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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."
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...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This is hopefully a big step against DLC in general.
Not really. There's three official DLCs for Skyrim (not counting the high-res texpack, which is free) and game mods may require any number of them. Many of the most interesting mods require at least the two larger (and more expensive) expansions.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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...
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?
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.
and most importantly editors/distributors don't have a leg to stand on when requesting 75% of the money on the premise that they sold the engine
The claim that without the game itself there would be nothing to mod seems like a rather large leg. Never mind that Valve is allowing the use of their store and payment system which makes it a lot easier to collect money.
That said, there are far too many problems with the current implementation for Valve to allow for paid mods. They already have enough issues with quality control on Greenlight. Mods are an even bigger problem as there's no guarantee of quality, indication that there won't be conflicts with other paid mods, and the invariable jerks that submit existing free mods that aren't theirs in order to make a quick buck.
If Valve wants to do this they should develop a system that makes it easier to address some of those issues before they try to offer paid mods.
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.
>> 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".
If that was the case you would not have given them 25% and taken 75% for you and the game makers.
You know, I always hate how my grunt work for companies makes them 4 times the money they pay you. It's just greedy theft. We should start a movement where the means of production are owned by the workers rather than investors and management!
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
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.
That would require some kind of effort on Valves part. Considering their lack of customer support and an F rating from the Better Business Bureau, it would take some kind of divine intervention before that happened.
(Source: http://www.bbb.org/alaskaorego... )
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?
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...
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.
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.
How does that work? Steam already got paid when you bought the game for Steam. The marketplace isn't providing anything other than facilitating payment for something that was already happening, so why should they get 30% of the value when the people who made the game which the mod relies on get nothing?
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.
Fuck all, that's how much. Valve only pay for the bandwidth and storage, which they pay even for free stuff, so if that is what it was to cover (as opposed to being added to the cost of the game or just a cost of doing business, like real estate taxes for bricks and mortar shops), this would indicate that their end goal is to make ALL mods for-pay, to cover those costs. Valve therefore are trying to shift the window until everyone accepts that ONLY for-pay mods will be available.
You mean like there are only paid games on their service, and nothing is free to play ? Oh, wait. Paid mods being made mandatory is just FUD, and is also stupid because mods that would otherwise be free would simply not be released instead, or distributed outside Steam. Valve have no policy of setting a mandatory minimum price on all items sold on Steam, and there is no indication that this will change in the forseeable future.
Bethesda did NOTHING, no cost WHATSOEVER. NO EFFORT whatsoever.
That is great news, since then there is no need for their game or tools, and one can just make a game from scratch without relying on them. On the other hand, if you want to use Valve's and Bethesda's service and tools, then you need to accept their terms. Skyrim and the Creation Kit are Bethesda's intellectual property. That is why previously they were able to disallow any monetization of mods. If you do not like the terms, you have the choice of going elsewhere. That is how a free market works. Skyrim is not a monopoly, and nor is even Steam, because there are viable alternatives.
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".
I mostly agree. But the problem with Skyrim mods compared to DOTA2, CounterStrike, TF, etc, is that Skyrim is a much more complex game and mods are much more intricate and risky as result. With a TF mod you pretty much know what you're getting whereas with a Skyrim mod it's almost impossible to know beforehand if it will work as advertised, or if it will break your game, be incompatible with other mods, corrupt your save file... it's simply a much more experimental and risky way of modding than TF. This is partly also due to the tools not being as good as they could be.
I think a payment system for mods is generally a good idea, but the tools provided by the develper then need to be up to the task to provide a baseline of quality and security. At the moment, the "quality control" is being handled by the modding community with tools like SkyEdit, Wrye Bash, Mod Manager etc, so from this perspective I understand those who feel a little cheated by Bethesda cashing in, as it is the modding community itself that is providing the tools that make it even possible to run multiple mods with a minimum of safety and compatibility.
I think if the payed mods announcement would have been accompanied by an updated CreationKit that handles these issues, it would have been much better received.
Also:
Skyrim has no mod of this level
Not yet.
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."
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.
The claim that without the game itself there would be nothing to mod seems like a rather large leg.
