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Valve Pulls the Plug On Paid Mods For Skyrim
westlake writes: Valve has abandoned its attempt to introduce paid mods to Skyrim on Steamworks, following furious and unrelenting complaints by the gaming community that did not spare Gabe Newell. Valve said, "[O]ur main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid." Bethesda had similar goals, saying, "There are certainly other ways of supporting modders, through donations and other options. We are in favor of all of them. One doesn't replace another, and we want the choice to be the community’s. Yet, in just one day, a popular mod developer made more on the Skyrim paid workshop than he made in all the years he asked for donations."
Valve and Bethesda made numerous mistakes with this implementation, but I still consider it a good idea. I'm definitely planning to allow paid mods in my own games, if I ever get one ready for retail. But here's where they went wrong.
1) They set a minimum price far too high. Relatively few mods are worth a dollar, even the ones that are worth buying at all. Give supply and demand a free hand to set prices, and I think most average-sized mods would have been priced around $0.20. Some might have been able to sell at a much higher rate, but not many.
2) They didn't protect from fraud. As soon as the announcement hit, people started uploading mods they didn't make - there was already a massive corpus of free mods, after all, and basically no protection against this. The least they could have done is give a decent warning period, for mod authors to decide whether to start selling their mods or not, and to search for fake versions being uploaded without their consent. They didn't do that, and they definitely didn't do any sort of technical measures, like comparing uploaded mods' checksums against those already uploaded. All of that is easily foreseeable because I actually foresaw it - I've been planning how to do this in my own games, and all of that was on my list before they even announced their feature.
3) They didn't share the profit well. Valve was taking a 30% cut, which is already more than they do for full games, and then Zenimax was taking another 40%. I can see that, because the base game does a non-trivial amount of work for the mod, that they do deserve some compensation (although I'd say increased sales are the true payment to the publisher). But a cumulative 70% is just ridiculous. I'd argue that no less than 50% should go to the modder. For my own games with paid mods, I'm thinking more in the 75:25 or 90:10 range, or even 100% to the modder (because, after all, a vibrant modding community brings about more sales, so the marginal loss on hosting is more than recovered).
4) They launched it suddenly, with no notice. Nobody had any inkling it was coming, least of all the modders who would be most affected by it. Valve and Zenimax should have given at least the big-name modders some heads-up, so they could think and have time to rationally decide whether to start selling, and for how much, and to work out any licensing issues in multi-person teams. And perhaps if gamers had been able to see it coming, they could have realized it was a good thing, instead of letting the knee-jerk reaction control the debate.
They did, however, do one thing surprisingly right, which deserves recognition: they gave full, automatic refunds within 24 hours of purchase on any mod you didn't like. That's definitely something necessary, and something very surprising to see from Valve.
Hopefully they can sort out these issues with the next game they try this on, instead of giving up on what is an excellent idea.
Way to not pay attention. Valve took 30%. Bethesda decided they deserved 45%, and left 25% for the mod maker. 30% is Valve's cut on nearly everything, so this is not unusual or odd. If Bethesda had taken 20% that would have left mod makers with 50%, and the outcry would have not been there. If Bethesda had decided to forgo a cut in order to sell more copies of the game, everyone would have been cheering the 70% cut that mod makers received.
Should Valve have anticipated that 25% to makers would look bad? Yes. Perhaps they should have refused to roll it out with that initial revenue split. They certainly should have put better moderation tools in place to control graft and mod theft.
But the idea of charging for mods is completely fine; we've been doing it for years already with games like Dota and TF2. What's a community created hat? It's a mod that you pay money for.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Steam does no meaningful policing of any kind. One of the major problems with steam today is complete and utter lack of policing. That's one of the main complaints of indies especially, since they want to be visible on steam at least on the day when they release, and instead they get pushed off the "new releases" page's top in a matter of hours because some trash publisher fills the list with their "steam re-releases".
Most mods I think may come from Nexus, not the not-quite-ready Steam Workshop. For the longest time the Steam Workshop had size limits on mods until recently. So the storage/bandwidth for mods is somewhat irrelevant. Remember that Nexus also supports quote a few other games that aren't Steam related, as well as Skyrim, and it survives on donations and some voluntary subscriptions. The whole idea of the paid mod market was Valve's idea and did not originally come from Bethesda.
Bethesda however did a ton of work. Not last week of course, but it is their IP, the modders are usually reusing assets created by someone else, and Bethesda created the various creation kits and made them public. Bethesda even created their own game engine for their games, it's not some third party product like most modern game companies use. Granted, 45% of the cut is too much, but you can't reasonably say that they've done nothing.
Bethesda has said now and in the past that they are committed to keeping the availability of free mods with their games, rather than the fear some have had of DRMed mods (which some other games have someting like that).
Game developers don't always have control over the tools. Modding communities have grown up around some games which never provided tools to their customers. Bethesda was somewhat unusual in that they took a proactive step of making some of their internal tools available and they did this before modding was really common. Meanwhile some other companies which had modding in the past have decided to disallow modding altogether so that they can sell their own mods or monetize from curated mods.