Bethesda's games are sandbox games, and so testing all possible things that can go wrong is an immense task. That's one reason why most modern games are very tight on an rails, there's less to go wrong when the player can't do much.
On the other hand, I think there are very few breaking bugs in Bethesda's games. They are playable without mods, though there may be some rare game breaking things, it seems less than many other games. Most of the early mods that people really want are the convenience mods (better UI that isn't console-ized).
There will always be people who will fix the bugs for free though. The free unofficial patch will always be more popular than the paid unofficial patch. Remember those patches contain fixes from a hundred different people, and most of those fixes are very tiny and based on public information. You'd have to get permission from every one of those people to sell the mod, or share the revenue in some arbitrated way, and then deal with all the non-modders who uncovered the bugs and figured out the fixes. It would not be feasible.
It's like any other open source: it doens't get erased just because someone wants to make a commercial fork, and you can't change the license after the fact without getting approval from all contributors. Linux survives and many of those devs have spent far more time and expertise than modders do, and those devs don't tell everyone "pay up or GTFO".
(ironic possibly that one rationale for paid mods was to attract better modders, and yet linux does well and attracts the best developers)
On Steam Workshop, most of those mods didn't require the script extender because you couldn't get it there. For a long time there was a hard size limit for mods on Steam Workshop as well.
I think the biggest failure here though was that Valve/Bethesda kept this all secret and then tossed it out as a surprise with very little explanation of the reasons, with zero customer interaction. Some people did predict something like this, but those who had actual hard info were asked to keep quiet, and others had an NDA. So what happened is that the majority of customers were caught by surprise.
Thins weren't well thought out, especially legally. I mean you don't tell your modders "please check with your own lawyer for legal advice" because modders typically don't have lawyers on retainer, but that's essentially what one modder under NDA was told.
For most modders, making them IS free! $50 for a game and then another $50 for basic mods is dumb. Most of the paid mods being provided in the store were silly things. A quick reskinning of a sword, lore-inappropriate armor, etc.
Skyrim and the older TES games, and FO3, all run just fine without any mods, you just lose some convenience mostly. So if people had to pay for mods then they would mostly choose to not get them at all. Instead of a huge number of mods of every sort there would be very few I think.
What if PBS had this same attitude? Instead of pledge breaks asking for voluntary donations, they'd start calling all their viewers and cheapskate freeloaders and whiners. Would they be successful and well respected?
Not every time. Most of the mods I download and try I delete very quickly afterwords. Most are junk to be fair, but that's ok because they're free and I don't have to pull out a credit card when I download them and I don't have to maintain a Steam wallet or (ugh) paypal account. I have donated to things in the past, but I do so rarely and for high quality stuff, not for everything. Players should not be told "pay up or get out" for someone's weekend project, that's too much like the horrid shareware community that PCs had when other computer communities were busy sharing everything for free or the cost of distribution.
Today most of the best mods are made by teams of volunteers. Just like Linux is being made by teams of volunteers. So now if they mods are paid and you want to volunteer, would you get rejected because the existing team doesn't want to dilute their income? Do the team members now get rated on how much contribution they made and the quality of it, like it's a job?
Which is why some games that have had modding capability have disabled it in later releases. But Bethesda has said now and in the past that they're going to keep supporting fan created free mods. Practically speaking though, Bethesda knows that if they disabled free modding that their games would not sell so well. Other game makers are under intense pressure to produce new games or DLCs at a high rate, because their games only make money when they're brand new. Whereas Bethesda can create one new game and keep getting decent revenue off of it for years.
Remember that most gamers in the market are pretty young and want the latest and greatest fads. These aren't necessarily discerning customers carefully deciding where to spend their money. Many of them do impulse buys. They key for that market is to have new stuff all the time; new games, new DLC, new features. That market will eat it up. However some game companies do care about that other segment of the market. Bethesda's games primarily are for those who want to play games a long time, they have open sandbox games rather than a quick game on rails with a tightly controlled script, and the provide modding tools for free and encourage modding rather than lock it down like some other companies.
I watch some of the "let's play" videos, because no one has any demos anymore, and the marketing is full of lies. The only possible way these days to see what a game is like before you buy is to watch it being played.
