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Comment by erikb | Hacker News Reader

Let's not underestimate what Valve has done here. At first they tried to give passionate content providers a way to also make some money. That's a huge thing. Most modders can tell you about it. Then they screwed up, which can happen if you try something the first time. I think it's okay, but I understand why people are pissed. Then the boss himself comes and talks to people on reddit to see what is going on. He gets informed first, includes peoples ideas in his opinion, before making a decision. We know many big companies who wouldn't even thing about such a move. Finally they decide to shut it down as a failure and give back the money. All in all a very strong move. This at least made me believe in Valve again, after the last months slowly shipped away on my support for them. Kudos!

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  At first they tried to give passionate content providers
  a way to also make some money.

Given that the "passionate content providers" only make 25% of what users pay, I think that's a very generous interpretation.

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.

As far as I understood that was a value set by Bethesda, not Valve.

And okayed by Valve.

The latest I've seen is that Valve gets 30%, then the publisher decides what the rest of the split looks like. If they had released the exact same system, but said the modders get 75%, I think this whole ordeal would have been avoided. It's interesting to me that it was apparently better to give modders nothing than to give them 25%.

> It's interesting to me that it was apparently better to give modders nothing than to give them 25%.

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/...

That's not quite the same. That game involves two people trying to figure out who gets what from a pot of money they did nothing to deserve receiving. Mod makers did work that may deserve compensation. One example is a possible bonus for the people involved, the other is a possible shafting for the people involved.

Inequity Aversion only exists in America and other Westernized countries btw. We're WEIRD like that.

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.”

>Inequity Aversion only exists in America and other Westernized countries btw.

Monkeys do it:

http://www.livescience.com/2044-monkeys-fuss-inequality.html

I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful. They produced the game and made their money on game sales. If they continue to be responsive to bug reports and/or adding new features to the game then perhaps I can see a small amount going to them.

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.

> I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful. They produced the game and made their money on game sales.

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?

'Piggyback' is a loaded word. Its something we all do when we use a compiler or desktop machine. Yet those folks don't stick their hands into our revenue stream.

LOL, exactly.

Hell, why don't musical instrument makers get a share of royalties for music made with their instruments?

> 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.

> Yet those folks don't stick their hands into our revenue stream.

Game engines do. And they used to tack on $100,000 up front, to boot.

Not all game engines, some are free to use.

Some are, true. But the ones with lots of features, that everyone really wants to use—the ones that you can make games for multiple platforms, and that big development houses use—those... are not free.

[0] Actually if you look at some of the big engines, they are becoming free, or require a small royalty to use, and it sure as hell isn't a 75% cut.

[0]https://www.unrealengine.com/what-is-unreal-engine-4

It's much less than 75%—but then, you only get the engine, you don't also get the multimillion dollar award winning game to build on top of. If you make a mod for Skyrim—say, a new dungeon—you're adding that to the existing game and assets and dungeons and all that. You don't have to build everything from scratch, and you don't need your new content to be enough by itself to get people to buy it. A game with 1 dungeon, who would buy? But a mod that adds 1 dungeon to Skyrim, sure.

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.

Well, I could say that the fact the assets already exist in the game that I paid for, then the assets have already been paid for whether there's a mod that makes use of them or not. The other factor is that the game assets the modder is using is only available to players who have purchased the game. The assets have been paid for once, what this system is asking that the assets be paid for more than once. Mind you, not paid for by the modder, but by the player who has already paid once for those assets. To expand that to an obvious conclusion; let's say there is a sword asset in the game I paid for. I pay for ten mods that make use of that same sword asset in different ways. Which means I have paid for that same sword eleven times. Which is free money to the developer for doing absolutely nothing beyond providing the initial game I already paid for.

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.

Yes.

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?

> 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.

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?

I knew the mod community around the game would provide value long past the original game.

Did I say I never donated to mod authors? Did you ask?

I'm not pissy, but it sounds like perhaps you are.

> Did I say I never donated to mod authors? Did you ask?

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.

The part where they also got to sell the game engine to customers, the developers, and then take a cut of the developers profits too?

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.

> If they want more money for the game, they can increase the price.

That still doesn't get the mod developers any money.

Microsoft doesn't get a cut of Jetbrains' IDE "mod" revenue, though, despite the fact that Reshaper and similar products "piggyback" (what a loaded term) onto Visual Studio and other Microsoft products. Microsoft already got their cut up front.

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.

Also, I wasn't aware that Bethesda had released their game engine for free. Care to give a link as to where they've done so? As far as I'm aware you still need to pay for a copy of it.

Their game isn't free; nor did I claim that it was. What is free, however, is they don't charge you any licensing fee to create a mod for it.

