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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."
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.
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 $30 of content optional to buy.
Why the hell would anyone per-order a digital game, where there's no chance it'll sell out and they won't be able to get a copy?
Because they can't afford an Internet connection that'll transfer 30 GB in one hour. So instead, they let Steam download the game over the preorder period and then install it on release day.
Why are people sitting around watching OTHER PEOPLE play games that they themselves could be playing?
Lack of skill, lack of strong enough PC, lack of the correct console, game being out of print, etc. Why do people watch football instead of playing football?
>> If that was the case you would not have given them 25% and taken 75% for you and the game makers.
Well, let's see where does the 75% go? Steam takes 30% from all transactions as a fee for keeping servers running, providing unified interface, update rollout, you know, the infrastructure, for all the games, be it an indie for 3$ 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".
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?
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.
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.