycats trying to con people into giving them a few bucks.
I do not have a solution, but I think there should be more thought put into it. For the moment, patronage style remuneration and crowdfunding are the best solutions we have.
For example, they can require mod makers to explicitly assign a license to their work before publishing the mod. Even allow encryption/signing of mods. That alone would have vastly reduced the "this jerkwad stole my free mod and is charging for it!" problem.
I'm hopeful that Valve will eventually try this again on a new game with a fairer compensation structure and a better community infrastructure in place. I'm not so hopeful that that same subset of gamers won't have a tantrum all over again.
* Public repositories (fork for free)
* Premium repositories (fork for a fee)
* Private repositories (restricted to content owner who pays the fee)If anyone is interested in building it, send me a note, I'd love to be involved (but totally lack the skills to do it myself).
Skyrim has a very complex modding system, and a lot of skyrim mods have dependencies on other skyrim mods, so when you start putting any mods behind a paywall things get dicey real fast.
It could only see this working in a game where mods are simple and standalone.
In the case that a phone got bricked, can the store owner just shrug it off? If malware was injected, who is to blame? When something suddenly breaks because conflicting apps, is that the customers fault? Does it matter if the app was sold 14 days ago, 30 days ago, 1 year?
It would make for a nice reading for a solution to this problem that would handle all of this, while retaining fully compatibility with consumer laws and customers trust in the market.
1) It's almost impossible to start charging for something that was free
2) It's almost impossible to go from one time payment to subscription model.
If you want either model you better start out with them or you're going to have a vengeful mob after you. I've seen this repeated time after time with catastrophic results. I was actually surprised that Adobe got away with it.
The first update came as a set of specialized armor for
Oblivion 's ridable horses; released on April 3, 2006.
Although gamers generally displayed enthusiasm for the
concept of micropayments for downloadable in-game content,
many expressed their dissatisfaction at the price they
had to pay for the relatively minor horse-armor package
on the Internet and elsewhere.[85] Hines assured the
press that Bethesda was not going to respond rashly to
customer criticism.
Valve's Half-Life 2 was the first game to require
installation of the Steam client to play, even for retail
copies. This decision was met with concerns about
software ownership, software requirements, and issues
with overloaded servers demonstrated previously by the
Counter-Strike rollout. During this time users faced
multiple issues attempting to play the game.
Utter nonsense. Have you never played an abandonware game from the late 80s and early 90s? "Enter the first letter of the third word on page 14 of the manual"? I used to get pirated Amiga 500 floppies with the copy protection stripped out and a little boot animation from the pirates inserted.
Valve introduced Steam to the PC gaming world... but then again, it's their product. And when all is said and done, Steam has been a significant net benefit.
You can own the DVD with a copy protection and even legally create a backup-copy. You simply cannot own a DRM product, as its bound to a server side check. DRM products may suddenly vanish from your PC, or change its content. Valve already wiped some games and changed the regional settings (removing games from certain parts of the world in retrospect) and Rockstar released an automatic patch for GTA San Andreas (2005) over Steam which altered the game (broke several features like widescreen support, removed several songs from radio stations)
"The term [DRM] is also sometimes referred to as copy
protection, copy prevention, and copy control, although
the correctness of doing so is disputed."
Google Neverwinter Nights premium modules.
The concept's old as dirt.
Since 2006, a DLC is usually a minor content like a horse decoration, a car, a few short missions worth 1-2 hours gameplay, etc. DLCs come also with DRM, you cannot sell it later. (Also used in conjunction as pre-order bonus on e.g. Amazon or Steam) (Some still release Addons, some call Addons DLCs, but generally it is the way as described above.)
1) Valve half-assed the implementation (of course) so that existing mods couldn't be changed to "pay what you want" (a.k.a. donations) unless you deleted and re-uploaded the mod (thus breaking auto-updates for anybody who had the old version).
2) The real tragedy here is that Valve's also turned off the "pay what you want" option in addition to the listed price options. So if I do want to accept donations for my mods, even understanding my "cut" is only 25%, I can no longer do that.
What percentage do the actual content creators get usually in a blockbuster game release? That probably provided a floor for what Valve/Steam consider reasonable.
Is that 25% of gross or net of sales taxes or ...
