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

Uninformative article

[ArylAkamov]

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.

Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake

[MrBigInThePants]

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...

Paid mods are a bad idea

[TheCarp]

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.

Curation

[wisnoskij]

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