GOG.com! DRM free games, most of which are also on Steam but with more restrictions. There are a few not-so-big benefits to Steam over GOG but the advantage of being DRM free is huge. So you don't get those ridiculous acheivements, you don't get the patches as early but they aren't mandatory patches, etc.
Much of the problem is how this was all handled. It was secretive and then seemed to be sprung on everyone by surprise on a Friday. There was no explanation of the pros and cons, which did come out on Monday a few days too late to mollify the customers. So Friday night was just rife with speculation about worst case scenarios, Saturday was full of calling out individuals by name for extra harrassment, Sunday some more official information started appearing, etc.
I think they should have announced some plans early and had a discussion with players. But I see often with game companies that they often make the decisions internally and then respond to customer complaints relatively late in the cycle. Ie, the Thief reboot game was heavily criticized for things like quick time events, and they quickly revised a lot of the game but didn't really have enough time then to polish things completely before the mother ship shut them down. There was the XBox One plans that had a huge negative feedback from the public. A few cases of restrictive DRM plans that have had pushback forcing changes. The thing is most game companies still have not quite learned to get early customer feedback instead of waiting until the last minute or release.
(though exceptions to be sure, Obsidian was very good at being open and interactive during design and development of their kickstarter game, but they're a relatively small development company)
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.
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).
Ya I agree here. There was no need to do this for a game that's a few years old. Everything's well established. Even if Skyrim was new, the modding community for Bethesda games was well established. The Nexus, the primary source of free mods has been around 14 years.
Skyrim itself still sells. At the same time as the roll-out of the paid mods for Skyrim, it was also a weekend here you could try Skyrim for free. It's not uncommon to see lots of new comers in the forums wondering how to do things or where to get mods (which usually points players away from the Steam Workshop).
I'm of two minds about it all. It does make sense to reward the best modders, as they do put in a lot of time and do spend a lot of their own money sometimes. That small "donate" button gets overlooked a lot. However if you looked at the first paid mods up, only one or two seemed mediocre or better, most of them were basic reskinning of weapons something no one would ever want to pay for if they had to expend the effort of pulling out a credit card (but if they've already filled up their Steam wallet then it's a one click impulse buy). I think it had the chance of ending up like the smartphone market, full of utter crap, so much crap that you can't even find something of value, and all the crap is overrated with astroturfed reviews.
I do think modders should get some cash, and they often get enough from donations to keep going. But the idea of "you must pay $0.50 for my piece of crap I spent the afternoon building" is just wrong. I like NPR and PBS, they have the pledge breaks on occasion, and they're not all pissy and indignant if only 1% of their viewers and listers give money. It's a model that works. So how does that get translated to games?
I may have said some immature things the first day. But it was late on Friday, I hadn't heard the news until just then, and didn't have all the facts. But I did not mention anyone's names or insult anyone. So I was amazed at how much trash talk there really was, people being called traitors or shills. Wow, the intersection of internet plus gamers is a very dark place. The whole process should have been thought out better, and should have been discussed with the players. But it was all a secret and then sprung on most people by surprise.
You don't need an Apple ID on an iPhone? I don't know all the terminology, but doesn't that automatically give you an account on the apple store, which I thought was same as the itunes store as well. Or do you need separate apple IDs for those?
Or what about people with Android, who get google+, youtube, gmail, etc, without ever asking for that stuff. *Exactly* like people who get itunes & apple store for no reason other than having an iphone... Why do people rage about this but not about iphone? Why do they rage abut unwanted google+ accounts but not unwanted youtube or gmail accounts?
Naw, we use C. Not a lot of kids applying who have the skills necessary to think about low level code that has to be small and efficient. We'd like more junior people I think but they're hard to find and if they're competent there's a lot of competition to snatch them up.
You can be the world's greatest engineer and yet have zero skills for starting your own business. There's very little overlap between those two skill sets.
If you have your own business then you live every day on the edge, you have to invest your own money and property into your own business. With a job you let other people do the gambling instead. Five years on a job that goes bankrupt still earns you 5 years of paychecks. Five years on your own business that fails may mean you have nothing to show for it.
Younger programmers tend to work loooong hours, because they think they'll be rewarded for it. They're handy to get all the grunt work done once the design is hammered out, though you do have to monitor what's going on so that they're not going full steam ahead in the wrong direction.