Yes, but no. Sure, they made the game, but why should they take such a big cut of someone spending 6 months modelling 3d models, coding features, recording sounds, etc.? A lot of games are still alive right now thanks to their modding community and the hard work of modders.
Those people are not creating a product off the back of the big games. They are modifying the current game to make it better. They owe nothing to the game developer. If anything, the game developer owe them for fixing their game.
Take a look at the community patches of various games. Some of them fixes up to half the bugs of a game, some fix all the bugs of a game. Why should the game company take a big cut from that? "Thanks for fixing our game! Here, we will sell your patch, now take 25% of the profit of your work!" ... Makes no sense.
The game companies should be the ones getting a small cut. They are getting free content, free support for their game, free bug fixes, free publicity.
I would rather work for free than get the wool eaten off my back.
Also, the amount of work one developer did in 6 months modding the game is probably still only an insanely small fraction of the work that went into coding the game engine being used. Which is probably written by dozens of programmers for months if not years.
Last, if you don't want them to make money on your mod, mark it free. This is totally an opt-in feature. No one is forcing modders to do anything.
This is why this isn't about Bethesda paying or not paying modders. This is about why the hell should Bethesda get 75% of the profit out of a modification that was made on someone's own time and sold through a third party. It's not as if Bethesda was doing quality control, providing support, hosting the mods or providing a marketplace. Steam is providing the hosting for the mods and providing the marketplace, so it makes sense they get that small cut.
Bethesda shouldn't be getting such a big part of the pie.
This is not about some mods being free while other are paid. This is the community saying "No, we don't accept that. The modder getting 25% of profit for something that was done independently, without their support, is unacceptable."
The game company is getting free content, free publicity, free developers. They shouldn't also get the majority of the profit.
edit: fixed some numbers that were wrong (75% profit by company vs 25% profit by modder)
Also, for the record, Bethesda only gets 45%, Valve get 30%, and the modder gets 25%.
> The game company is getting free content, free publicity, free developers. They shouldn't also get the majority of the profit.
You have it backwards, the modder is getting free content (the base game), free publicity (Bethesda spent $100m+ advertising Skyrim) and free developers (everyone who developed the engine/assets/etc.). The modder is getting way more free stuff than Bethesda.
However, from my point of view, most mods are not seen or developed as products to be marketed. Most are work of love, personal projects, team projects. Fans getting together to fix a buggy but otherwise good game. In that sense, those developer couldn't care less about the fact that the game company is providing the game for free... they are fans, and all that they want is to make something cool. They add content to existing games for the sake of making the experience better.
Those are the ones that would rather work for free than being insulted by a 25% cut.
I believe the modders should get the majority of the pie. Steam should only get a cut for the hosting, support and mod store. The game company should only get a small cut. They already get a community and free content creators from the modding community. They shouldn't expect to make money out of thin air.
Should EA get money from old Battlefield 2 mods? Should Bohemia Interactive get money from Arma 1 mods? In my eyes, no. The only reason people are still playing those games is because of the modding community. Do take advantage of the presence of those players. Create events, contests, hire modders to create official content. But don't simply get the big part of the pie for simply being the creator of a game you don't even support, release bug fixes or content for.
That being said, I understand that there is a legal side to all of this and the game company must still get money for the use of their game. I however believe that 25% is too small a cut for the modder.
You're saying the 25% is a raw deal. Maybe it is, but that's the mass-market deal. If you're mod is awesome, then maybe the publisher is willing to buy it or pay for it. Counter Strike was a mod that Valve bought and made into a standalone game. If it is shitty, well then you get the mass-market deal or nothing. Everything is a negotiation. If you think the company is treating you like shit, then don't do free work for them that they didn't ask for.
From my point of view, if this happens, it would simply hurt the modding community as a whole. Big games like Skyrim will get a big quantity of low quality mods that sells for lower and lower, driving the market down, making the modder already small cut even smaller.
Damn, this situation is complicated. I understand why Steam pulled the plug while they think about it more.
As an aside, I actually think the way the payout scheme was pretty fair. I mean valve is taking 30% of everything sold on their marketplace no matter what, so if you write that out and only count the money that could go to the publisher the split was actually 65/35 publisher/modder.
That said, I can understand people arguing too much or too little. All I am saying is that I think, overall, paid mods are a net positive once they shake out the kinks.
I've been following the evolution of the situation very closely, as i'm actually a big believer in paid mods.
Valve's problem, I believe, was trying to take an existing ecosystem/market that wasn't geared towards financial rewards, and tried to force it on it. Even if 75% would have gone to the mod developers, the community would still resist the change, since that's what the human mind is programmed to do, and tight communities like those operate like a hive-mind, causing the outburst to be exponentially stronger.
Edit:
Forgot to add, all the talk about "open collaboration cannot happen in an ecosystem with financial incentives" - I call BS.
Compare this to the world of software development and open source - which is thriving. Mega corps & the little guy/girl building production quality libraries and systems which generate big ass revenue streams.
What's the difference between a mod's code and an [insert your favorite package manager here] package? Right, there's graphic assets, but maybe someone's missing a collaborative graphic design market?
Game development is heading the same directions as the start-up world - from an industry where only the big boys can play, to a collaborative effort where the execution matters & creativity thrives.
Open source software companies rarely generate money from software, it's almost all in services. Games don't have an equivalent services model e.g. "Hire iD rep to come to your house to install the latest Quake Mods $175/hr, minimum engagement 6 months FTE"
So far the paid mods have generated $10K total. That's like 1% of the cost of the incremental email the program has generated for Valve employees (yes, I mean pissing off the Internet costs you a million bucks in just a couple of days).
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/33uplp/mods_and_ste...
It's a bit like the crazy excuses people make for pirating games.
25% is awfully low, honestly.
IMO, Bethesda should not get any money (see my post)
That leaves 70% for the modder. Seems acceptable to me.
15% to Valve for merchant fees(this is already crazy high compared to the credit card processors and other payment processor's fees). They shouldn't get the full 30% they charge for game publishing since they already offer Steam Workshop for free and mods don't have the same visibility as games in the store.
15% to the game creator for on-going royalty fees for re-purposing of assets/technology. They would also receive final say in what mods are or are not allowed in Workshop, paid or free. They retain ownership of their original creation and any use or derivation of it.
70% to mod creator.
Now its' 0.
I think the biggest problem most people had was that they forecasted Steam's mod marketplace as being swamped with garbage mods that offered no real value and were nothing more than a quick cash grab. This would result in the modding community becoming a race to the bottom as modding became less of a hobby of passion, and more of a trash market. Looking at what's been greenlit on Steam lately, seeing the garbage that's been flooding the mobile phone market these past few years, and witnessing the bullshit DLC is these days, I don't think those predictions would be too far off.
The low barrier to entry also opened up the opportunity for people to rip existing free mods and sell them on Steam, hoping to cash out before they got pulled.
I don't think the complaints were at all hollow and plenty of high quality mods exist without paying 45% to the publisher + tip to Valve.
I don't mind the idea of mod creators earning money from modding. But the thought that Bethesda would be profiting off of releasing broken games rubs me the wrong way real bad.
Adding financial incentives to a community built on a share-and-share-alike mentality skews things a lot. I can see this whole paid mod thing working, but it's going to take a much gentler approach than what they did here.
In fact I can't think of a single real high end open source project which it's development isn't fully supported by an army of paid developers.
For example, suppose I ask for a friend's help moving to a new apartment. The friend says yes, and the move is finished after a full day of moving boxes. At the end of the day, I tell him thank you, and give him $5. The friend is insulted. Do I value him that little? What he would happily do for free, he refuses to do for $5.
The same is true for mods. A modder may pour his/her soul into making a mod, all the while thinking of how people will enjoy the mod. The modder has a few friends, and they enjoy discussing it. Now, the modder is offered a pittance. Suddenly, it is an insult, because the amount is so low.
Unless you are offering sufficient monetary compensation to outweigh the loss of the social incentive, you lose. No, it isn't "rational", but it is how people work.
If you had a decent way compensating them, the more popular mods could have full-time people.
But the frustration in this instance is mainly about the specific implementation. Paid modding was being forced onto a game and a mod community never designed to tolerate it. There were simply way too many complications for it be simply a case of: pay money, eventually get better mods. Skyrim modding is too haphazard and a legal and ethical mess. Plus it is a community that had survived for years and produced many quality mods without any formal financial system to aide it at all.
As an avid gamer it is quite frustrating to see people dismiss this outrage as "gamers not knowing what's good for them" or "entitled gamers not wanting to pay for something they expect to be free" when it is a lot more nuanced than that.
With this system, if a guy wanted to drop his full time job, and do modding full time he could if it was popular enough. Now, that would be more difficult. Resulting in less content.
If you have financial incentive, more modders will come on to the scene and do it full time.
As an adult I shrug of 1 dollar for this hat, 2 dollars for this shiny hat but I remember well being younger with a very limited budget and trying to decide which 50 dollar game to get knowing full well I would most likely not even play the game I didn't choose.
These mods are on top of expensive games, when a sword is a dollar and a horse skin is a dollar and the sky UI which is required for 80% of other mods is 3 dollars.. how can most afford this?
I worry about kids ability to understand budgets when a few dollars seems so small now but adds up at the end of the month, at the end of the year. Especially when it is now extending into the modding community.
0-1,000 downloads = nothing
1,001-100,000 downloads = donate button
100,001-1,000,000 downloads = big donate button
1,000,001+ downloads = set your own price, 50% share to modder
http://www.bethblog.com/2015/04/27/why-were-trying-paid-skyr...
TL,DR: Bethesda doesn't deserve the 45% of the sale, specially when they are charging 60$ for the game. IMO, they deserve 0%, for they have created nothing (and were already paid for the game/tools). And mods had value to the game, and increase it's lifetime.
Two problems with paid mods:
1 - most modders are heavy modders (about a hundred mods at a time). Knowing that, I can see some players realizing they will spend more than 100$ in a game.
2 - This can becomes Bethesda's business model. It can lead to a Elder Scrolls 6 with lackluster content, waiting to be filled with (paid) mods.
I don't have a problem with paid mods. I just think Bethesda is getting greedy. Does adobe get a cut from Photoshop plugin sales? Does Unity get a cut from Unity developed games?
How to implement paid mods:
- Help modders choose a copyright license
- Help track/prevent copyright infrigement. Many mods use other mods or are "mod compilations". And track unauthorized mod uploads to the market.
Not true at all. They created an attractive gaming environment and a mechanism for modding. They should get some percentage, like a royalty, but taking twice as much as the people who write the mods is patently ridiculous.
Isn't that what paying the $60 for the game pays for?
The fact that it can be so heavily modded is what drives continued sales long after the initial release.
If you're selling something that's largely due to the popularity of the source material, why is the idea of a royalty problematic?
Maybe it's appropriate to liken the royalty to Bethesda, to the per-sale royalty agreements that gaming engines have struck with some developers? Skyrim-as-development-platform is not entirely unlike Unreal-as-development-engine.
Except, for, you know. Skyrim. A game engine and toolset attractive enough that people want to build in it so badly, they're willing to do it even though there wasn't a way for them to get paid for their efforts. Maybe you've got higher standards, but that's more than I get when I pay $60 for most games. Of course, I only paid $7.50 for it, but.
That is not unheard of. Afaik the free version of the Unreal engine has a royalty system. It's kind of the same thing with the Source 2 engine, except instead of paying royalty you promise to only publish on Steam.
That's 1/15 of the revenue share that would be in place at the Workshop.
I spent a lot of my time as a young teenager on the custom ladder in Warcraft 3, where people played home made maps which essentially amounted to mods. This was the birthplace of Dota and the place where many of us were introduced to tower defence. Every time someone uploaded an original or fun new map people would take their map and tweak it in some fashion or another and slowly the maps would evolve. The versions of Wintermaul that people were playing years after the original were definitely improvements upon the original.
If new maps/mods on the custom ladder had cost money this would never had happened. I'm sure Duke Wintermaul wouldn't have been happy with all the remixes of his vastly popular mod if he had been selling it himself. And, although he might have updated his mod to improve balance and the such he most likely would not have come up with several of the features that were included in the late versions made by others.
I see people saying that modding is for hobbyists and I have seen several modders claiming that they will never charge for a mod and that may very well be the case. For now. Once paid mods are released they will slowly seep into the community and the modders of the future will have been raised with paid mods instead of free ones. Once upon a time video game companies would sell their games in retail and then support it for free, now they charge for the support cost through subscription fees, dlc or microtransactions. If customers are OK with paying for it, why should they give away their work for free? The same thing goes for modders.