> I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful.

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.

Bethesda did get something. They got my purchase of the original game plus all of the DLCs. All at initial sale prices to boot.

Do they deserve more than that?

I don't know about deserve, but if you want to talk about incentives for behavior, you really can't go wrong with something that provides both "increased sales volume and lifetime" and "an ongoing share of the grosses".

If you want game developers to promote a helpful environment for mod developers, grab some money and pay them something out of it. Definitely!

Well, if Bethesda gave the game away for free and wanted a source of revenue from mod makers, sure. But it's quite established that a strong mod community results in continuing sales for the game beyond a normal product lifespan. In some cases, the price of product remains higher than normal because of the strong sales due to the mod community. Bethesda has already made money on the backs of mod makers.

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.

> 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?

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.

I don't see how the idea that Steam should get a share approaching 30% is any less repugnant than that. Visa gets less than 4%, and they are the ones that are really processing the charge. Valve eats that much, and whatever they get paid over that is simply for their role in facilitating the transaction

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.

> I don't see how the idea that Steam should get a share approaching 30% is any less repugnant than that.

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.

> to take 70%

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.)

What about mods that the publisher can't do?

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.

[1]:http://www.moddb.com/mods/8-ball-prestige-packs-dlc-pc

If you think about it, those mods probably wouldn't be able to be sold either (forget anyone taking a cut)

Unless a deal could have been worked out with Ferrari. But good on you for asking something different!

I agree maybe not the best example, but it illustrates about problems than can come up from combining services in the market. Hypothetically if steam was _just_ a package manager and the mods payed to for the convenience of users to install it. It shouldn't matter about the content.

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.

That's a great example of a mod that just plainly repairs a deficiency in the original game! I was in fact struggling to think of one.

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.)

Yes they wanted 45% so Valve slapped on another 30% while not providing any or minimal QA from Valve or Bethesda for that other 75%?.

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.

And don't forget they were trying to minimise the potential competition and challenge to their revenue streams that modding represents.

> non-waiveable EU consumer rights regulations require 14 days

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..").

That Steam allows it doesn't make it legally binding or compliant with current regulations which override any TOS/EULA in a given legal region.

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.

> so Valve slapped on another 30% while not providing any or minimal QA from Valve

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.

Heaving dealt with Valve customer service a few times, the 30% is definitely not going into training, hiring more or providing responsive and helpful customer service. Valve only get's away with it because they run a de facto monopoly.

> the 30% is definitely not going into training, hiring more or providing responsive and helpful customer service

It should, certainly, and it's not, but I didn't claim that it was.

Oh so you think Valve has no negotiation power over this kind of things?

I haven't been paying extra close attention to the whole fiasco, but there's something that I don't understand.

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?

As much as the idea of paid mods pissed me off, I 100% agree with this. Anyone who was getting upset over the 25% to the modder was just using it as an argument point and not serious. If they were serious then they would have come to the same conclusion you did and realized 25% of something is better, monetarily, than 100% of nothing.

That doesn't hold up. The argument that Y% of X is better than 100% of 0 for 100 > Y > 0 doesn't seem to hold up if we set Y to be really low, say .01%. Thus we accept that at some point, a certain percent of some amount of money is a 'slap in the face' compared to it being free and based on donations. That some people think that is at 25 instead of .01 does not mean they have a hidden agenda.

I'd say the person who can rightfully make that argument is the person choosing to sell or not sell their content.

My point is independent of who deserves to make that argument. I am merely saying that those who do make that argument are not always doing so with a hidden agenda.

Yes, but you cannot judge 25% sufficient (a priori) like that, just as you can't judge any % insufficient a priori. It may very well be too low and damage the community. And clearly the consensus was that it is too low.

Fair distribution is one of the situations in which rationality breaks down. See the ultimatum game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game

It's also a sting as others have mentions because the customer already must have bought 100% of something to get assets the will use. The publisher skimming 75% off 100% of the value that modders created for free seems a bit shitty.

Especially when there's still no requirement for the original developer to have made the modders lives any easier to get this benefit.

That seems like an argument that any percentage is fine as long as it's above zero. But certainly people can debate over what a fair percentage is.

People are in favor of offering donations and having the modder get the full donation, not being asked to pay for added content. This includes full-fledged mods to a single weapon skin. To make things worse, it seemed that the store became flooded with half-assed content as a means for modders to make a quick buck. Furthermore, some mods required other mods, if the mods that were required started to charge, it became EXTREMELY prohibitive to piggyback.

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."

They sold Counterstrike as a retail release when it was still a mod. The donation stuff is a sure way to make sure almost no one ever even considers paying.