Well, older programmers actually know how to do stuff. They've seen the paradigm shifting technologies rise and fall on a regular basis. They know what the mistakes are because they've made all of them.
I'm not so sure here. Young kids recently seem to act like know-it-alls who hate conforming the group environment; everything you do they see as being done the wrong way as it's not the same as what they did on their last job or what their professor talked about. Older workers, or those of a certain age, had to learn by necessity to learn new tools and discard old ones on a regular basis, and ever new job they took required them to learn to adapt to the new situation.
The older workers can be molded because they have plenty of experience with being molded. The younger workers still have this idealistic vision of how everything should be done. Older workers have patience earned through experience, and it's much more common for me to see the younger workers as the ones who are easily frustrated.
The kids are the ones who only write in their preferred language in my experience, which is probably the only language they know.
"Director" is not earned from technical competence, but from political maneuvering and brown nosing. Ie, it's a reward for loyalty. Good companies will spot this and be much more picky about how gets to be director, but bad companies will be chock full of director level people who are incompetent at being a director (even if they were competent at their lower rank jobs).
But then remember that director has to be a brown noser and political player as part of the actual job itself. They must deal with higher level executives daily. Maybe it's better to have the incompetent kid in that director job than wasting the talents of a competent older worker.
They don't pick an inept person to do the interviewing in order to filter out the expensive candidate. Instead Google has a policy that totally inept people must do the interviewing. The interviewer seems to be either chosen at random or in a round robin fashion. The intentionally choose interviewers who are from different departments or fields than the person being interviewed.
It would seem the only time such an ridiculous interview strategy could work is when you're interviewing for entry level jobs. Thus the median age is still in the junior cadet range.
Ya, their interview structure is utterly incompetent. They randomly pick people who may not have the necessary skills and experience for the job that they will evaluate a candidate for.
Except that there is real and positive progress! It's not a "cure", but there are now treatments for types of cancer that had none a decade ago. Every cancer is different, and the chemotherapy that works for one may not work for another. And there are better chemotherapies that cause less damage to non-cancer cells.
Slashdot Mirror
Who said "forcefully" except you?
Bethesda's games are sandbox games, and so testing all possible things that can go wrong is an immense task. That's one reason why most modern games are very tight on an rails, there's less to go wrong when the player can't do much.
On the other hand, I think there are very few breaking bugs in Bethesda's games. They are playable without mods, though there may be some rare game breaking things, it seems less than many other games. Most of the early mods that people really want are the convenience mods (better UI that isn't console-ized).
There will always be people who will fix the bugs for free though. The free unofficial patch will always be more popular than the paid unofficial patch. Remember those patches contain fixes from a hundred different people, and most of those fixes are very tiny and based on public information. You'd have to get permission from every one of those people to sell the mod, or share the revenue in some arbitrated way, and then deal with all the non-modders who uncovered the bugs and figured out the fixes. It would not be feasible.
It's like any other open source: it doens't get erased just because someone wants to make a commercial fork, and you can't change the license after the fact without getting approval from all contributors. Linux survives and many of those devs have spent far more time and expertise than modders do, and those devs don't tell everyone "pay up or GTFO".
(ironic possibly that one rationale for paid mods was to attract better modders, and yet linux does well and attracts the best developers)
On Steam Workshop, most of those mods didn't require the script extender because you couldn't get it there. For a long time there was a hard size limit for mods on Steam Workshop as well.
I think the biggest failure here though was that Valve/Bethesda kept this all secret and then tossed it out as a surprise with very little explanation of the reasons, with zero customer interaction. Some people did predict something like this, but those who had actual hard info were asked to keep quiet, and others had an NDA. So what happened is that the majority of customers were caught by surprise.
Thins weren't well thought out, especially legally. I mean you don't tell your modders "please check with your own lawyer for legal advice" because modders typically don't have lawyers on retainer, but that's essentially what one modder under NDA was told.
For most modders, making them IS free! $50 for a game and then another $50 for basic mods is dumb. Most of the paid mods being provided in the store were silly things. A quick reskinning of a sword, lore-inappropriate armor, etc.
Skyrim and the older TES games, and FO3, all run just fine without any mods, you just lose some convenience mostly. So if people had to pay for mods then they would mostly choose to not get them at all. Instead of a huge number of mods of every sort there would be very few I think.
What if PBS had this same attitude? Instead of pledge breaks asking for voluntary donations, they'd start calling all their viewers and cheapskate freeloaders and whiners. Would they be successful and well respected?
Not every time. Most of the mods I download and try I delete very quickly afterwords. Most are junk to be fair, but that's ok because they're free and I don't have to pull out a credit card when I download them and I don't have to maintain a Steam wallet or (ugh) paypal account. I have donated to things in the past, but I do so rarely and for high quality stuff, not for everything. Players should not be told "pay up or get out" for someone's weekend project, that's too much like the horrid shareware community that PCs had when other computer communities were busy sharing everything for free or the cost of distribution.
Today most of the best mods are made by teams of volunteers. Just like Linux is being made by teams of volunteers. So now if they mods are paid and you want to volunteer, would you get rejected because the existing team doesn't want to dilute their income? Do the team members now get rated on how much contribution they made and the quality of it, like it's a job?
Which is why some games that have had modding capability have disabled it in later releases. But Bethesda has said now and in the past that they're going to keep supporting fan created free mods. Practically speaking though, Bethesda knows that if they disabled free modding that their games would not sell so well. Other game makers are under intense pressure to produce new games or DLCs at a high rate, because their games only make money when they're brand new. Whereas Bethesda can create one new game and keep getting decent revenue off of it for years.
Remember that most gamers in the market are pretty young and want the latest and greatest fads. These aren't necessarily discerning customers carefully deciding where to spend their money. Many of them do impulse buys. They key for that market is to have new stuff all the time; new games, new DLC, new features. That market will eat it up. However some game companies do care about that other segment of the market. Bethesda's games primarily are for those who want to play games a long time, they have open sandbox games rather than a quick game on rails with a tightly controlled script, and the provide modding tools for free and encourage modding rather than lock it down like some other companies.
I watch some of the "let's play" videos, because no one has any demos anymore, and the marketing is full of lies. The only possible way these days to see what a game is like before you buy is to watch it being played.
GOG.com! DRM free games, most of which are also on Steam but with more restrictions. There are a few not-so-big benefits to Steam over GOG but the advantage of being DRM free is huge. So you don't get those ridiculous acheivements, you don't get the patches as early but they aren't mandatory patches, etc.
Much of the problem is how this was all handled. It was secretive and then seemed to be sprung on everyone by surprise on a Friday. There was no explanation of the pros and cons, which did come out on Monday a few days too late to mollify the customers. So Friday night was just rife with speculation about worst case scenarios, Saturday was full of calling out individuals by name for extra harrassment, Sunday some more official information started appearing, etc.
I think they should have announced some plans early and had a discussion with players. But I see often with game companies that they often make the decisions internally and then respond to customer complaints relatively late in the cycle. Ie, the Thief reboot game was heavily criticized for things like quick time events, and they quickly revised a lot of the game but didn't really have enough time then to polish things completely before the mother ship shut them down. There was the XBox One plans that had a huge negative feedback from the public. A few cases of restrictive DRM plans that have had pushback forcing changes. The thing is most game companies still have not quite learned to get early customer feedback instead of waiting until the last minute or release.
(though exceptions to be sure, Obsidian was very good at being open and interactive during design and development of their kickstarter game, but they're a relatively small development company)
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.
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).
Ya I agree here. There was no need to do this for a game that's a few years old. Everything's well established. Even if Skyrim was new, the modding community for Bethesda games was well established. The Nexus, the primary source of free mods has been around 14 years.
Skyrim itself still sells. At the same time as the roll-out of the paid mods for Skyrim, it was also a weekend here you could try Skyrim for free. It's not uncommon to see lots of new comers in the forums wondering how to do things or where to get mods (which usually points players away from the Steam Workshop).
I'm of two minds about it all. It does make sense to reward the best modders, as they do put in a lot of time and do spend a lot of their own money sometimes. That small "donate" button gets overlooked a lot. However if you looked at the first paid mods up, only one or two seemed mediocre or better, most of them were basic reskinning of weapons something no one would ever want to pay for if they had to expend the effort of pulling out a credit card (but if they've already filled up their Steam wallet then it's a one click impulse buy). I think it had the chance of ending up like the smartphone market, full of utter crap, so much crap that you can't even find something of value, and all the crap is overrated with astroturfed reviews.