Providing compensation may allow teenagers to justify their time spent on mods leading to more time and energy spent and offer them an early and valuable taste of the business world.
On the other hand innovation usually comes from the ground up. Look at Valve's most profitable title right now, (Dota) that was a mod of WarCraft. Had it been a paid mod it may have stifled the contributions and evolution of the game. Valve may very well be poisoning the pond they're fishing in?
Second, I wanted to echo that there's a concerning parallel between paid vs free mods and free to play gaming. In both, I think the proposed solution _COULD_ be better. Some mods are ridiculous. (Skyrim on Morrowind? Some of the system shock 2 total overhauls?) I would _love_ easy, consistent, and safe channels to compensate the authors, and some sort of paid system seems fair in that sense. Similarly, if a game can be released free and keep passive costs going through balanced means (Path of Exile comes to mind) you CAN walk the line of "ethical microtransactions" or whatever the hell you call it nowadays.
But it's SO EASY now to point out failures in the f2p model, games that just gave up any attempt at legitimacy to pursue profit (which can be far more... subversive, in a f2p environment as opposed to selling traditional games, e.g. zynga). The worst part to this, to me, is that it's becoming the norm, as you say. People "are OK with it", and it eventually becomes accepted practice, and games that were once pillars of buy to play (guild wars 1 comes to mind) have sequels that essentially let you whip out a credit card for most of the end game gear, and fans who will _FIGHT_ you if you suggest this in any way moves towards "bad f2p".
I see a lot of potential for the cornucopia of modding creativity and availability we saw to fade in preference for monitization, and the true impact of this may not be seen for decades. (Is there really a difference in gamers who grow up being inspired by and playing with the hilariously accessible mods all over the place, and those who just play box products, or mods blackboxed so they behave as such? Selfishly, I can't but think so.)
Now that is cool.
This can become pretty dangerous for games that will start popping up with relatively limited amount of content in them but with 'Infinite possibilities through modding', developers leaving it up to fans of the game to provide additional content, either free or paid. What happens when these assets or mods aren't maintained by the 3rd party that created them? Will the game developer simply remove these or maintain them?
I guess that's what things like second life covered though.
One game that I love that has very little in the way of story is Don't Starve. It has a great mod system that uses Lua to provide so pretty amazing mods to the base game. Basically the entire game is written using the mod system with only the lowest level engine parts being compiled code.
It is not hard to imagine that this business model could have been used with mods. Mods would be prohibited from being paid-only, and an opt-in subscription could be implemented. Users would sample mods risk-free (financially at least) and could support the development of mods they deemed worthy.
How about minecraft? Tee shirts, lets play videos, outright donation buttons, last but not least advertising encrusted download sites.
Something not discussed here, that did arise in the MC community discussions about the valve store, was synergy, which usually is a four letter corporate word, but it actually applies this time where a modpack project like feed the beast has 115 mods, and the compilation is stronger than the linear combination of any individual mod. Also if each FTB mod charged a modest $3 that means a working FTB modpack would be about $345, which suddenly isn't so modest. Its basically impossible to get an individual mod designer out of Ramen Noodle territory without making modpacks expensive enough to destroy them.
Not going to trust Valve as much as I used to until they start being constructive again, of course. It's one thing to recognize a bad decision and backtrack on it (something most video game publishers would never do), but it's another to not make the bad decisions in the first place. Valve tends to be heavily concerned with testing and user acceptance, and it seems weird that they'd push a feature like paid mods without going over it with a fine tooth comb first.
To me, paid mods seemed like an experiment in self-publication on Steam. Like how Valve used Team Fortress 2 as a testbed for many features that would eventually be used in Dota 2, it seemed like paid mods was a test of something a lot larger, especially considering their stance on the existing Steam Greenlight. Setbacks like this will probably mean we won't see what they were planning from the beginning for a while.
Donations, Kickstarter, and Patreon on other hand is currently already working to provide compensation to passionate content providers. Valve could have gone this way and made it easier to donate and support modders.
