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ux-app

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?

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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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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