I do think modders should get some cash, and they often get enough from donations to keep going. But the idea of "you must pay $0.50 for my piece of crap I spent the afternoon building" is just wrong. I like NPR and PBS, they have the pledge breaks on occasion, and they're not all pissy and indignant if only 1% of their viewers and listers give money. It's a model that works. So how does that get translated to games?
I may have said some immature things the first day. But it was late on Friday, I hadn't heard the news until just then, and didn't have all the facts. But I did not mention anyone's names or insult anyone. So I was amazed at how much trash talk there really was, people being called traitors or shills. Wow, the intersection of internet plus gamers is a very dark place. The whole process should have been thought out better, and should have been discussed with the players. But it was all a secret and then sprung on most people by surprise.
You don't need an Apple ID on an iPhone? I don't know all the terminology, but doesn't that automatically give you an account on the apple store, which I thought was same as the itunes store as well. Or do you need separate apple IDs for those?
Or what about people with Android, who get google+, youtube, gmail, etc, without ever asking for that stuff. *Exactly* like people who get itunes & apple store for no reason other than having an iphone... Why do people rage about this but not about iphone? Why do they rage abut unwanted google+ accounts but not unwanted youtube or gmail accounts?
Naw, we use C. Not a lot of kids applying who have the skills necessary to think about low level code that has to be small and efficient. We'd like more junior people I think but they're hard to find and if they're competent there's a lot of competition to snatch them up.
You can be the world's greatest engineer and yet have zero skills for starting your own business. There's very little overlap between those two skill sets.
If you have your own business then you live every day on the edge, you have to invest your own money and property into your own business. With a job you let other people do the gambling instead. Five years on a job that goes bankrupt still earns you 5 years of paychecks. Five years on your own business that fails may mean you have nothing to show for it.
Younger programmers tend to work loooong hours, because they think they'll be rewarded for it. They're handy to get all the grunt work done once the design is hammered out, though you do have to monitor what's going on so that they're not going full steam ahead in the wrong direction.
Well, older programmers actually know how to do stuff. They've seen the paradigm shifting technologies rise and fall on a regular basis. They know what the mistakes are because they've made all of them.
Hey wait now, Google still uses old fogey languages like C, C++, Java, and assembler.
I'm not so sure here. Young kids recently seem to act like know-it-alls who hate conforming the group environment; everything you do they see as being done the wrong way as it's not the same as what they did on their last job or what their professor talked about. Older workers, or those of a certain age, had to learn by necessity to learn new tools and discard old ones on a regular basis, and ever new job they took required them to learn to adapt to the new situation.
The older workers can be molded because they have plenty of experience with being molded. The younger workers still have this idealistic vision of how everything should be done. Older workers have patience earned through experience, and it's much more common for me to see the younger workers as the ones who are easily frustrated.
The kids are the ones who only write in their preferred language in my experience, which is probably the only language they know.
"Director" is not earned from technical competence, but from political maneuvering and brown nosing. Ie, it's a reward for loyalty. Good companies will spot this and be much more picky about how gets to be director, but bad companies will be chock full of director level people who are incompetent at being a director (even if they were competent at their lower rank jobs).
But then remember that director has to be a brown noser and political player as part of the actual job itself. They must deal with higher level executives daily. Maybe it's better to have the incompetent kid in that director job than wasting the talents of a competent older worker.
They don't pick an inept person to do the interviewing in order to filter out the expensive candidate. Instead Google has a policy that totally inept people must do the interviewing. The interviewer seems to be either chosen at random or in a round robin fashion. The intentionally choose interviewers who are from different departments or fields than the person being interviewed.
It would seem the only time such an ridiculous interview strategy could work is when you're interviewing for entry level jobs. Thus the median age is still in the junior cadet range.
Ya, their interview structure is utterly incompetent. They randomly pick people who may not have the necessary skills and experience for the job that they will evaluate a candidate for.
Except that there is real and positive progress! It's not a "cure", but there are now treatments for types of cancer that had none a decade ago. Every cancer is different, and the chemotherapy that works for one may not work for another. And there are better chemotherapies that cause less damage to non-cancer cells.