Eh, yes. But at this point it had a gigantic following and was no longer considered to be in "beta". That said, if you had HL1, you could still download it for free, whereas if you did not and you just wanted CS, you could buy CS. There is a distinct difference.

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.

That's not really comparable, they sold a version of Counterstrike that did not require a copy of Half-Life to play, so at that point it wasn't really a "mod" any more.

The core of the issue came down to the effects on the modder community.

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.

But the reason it's not a profession is that it's currently not possible to be paid for it.

Make that possible and you'd then have some professional modders and some amateur ones.

In this case I believe that allocating a dollar value to work done for the love of it, significantly devalues that work in the eyes of its creator.

Yeah, this is like the chapter out of "Drive" where they tried paying people to give blood but ending up decreasing the number of blood givers... they'd rather feel charitable then earn money

Why would making it possible to make money from them make it impossible not to charge for them?

The system in place didn't do anything to protect the mod from being uploaded fraudulently. If I wanted a $0 price tag on my mod, I especially wouldn't want to spend time I could otherwise be working on my mod policing the store to make sure nobody is selling my mod. Fix that and you fix a lot of the issue.

That's a pretty nontrivial problem to solve technically.

Well, I guess the other issues listed here were nontrivial enough to make a solution unfeasible, or Valve probably wouldn't have backed out.

> 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.

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?

That comment is mostly by gamers, not modders. Also, the difference is that one assigns a worth, while the other is someone saying 'hey I appreciate what you do'.

> That comment is mostly by gamers, not modders

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."

When you buy something you have some expectations. You'll want the mod to be stable, be updated along with the game, play along with other mods.

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.

plus that the seller requires to set a price, which may be too high/low .. but using donations happy customers can pay whatever they feel is ok for them

Donations normally also happens after someone has used the work, rather than upfront.

A donation doesn't instill the same level of responsibility to the product. A donation is to support a hobby, a payment is to support a job.

So they want to get paid, they just don't want any responsibility towards their product or the people who give them money for it?

Yes, to use your slightly off description. But there's nothing wrong with that if the people offering the money understand what the expectations are before donating.

Then do the Patreon model where the modder is "hired" by the community. The modder/s decide a minimum wage, and then see if the community is willing to continue to support the mod creation.

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.

There is a former maxis employee doing exactly that for high quality building mods in cities :skyline. Its working well for him, but that has partly to do with the his former job, the pure quality of his work, and the press attention hes garnered. I suspect it was the timing of maxis closing and Cities releasing that helped the most, although his models are excellent in every way. Its just that even with great art, without some attention you will languish.

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.

I think it would be a great model indeed.

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.

In the end, most modders don't WANT to be paid for their mods, because it's not a profession.

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?

Many mods are interesting because the modder solved a personal problem of his.

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...)

I think another valid pov from most of the gamers is the dislike for the system that has been growing where once you purchase a game there are usually a series of other purchases associated the game to get all of the content that somebody else has been playing. It's extremely frustrating to many of the players to have to continually purchase little bits of the game, and this trend has been started by "day one DLC (downloadable content)" and persisted with "pay to win" freemium models. In the end it seems most people saw this as a cash grab by valve, pushed by Bethesda to milk even more money out of their players. They see the charitable donations currently being given and want to translate that to earnings that a game can make, and this doesn't sit well with the fans.

That POV doesn't seem very valid in the general case. It's extremely similar to "I already bought a ticket to Avengers, so why are they charging me again for the rest of the story?"

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.

It's definitely that in part, I would have to agree with you. This generation of gamer grew up with the relatively easy ability to pirate games instead of pay for them and steam sales on PC. So there is some resistance to paying for it even if it's not outspoken. My own personal reasoning (now that paying for a game isn't saving weeks of allowance) relies more on resistance to change on the way things have always been, with a bit of skepticism on the way they are monetizing the mods with the split amount.

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.

>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?

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 lone hobbyists can improve a game so much, can you imagine if a studio of 5-10 could make a viable living from modding?

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 this was viable, you'd think that studios would consider paying small teams to continue patching and generating content for games for some years.

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.

> 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.

Unless I'm missing something, nothing happened that would have forced mod makers to start charging, right?

You are correct: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/33uplp/mods_and_stea...

Sort of other people could post and charge for your mod.

If you also posted the mod for free, nobody would have a reason to pay for a re-posted paid mod. If you're both charging for it, then that goes into the realm of intellectual property. That's a change that could be painful in a world of previously free mods, but something not uncommon in other places.

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.

You’re assuming perfect information. Amazon sells plenty of ebooks you can get for free on another site.

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.

I think people are used to the apple cut when thinking about the 70% and getting angry, rather than using an already marketed brand to start with, no starting in obscurity.

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?

As I understand it the games industry has made some "innovations" since I was a gamer back in the 1990s - such as pre-orders, paid early access, DLC, micropayments, retailer-exclusive content, Google Play and Apple App Store, releases of buggy and untested games that just plain won't run, extensive DRM and so on.

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.

[1] http://knowyourmeme.com/photos/743258-video-game-logic

There's a lot of other context to the issue. -Mods that depend on other mods -Mod dependencies being removed from Nexus and changed to paid mods on Steam -Mods stealing work from other mods

If you read Gabe's responses he starts poking at the "Wow wow wow, why is this bad?" and learns a few things.

Yes, they are. For example, extend your percentage to 1% instead of 25%. Then it becomes obvious you would be just putting a burden on consumers with actual moders profiting only marginally, and the activity as a whole will tend to decline, since it'1) less attractive as an economical activity, 2) less attractive a hobby, since that might be seen as a low paying job instead, and 3) less attractive for consumers given poor/scant products. The 25% is a milder version of this effect, but I don't find it hard to see why people were upset.

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.

If you make a Mickey Mouse sequel using derivative assets, how much of a cut would Disney want? Keeping in mind the assets would be open to competing high-caliber studios (back to the Skyrim example, just allowing for free modding generally precludes competing triple-A's from producing anything, but give them say a "fair" 75% cut of expansions or complete sequels to a competitor's bockbuster game, taking advantage of all their lore, characters, graphical assets, and game engine?).

75% should go to the modders. If people are buying the mod, then the mod developer deserves most of the cash for the mod purchase. Remember, the player needs to buy the original game too. Those funds don't go to the mod developer.

You misunderstood.

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).

As mentioned by the guy above you, 30% was to valve, and bethesda determined the rest. A 30% cut is similar to what you'd get from the app store and in my opinion is reasonable for the costs of hosting and perhaps supporting the mods.

This all seems like an attempt to app-storify mods. I really didn't think it was a bad thing.

Except in this case the 75% was going to the studios (Valve got their flat 30% cut, as with everything, and Bethesda elected to charge a further 45%). The modders were getting 25%.

If you make a Mickey Mouse sequel, it doesn't require users to first buy a copy of the original movie.

Using a mod does. These two things are in no way comparable.

Just to add to your point: I wonder how many copies of Arma 2 were sold explicitly because of the DayZ mod. How many copies of Half-life were sold because of Counter Strike? Warcraft 3 and Dota? I could go on.

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.

Absolutely right! Think how differently it would be if we had to pay $50 for Half-Life and another $10-15 for the counter-strike mod. Everyone would lose.

This is what's always driven me mad about the battlefield series. There's were some great mods springing up and I wish it was capitalized on and encouraged.

I feel like Arma 2 saw the Project Reality demographic and said "Lets go for that"

It's pretty darn hard to make a derivative work without understanding the source material. I suspect your immediate dismissal of this analogy is more related to your strong personal greed for entertainment, which appears to be a fundamental human feature.

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.

> Given that the "passionate content providers" only make 25% of what users pay, I think that's a very generous interpretation.

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.

This little subtopic can't be summed up in a sentence. Valve didn't set the 25% number, and that's the important part. Bethesda opted to take over 40%.

In a way, this reminds me of the old joke:

> 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.

So the closest analogue to computer game "mods" in the book publishing world is "fan fiction".

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.

> Note that 25% is pretty generous when you're creating a derivitive work off of someone else's IP

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.

Fan-fiction doesn't require you to have bought the original work to read (though having read the original may affect your enjoyment of the fanfic).

Honda doesn't get a cut if I have my car modded at an independent shop.

> 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.

Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright.

Yikes.

Actually, I think both launching it and canceling it were ill-conceived moves.

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.

> 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.

The thing is they always do shit like this. Steam had tons of problems in the early days. And remember when Greenlight was launched? Total shitshow. Valve doesn't always think things through all the way, but eventually, they work out the bugs and the result ends up being pretty damn good.

> Valve doesn't always think things through all the way

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.

I think and hope that they will try again with another game that isn't out yet or at least has no strong mod community yet. That's what they decided as the biggest problem, experimenting on a big community instead of a small one.

Hijacking for visibility (I'm so late to the party..)

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

Yes, sorry, didn't say that clearly enough. The real mistake here was starting with the biggest mod community they have. You should first try to find a good system without being so public about it. And that's what they will change. Iterating with a smaller project.

I'm personally incredibly hopeful for Tabletop Simulator.

The Skyrim community was just a bad fit, and Bethesda a terrible overlord.

Valve are people and people make mistakes. With that said, lets make sure that we pay attention to how FEW mistakes they make.

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