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."

Comments

Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake

[drinkypoo]

The problem is that Skyrim is still hugely popular and active. It still has a healthy modding community, so people are actually still buying the game. You need a healthy mod community to make it worth it, but that also precludes doing it...

Inflation, slow Internet, skill, slow PC

[tepples]

Now we're getting "day one DLC." What the fuck?

In the Super NES era, games used to cost $60, which is about $90-something in today's money after inflation. Now in the Xbox 360 and Xbox One era, games still cost $60. Day one expansions make the extra $30 of content optional to buy.

Why the hell would anyone per-order a digital game, where there's no chance it'll sell out and they won't be able to get a copy?

Because they can't afford an Internet connection that'll transfer 30 GB in one hour. So instead, they let Steam download the game over the preorder period and then install it on release day.

Why are people sitting around watching OTHER PEOPLE play games that they themselves could be playing?

Lack of skill, lack of strong enough PC, lack of the correct console, game being out of print, etc. Why do people watch football instead of playing football?

Re:Inflation, slow Internet, skill, slow PC

[Anonymous Coward]

"In the Super NES era, games used to cost $60, which is about $90-something in today's money after inflation. Now in the Xbox 360 and Xbox One era, games still cost $60. Day one expansions make the extra $30 of content optional to buy."

You're comparison fails to grasp the effect of inflation in an attempt to make it look like selling parts of a game for full price seem sane.

If you'll kindly convert the average salaries of the standard gamer back then into today's cash you'll find that they were much better off than we are on all levels. As such, that 60 dollar game, which was feature complete, was much easier for them to buy than the 60 dollar broken bug-infested chopped up game of today. And then they're expecting more. Some games to the tune of expecting you to fork over literally HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS for the "complete experience".

They're too lazy/cheap to try to increase the market of gamers by trying to interest people in the hobby and to make it more acceptable to sit down and play a game or two. Instead they're trying to squeeze every nickel they can out of the market they have - which is decreasing as more people get turned off by the microtransaction hell devs put their fans through.

Re:Inflation, slow Internet, skill, slow PC

[The Rizz]

It isn't copyright infringement. There is no copy of the fixed work being made.

Unfortunately, it isn't so cut and dried. Everything inside the game - models, characters, music, dialogue, art, etc. is © and often the game company. While most people believe that doing a "let's play" or streaming the game is fair use, it falls into a legal gray area - typically only reviews, parodies, and maybe satire allow you free reign to re-use someone's IP without permission, and it's not clear that these uses would be considered such by a court.

Is it right? As I said, it's a rather gray area. Personally, I think this sort of thing falls into that same general category and should be protected, even if it doesn't fit any of them exactly. Most game companies agree; I've rarely heard of legal threats against players for this sort of thing in the past, and the companies often even encouraged it - after all, it was basically an ad for their game that consumers actually sought out on their own, that got made for them for free, and they had plausible deniability about any sketchy content.

This sort of thing reminds me of the early days of modding: Mods were totally unauthorized, and companies were known to try pull the plug on mods, and even put out patches to purposely break mods. Legal threats were rare, but not unheard of. Once it was noticed that the games with mods started outselling the games without - and often garnered new sales of years old games - the industry as a whole suddenly embraced modding, and even started making things easier to mod, and put out official instructions and editors to facilitate it. Technically, modding still falls into the same kind of gray area on any product that doesn't officially support it, but the idea of threatening legal action over it is unthinkable nowadays - the same is likely to happen with streaming/let's plays/whatever as time goes on.

Almost as stupid as those idiots rioting right now

[PhrostyMcByte]

The amount of douchebaggery over this was incredible.

First, you had a number of people who've decided modders shouldn't get paid for their work. I know some modders/mappers and while you'd never hear them complain about their hobby, the amount of effort they put in to these things is astounding and it's always pained me to see the amount of entitlement people display towards it.

And finally you had Nexus Mods, who came out as the people's champion despite they themselves actually raking in tones of dough over the years without sharing more than a pittance with modders – all to maintain servers which are essentially on auto-pilot with downloads on off-site hosting they aren't paying for.

I can see why Bethesda would just say fuck it and pull the plug. What a horrible community.

The least vocal, and perhaps most sensible, were people who merely took issue with Zenimax/Valve taking a crazy high 75% cut of sales.

Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake

[Pi1grim]

>> If that was the case you would not have given them 25% and taken 75% for you and the game makers.

Well, let's see where does the 75% go? Steam takes 30% from all transactions as a fee for keeping servers running, providing unified interface, update rollout, you know, the infrastructure, for all the games, be it an indie for 3$ or a AAA title for 60$. 45% goes to Bethesda. You know, the guys that made the Skyrim. And you know who decides how much goes to original game maker? Original game maker decides. You know why they get to decide? Because the control derivative works from their games, they created the engine, a ton of assets, models, textures, sprites, effects, the whole game. If you don't like it - vote to change the copyright laws (long overdue by the way).

But let's all whine at Gabe, because that bastard let Mod Creators CHOOSE to charge for their mods. How dare he give them the freedom to ask for money?

The whole reaction is a kid's tantrum to "how dare those slaves ask for money for their work" ? What's most bizarre (quite usual actually) is that noone has any clue as to how the pricing is made (noone cares that Bethesda takes 45% and whines at Steam for taking too much money) but still throw a fit over "but mod devs get so little".

And for that kind of money there should have been

[Sycraft-fu]

I mean if you are going to take a 75% cut, well then you can afford to spend the fucking time curating your shit. If they are going to charge that kind of cut, they can afford to have people review the content. Given that they are taking a much larger cut than the dev, it should stand to reason that goes to paying for some work on their part.

Have it where you submit a form to Valve with what your mod is, what it does, etc. They screen it to make sure it sounds like a reasonable idea, and then send you stuff to sign where you declare that this is your work, you aren't violating copyright, you've paid commercial licenses for software used on it, etc. Once they have that, mod gets submitted and then it goes off to Bethesda for QA. They test it to make sure that it does what it says, doesn't crash the game, and so on. Maybe even help fix bugs possibly. If that's all good Valve does a final check to make sure they don't see any copyright violation (maybe an automated system that flags and then a human checks i there are flags to see if it is legit) and it then gets posted.

If they were doing something like that, then ok maybe there's some justification of the price. Ya there's a big cut getting taken, which means higher prices, but you are getting something more along the lines of paid DLC. QA like that might be worth it.

However they were just letting anything and everything get posted. They were treating it with the same indifference as the rest of Steam, which is just not ok.

Rent seeking all the way down.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

That is a dangerous assertion. Why shouldn't Microsoft take a 40% cut of Zenimax profits because Skyrim runs on Windows? Why shouldn't Intel take a 40% cut of Microsoft since Windows runs on their processors? Amusingly enough: Why shouldn't PC Gamers take a 40% cut of Intel profits since Intel processors run on the machines they build?

Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, those were actually their goals.

The 25% cut was already tested with Valve's own games. You can create and sell content for DOTA 2, Counterstrike: GO and Team Fortress 2 right now and you get the same 25% (however, there is no Bethesda in that equation: Valve gets the entire 75% remaining). Instead of people organizing riots, this has been extremely popular and well received so far. A coworker is making 20-30K a year making content for Valve games in his spare time, and the top dogs are easily getting 100-200K. No complaints to be had. Keep in mind like all digital markets, there is no middle ground. Top quality content makes thousands, and the rest makes close to zero. A better cut won't do a thing for any of them. Or, think about it in another way: nobody buys food with a percentage, but with money, and that 25% means a few thousands dollars opportunity at least. Good enough.

Sure, you worked you ass to model your armor or level, it is all your content, and you only get 25% of the sale price. However, what is the real value of your product? If you are really good modelling swords, were is the market where you can model a sword and get thousands of people interested in paying $1 or $2 for it? I'd argue a lot of the value you're providing comes not from your mod, but from the framework that allows it to exist in the first place. And you don't own that.

Here is another argument: Valve is still working and developing things in their games, founding that with third-party content revenue, while Bethesda has mostly forgotten about Skyrim, so it would be unfair for them to get a great cut from others' work. But it is naive to think that this test case would be universal or stay that way for long. If this experiment had succeeded, we would have got not only much better mod tools for their next game, but also continuous support for modders. Skyrim looks extremely mod-friendly to the casual observer, but the creation kit is mostly an unmantained mess released as a gesture of good will. Many, many mods require a DLL injection hack (SKSE) to provide basic functionality, for example.

The Internet wants to think that Skyrim is a broken game that would have failed, until modder heroes came, saved it, and brought it to great success. Even the most reasonable people argue that the game's long shelf life was only possible thanks to mods. But this is not the case. While I'd say mods provide added value, the primary SKUs are still unmodable consoles, and there is no sales spike to be seen when an amazing mod is released. Nobody buys Skyrim just to play a mod, although their existence may be a factor in the purchase.

A lot of people inside Valve are modders. In fact, they have some of the best modders ever, people who made mods which went beyond the original game and actually manage to sell game copies, until eventually becoming great games of their own: DOTA, Counterstrike, Team Fortress. Skyrim has no mod of this level, and Valve actually wants to create a climate were another uber-mod can be born. Skyrim had the community and the tools available, though.

Was the mod market a way to bring that? Could the uber-mod have been born from this opportunity? We will never know. It has been killed by the angry mob. Bad products and bad ideas are best tested in the market. If nobody buys it, it is worthless. If many people buy it, it has value. The mob disagrees. They think that some thinks (things they happen to like, for now) should exist, and others (things they happen to dislike, for now) must die. The angry mob is emotional, and any arguments used by them are pure rationalization. Today the hate was on the mod market, but tomorrow the hate may be on smartphone games, on console games, on jews, or on yourself.

I despise the Internet.

Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake

[vadim_t]

Steam has to handle payments, deal with the mod authors, do some kind of policing and support (minimal as it might be), host the mods on their servers, and somebody had to develop the functionality to support this.

30% might be excessive, but as far as Steam taking a cut at all it does make sense.

Re:Uninformative article

[Luckyo]

The biggest problem was that this opens a huge can of worms. It introduces a perverse incentive to companies to hunt down and take offline any free mods because they would be competing with "their" paid mods (their since between steam and publisher they get 75% of all revenue).

Entirely disingenuous

[Headw1nd]

I'm sorry, but the mental gymnastics to find a rationale of why this is bad are just a smokescreen to cover up the truth: People don't want to pay for things that they could once get for free. Nobody cares about mod developers, or the mod community, they just want free stuff. If I was a modder I'd remember this as the day that the rightsholders said "hey you deserve to make money off your work", and my alleged fans said "No."

Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the problem with your argument. I work for a company, and I get a small fraction of what I make for them. But they also see to it that I'm paid regularly and they also absorb a lot of risk if I fail. In this case, Bethesda isn't doing any of that. Typically a company gets the big profit because they absorb the risk, but in the case of these mods, they aren't absorbing any risk. The absorbed risk when the original development of the game, but not for the mods. If they wanted to take that sort of profit, in normal buisness practices, they'd be expected to front the mod developers money to do what they're doing.

From a buisness ethics standpoint, what they're doing is down right despicable. They fully deserve the backlash they're getting as hopefully it reminds other companies that ethics are actually something they occasionally need to abide by.

Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake

[jythie]

Ahm, because you can't do those things?

Well, the tool example you can, but people actually do this and it is a pretty healthy market. Lots of software is marketed that way (free for non-commercial use, paid license for commercial derivative works), and movies work that way too (the license for home viewing and commercial display are not the same).

One you move away from consumer goods into industrial (believe it or not, there are customers out there other than end consumers.) these types of contracts are actually pretty common, with it not being unusual for a company to get a cut of the revenue from downstream users of their product. Crow, there were probably libraries IN Skyrim that worked that way. 3rd party tools and libraries used in professional development often have per-seat or per-unit-sold licensing on them.

In all these cases though, you are forgetting that this was not an EULA change, but experimenting with a new system that ran in parallel with the classic 'donation' stuff authors have been doing for quite some time.

Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake

[Totenglocke]

There's one major flaw to having paid mods though, even if you solve the issues of theft / revenue distribution / quality / ongoing support / refunds. Mods very frequently are built off of other mods and have built-in dependencies. Mod X will not work without Mod Y installed. The problem that is that, regardless of if Mod X is free or paid, users who want to use it are forced to buy Mod Y. Short of the person designing Mod X just copying the code from Mod Y and giving it away for free (which defeats the whole paid model), I can't think of any way to solve that problem. Can you?

Re:How much of the effort did those two put in?

[Totenglocke]

Which they were paid for when you bought the damn game. They did 0% of the work in making the mod and as such, even a 10% cut for the sake of "IP licensing" (used loosely) is being generous. The person doing all of the work should not be getting the smallest portion of the revenue.