All the really thorough mods (AV, SkyRE, PerMA, Requiem, ASIS, DSR, FNIS, etc) use third-party patchers and automated load order management, which Steam Workshop can't handle at all since all it basically does for Skyrim is dump files in a folder.
At least for it, it all adds up to "even if there are ones worth purchasing, why would I buy mods through Steam Workshop when I have to manage them all outside of Steam Workshop in the first place to use a large number of mods at once?"
At the time it was kind of a big deal, but I also remember another big deal during that time: when Valve bootstrapped Steam and forced everyone to start picking up Counter-Strike updates through the software. Of course, mirrors were provided a few hours after the main release, but, Steam was the first place where the data was available.
This was a time when the main features of Steam were "preventing hacking" and providing a better CDN. The little known game Day of Defeat managed to be scooped up by Valve and the community couldn't wait to see what happened when Valve and the Steam platform supported a game out of the gate -- Team Fortress 2 looked a lot like Firearms mod with sentries, and the communities were on fire talking about Valve meddling with the mod community.
That time, a time I fondly remember growing up during, strikes me as strangely familiar when I look at the conversations around paid mods in Workshop. The funny thing is, though, every game has paid mods now in the form of DLC. The silly hat bullshit in TF2 should never generate real world dollars, this is the virtual equivalent of a mod that your buddy can see you activate. Content like new guns, maps, skins, models, etc used to exclusively come from the community, and infrequently in some "expansion pack" release from the game developers themselves. There's a different problem with game development companies and the incestious publisher relationship; but suffice it to say that the primary game publisher, at least (over) a decade ago when I was more involved with the community, was hugely flattered and took joy when their game was modded.
Not that running a mod team is easy, it's not. I remember distinctly when one of the main map builders for The Opera was hired by Raven. I remember too, when model and skin engineers spent hundreds of dollars on gun rentals and sound equipment to get the "bang" noise for each gun just right. I wish there was a kickass way to pay him on the spot for that kind of investment, but now there are so many "better" ways to run a grassroots development team (crowdfunding not the least among them) and if you actually kick ass and produce high quality game content, you'll just get a job in the industry like other people who kick ass at it. Or the community will bootstrap a development shop and you can try your hand at running a team "for real".
Instead of trying to open up a bespoke "skyrim mod" shop and peddle high resolution horse genitals for $3.99/testicle.
I refused to upgrade to Steam and patched my HL1, CS 0.8 to 1.x with non-Steam-patches. Valve was such a let down since Half Life 2 fake E3 presentation. HL2 was good, but many levels were cut (e.g. icebreaker) and after all HL1 was the better game (except the Xen alien levels). Half Life 3 is running gag like Duke Nukem Forever was for 10+ years.
The greed almost destroyed PC gaming around 2006-2009, it revived due to the casual trend and more players owning a PC/laptop. Nevertheless PC gaming is still strong in certain countries in Europe and Asia. Sadly, the real-time-strategy genre is completely dead (except StarCraft2 & clones) - Age of Empires, Empire Earth, Command and Conquer (3 different series) will be missed.
The people leading the charge were useless idiots too, they are happy to pay for Skyrim and not for quality mods? There should be opportunity for content creators to contribute in a significant way and get paid to do it.
This is just awful execution of a good idea, with the wrong rates for authors and the delivery mechanism. It should have been 15% Bethedsa, 15% Valve, 70% Creator.
I lament.
However, if you create a mod that changes all of the game sounds, using your own recordings, why should most of the profit go to the game company?
If you create a mod that completely overhaul the shader system, why should the game company get the most of the profit?
If you create a mod that makes all of a game's textures HD, using your own textures, why should the game company get most of the profit?
If you create a mod that patches all the remaining glitches and bugs of a no longer supported game, why should the game company get most of the profit?
Those people are already supporting and increasing the games quality. They are pretty much passionate and talented volunteers. Either you don't pay them, or you pay them an honestly. You don't establish a system that allow you to piggy back on their work in order to make profit.
Let Bethesda charge 2 dollars a month for access to their workshop. Modders then get a piece of the kitty for the number of subscribers to their mod.
Quality would increase because modders would want more subscribers, they would work to keep their mods up to date so that people stayed subscribed to them, and modders would not have to build an infrastructure to service and support a customer base as if their entire enterprise was a single mod.
> We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop.