Slashdot Mirror
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."
Most of the outrage was caused for four reasons:
1: Valve and Bethesda gave themselves 75% of the profit, modders got 25%
2. Almost every significant mod requires the use of the skyrim script extender (free), which introduces legal and moral implications since you would be making money off of the hard work of whomever made the script extender.
3. People were mass uploading/stealing others content to sell on the steam workshop
4. Most of what was being sold had little to no quality control (Game breaking bugs/didn't work/didn't do anything). There was one being sold for a few dollars that didn't actually do ANYTHING other than tell you how to open the console and use cheats manually.
TL;DR: It was a piss poor system for generating more money for Valve and Bethesda with little to no oversight or quality control.
It's stuff like that, this attempt at making mods "paid content," and mobile games that make me think gamers are dead. It was a suicide.
You've got bullshit like Amiibos, where Nintendo expects you to buy a little statuette to get content for games. Do gamers boycott this crap? Nope. They sell out and go for big bucks on eBay.
You've got mobile games, where the most popular games are "free to play" bullshit where there's no skill involved, just time, money, and luck. These games are no fun. They're just RNG bullshit designed to force you to keep spending money until the dice roll in your favor. It's not fun, but they routinely get top ratings as some of the best mobile games. What the hell, gamers?
Then there's DLC in general. Remember when the entire game came on the disk, and an expansion pack was extra content added to the end of the game? Now we're getting "day one DLC." What the fuck? Why would anyone put up with this? But gamers do! They buy the DLC! If they didn't, the companies wouldn't try it.
Not to mention pre-order bonuses. 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? Dumb-ass pre-order bonuses, I guess! People buy them! What the hell, gamers?
And, of course, streaming and "let's plays." Why are people sitting around watching OTHER PEOPLE play games that they themselves could be playing? But they do!
Thankfully, in this one case, gamers were able to stand together and get a publisher to back down from even more nickel-and-diming. Wonder if they'll keep it up when Valve reintroduces it in some future game, or if they'll rush out to get the digital pre-order bonus of a special virtual hat and then be forced to cough up a dollar to get another virtual hat their friend made?
Attempting this in the way they did AT ALL was a mistake. It was so obviously doomed from the start someone should be sacked over this.
>>[O]ur main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to,
BULLSHIT.
If that was the case you would not have given them 25% and taken 75% for you and the game makers. That is just blatant and exploitative greed on both your parts. You should be ASHAMED that you and your inept marketing department, board or management ever thought this would result in a positive sentiment. I mean how out of touch with your customers do you need to be?!
But then again greed blinds...
Altough there where doucebags, the MAJORITY of people agreed that modders deserved payment...
The biggest outcry was about the 25%/75% split, and the fact that it was an paywall. Most people would have agreed with an donation button, so they have the choice IF they want to daonate and how much. Most people would have agreed with an better split for the modders (say 50% modders and 50% to steam/publisher).
Do not forget an lot of gamers are running tired and sick about the increase of "first day" DLC's and microtransactions in games that are already bought for an decent amount of money. That kind of mechanic is simply there to milk the consumer. If this goes on the consumer has to pay an triple value for an game just to make it playable. This certainly added to this outrage..
There where more culprits, like quality cotrol and outright stealing of free mods from nexus and sell them on the steam site, and thus making money from other ones work...
It was not the concept of modders being payed that made the outrage, but the way it was implemented and the in-the-face corporate greed that was behind the concept.
I think this outrage was justified for those reasons...
Steam taking a cut is fair enough.
Bethesda already got paid for those textures and so on when I bought Skyrim. I see no reason why they should get 45% of something they didn't have any hand in developing, they don't host, and they don't provide any support for.
I really think paid mods are dumb, they will do little good other than encourage new modders, but, it will do it by giving them false hopes and setting them up for an antagonistic atmosphere. Look at Kerbal modders now for an example. They work together. There are few "competing" mods, most work with eachother, and when you see two modders working on similar or related mods meet in the forums it is always a "Oh you are the guy who does X? Awesome how did you do Y?" and they have a great conversation and work together a bit.
Enter paid mods, and they would have incentive to...not do that. You would have modders who just copy others and release trying to make a buck, you would have people trying to obscure code, and hide their "secret sauce".... all.... for a pittance that will never sustain them.
I run 30 kerbal mods now (and a similar number of skyrim ones). If mods started going paid, theres maybe 2 or 3 on each I would even consider continuing to use if they were even a $1 or 2....in fact, it would massively increase my resistance to even wanting to try a mod.
So the main thing it will do is mean a lot less mods get used.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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."
Within 24 hours they had dozens of mods that people (NOT the creators) had scooped up from websites and submitted as their own, and Valve was going to do nothing to rectify that. There was also a mod for new spells that had a "trial version" which had a chance to spawn an in-game "Please upgrade" popup whenever you cast, and it wasn't one of those protest mods. Without even talking about the fairness of the cuts taken by the publisher (which was more like "hey WE deserve to make money off your work") , that is about as "mentally gymnastic" as sitting on the couch eating donuts. I didn't have anything against the idea fundamentally, but after just these few days I can't see a scenario where this implementation would have worked out.
Also, a significant portion of those fans saying "No" was the modding community itself.
I think it could of worked, if handled better.
The mods would need to be fully vetted by an authority to make sure that they are relatively bug free and honest on their description. And to make sure the they are compatible with the existing paid mods and to give potential buyers a list of mods it will interfere with.
Another important part is that not all mods are equal. If we ever allow a skin mod to be sold (def. adds solely cosmetic and/or stat changes [so you can have different looking swords or swords with different dps/weight/ect]) it should be handled different than a mod that rewrites the entire campaign. There are mods out there where Skyrim is nothing more than an engine to run the 100% new content created by the mod developers. So if Skyrim's developers get a cut it has to take into consideration how much of the original game the mod developers used.
I am of the opinion that it would of been a good idea if they added a few huge mods/mod packs. Don't allow skinning mods to be sold, but vet a few of those large overhaul mods and a few of the really cool add some neat location/thing mods
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.