Yes and no, on the hand the statement is true. On the other hand Bethesda already got paid. If they had said at the outset we are going to use the Gillette model charge a minimal fee to recover our costs developing the game, and let the community produce a sell additional content for which we will take a cut, things might be different.
That isn't what they did though, the charged as much for the game as any other AAA title, and now seek to profit handsomely for efforts they have little to know hand in. There are probably some variable costs associated with 'supporting' the mods. More tech support calls for the core product etc.
Still 45% is a pretty big take and is hard to justify; especially when someone else is operating the market place doing all the risky work of handling the money etc and already taking %30 to do it. If they were asking 15% or something that would feel more like a kind of royalty (which isn't unfair), and I think people would find that much less objectionable.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
I suspect a lot of people were worried about the idea of Bethesda taking anything. Paying mod authors people can get behind, and people are generally ok with distribution services taking a cut, but the idea of mod revenue going back to the publisher would represent an uncomfortable shift.
I don't find your word-processor comparison compelling. The difference is whether it's a derivate work, no?
There's a difference between me using your word-processor to create a book, and me using your word-processor as a basis for my own enhanced word-processor.
If the word-processor's EULA were 'viral' even to documents produced with it, then I'd agree, that's not fair, but that's not what's going on here: a Skyrim mod necessarily directly uses Skyrim, where a .pdf generated by a word-processor doesn't directly use the word-processor.
Analogy: GCC is available under the GPL. There's an explicit mention that code generated by GCC is not 'virally' treated as a derivative work, i.e. compiling proprietary code with GCC is acceptable. But if you modify GCC, the resulting compiler may only be distributed under the terms of the GPL (i.e. the source is available and the licence is GPL) .
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.
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?
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
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.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
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.
Ahm, what you are describing is a derived work. We may not want it to be, but it can be considered one and they do have some rights over the combined work.
I think one of the problems in discussions like this is people have difficulty differentiating between what they want and what is, then go a step further and define what is as what they want it to be.
Bethesda has released their Creation Kit (that makes all these mods) for free. Depending how this plays out, I wonder if this type of thing would have a different cost to it in the future. It's great that mod makers can get paid for using their time and free tools, and this "licensing" is typical of software that is free to use for non-commercial purposes. Once a mod becomes commercial, it's a whole different thing, and those free tool makers (Bethesda) want/deserve their share.
By that logic, the government should be taxing businesses at 75% because, hey, without their infrastructure, property rights, and policing, where would that business be?
Top marginal tax rate was over 90 percent at one time. So actually, they did. Business tax rates were higher too. Was one of the greatest growth periods of American history, because the government spent that money on infrastructure. a LOT of infrastructure.
a Skyrim mod necessarily directly uses Skyrim
You're making a big assumption there.
Even where elements of an API are used, the bulk of the mod may well be original work, or adapted from a previous creation used with a different game.
E.g. I modded one game by adding a picture for use as a decal on a car. That picture was produced by a friend using pencils and paper. It's a derivative work of absolutely fuck all. You're saying that if I added that graphic to Skyrim it's a derivative of Skyrim?
No.
Yes and no, on the hand the statement is true. On the other hand Bethesda already got paid. If they had said at the outset we are going to use the Gillette model charge a minimal fee to recover our costs developing the game, and let the community produce a sell additional content for which we will take a cut, things might be different.
Beth got paid for the modder to play the game and enjoy the art. That would reasonably cover even the use of the game engine and art assets for the modder's personal projects.
Beth did not get paid for the modder to resell modified art assets to other gamers.
Some companies may decide that they would rather not take a cut to encourage a mod scene ... but it is within their rights to charge paid mods whatever cut they want. Some desired percentages may be counter-productive, profit-wise, but no one has the right to force someone else to maximize for profit.
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.
Except Bethesda had to create the framework to sell the base game. They didn't make those tools to "generously give away", they had to make them so that they themselves could create regions / characters / items / etc. I'm remembering why I rarely go on Slashdot anymore, it's filled with incompetent people who lack even the most basic thinking / reasoning skills.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson