At first they tried to give passionate content providers
a way to also make some money.
Edit: It doesn't matter if it's Valve or Bethesda or the tooth fairy that takes the remaining 75% - the fact is this system does little to accomplish the goal of "giving passionate content providers a way to make some money" - indeed it's so wide of the mark it's hard to believe that was seriously the intention.
Are people really more in favor of modders getting 100% of $0 rather than 25% of $X?
Is there more to this debate that I'm missing?
True however market rate for platform/store is 30% + 20% royalty if you use an IP + 5%-10% for engine or more for publishing dollars.
Many regular game breakdowns are the game developer only get 40-60% revenues, 70% if they have no other costs on most stores including Steam.
With the paid mods Valve took 30% (industry average although it should be challenged -- set by Apple), Bethesda took 45%, 25% for royalty and 20% for their take. Leaving 25% for the content creator.
Other developers could have given up to 50% to the content creator which is as good as many developers get on an original title. Valve probably wants to give more but they can't because other developers would be scared away due to unfairness since Valve owns the platform. 25% is low yes but it is more than people make at a crappy job or more than anyone gets at their day job in terms of ownership or points on profit/work.
I think with the backlash it is good that people can influence companies but much of it was black and white. Mods will always exist with or without Steam. Free mods would only grow with a paid mod side market as any economy grows when money is added in, the free side would have grown. Many of the sharing issues could have been alleviated with a shareable license the creator could add. Pay what you want with a simple breakdown could have been default like Humble Bundle. They also should have launched it with a better breakdown on the initial developer and game chosen.
The mod market will get money invading it again as it is immense and we live in a capitalist system where nothing of sufficient size evades money, but it will be smarter next time. Over the long term, it will make mods more prevalent and overall quality will go up at the top. There may even be a mod professional job someday, I think it is good when people can make income from making or playing games. If you can make money doing what you love then you can spend more time doing it. And donations aren't enough for good mod makers to keep doing it when there are other things they can do.
> A man asks a woman if she would be willing to sleep with him if he pays her an exorbitant sum. She replies affirmatively. He then names a paltry amount and asks if she would still be willing to sleep with him for the revised fee. The woman is greatly offended and replies as follows:
> She: What kind of woman do you think I am?
> He: We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling over the price.
The important bit here is that mod developers can get paid. How much is a matter of negotiation and revising.
Note that 25% is pretty generous when you're creating a derivitive work off of someone else's IP. See Kindle Worlds http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1001197421 for an example of the kind of deal you'd be lucky to get.
The first - obviously didn't align well with the community's (more like the mod users) intentions. The canceling - Upset quality producing modders who think they should be compensated for their time and effort, and now makes them part "part of valve's greediness" in the eyes of users.
Seems like they didn't think all the way through in both moves.
Yes, it looks pretty bad, and it makes Valve look like a bunch of amateurs. And this is coming from someone who generally likes what they do.
Valve has not ended the paid mods programme. They've only turned it off for Skyrim.
From the Valve post:
> We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop.
They're very explicitly removing it only from Skyrim.
Personally, I'm completely okay with the paid mod system - and I think the reason it failed so spectacularly was because of Bethesda and the invisibleness of the "Valve takes 30%, Bethesda takes 45%" - But it is important to note
Only 25% going to the content creators? Really?
And a poor returns mechanism, getting a refund gets you banned from the steam store for 7 days to stop abuse. That's a poor returns policy when you're buying things like mods that might be of really poor quality once you start to use them.
I'm hopeful that Valve will eventually try this again on a new game with a fairer compensation structure and a better community infrastructure in place. I'm not so hopeful that that same subset of gamers won't have a tantrum all over again.
Skyrim has a very complex modding system, and a lot of skyrim mods have dependencies on other skyrim mods, so when you start putting any mods behind a paywall things get dicey real fast.
It could only see this working in a game where mods are simple and standalone.
In the case that a phone got bricked, can the store owner just shrug it off? If malware was injected, who is to blame? When something suddenly breaks because conflicting apps, is that the customers fault? Does it matter if the app was sold 14 days ago, 30 days ago, 1 year?
It would make for a nice reading for a solution to this problem that would handle all of this, while retaining fully compatibility with consumer laws and customers trust in the market.
Like seriously, have those people been paying attention? If anybody is going to listen to their userbase, admit their mistake, and do a 180, it's Valve.
"We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating."
Translation: "We'll let it go this time". It wouldn't surprise me if the next Bethesda game had that very same system baked-in right from the start.
Valve claims that 30% share is fair while having one of the highest income per employee of any company. That means that their share is too high.
It's more than what the government demands from you, while the government is _much_ more important than Valve is for any business.
The CEO of Valve argues that money steers the community. That's true, and it leads to slavery, drug trafficking criminal organizations and war if the government doesn't regulate. Commercialization does not only have good consequences. Though being able to extort more money out of the masses might skew your vision on that.
Just because it sells doesn't mean people like it. It might be lack of alternatives.
I'm not in principle against money. If you really think that you should, offering a service to make payments to the authors easy might be good. But among many things, DON'T BE RIDICULOUSLY GREEDY.
Let's suppose now that to develop the infrastructure for your service was really expensive and the market volume is not big enough to get the investment back with small percentages.
This is an interesting situation because even if you are "forced" to offer it with 25% share for the author some authors will use it due to lack of alternatives.
Right now I don't have a good solution to this problem. Maybe lower your cut according with the return you already got until you arrived at a fair share? Maybe the best would be if you didn't offer your service at all...
I really don't have an issue with paying for good mods and in fact I was really excited by the initial announcement because I would have totally gotten into game modding if I could earn some significant supplemental income doing it.
I think the number of people buying a game because of a mod is rather small, so business people will see things more from the second viewpoint.
1) Valve half-assed the implementation (of course) so that existing mods couldn't be changed to "pay what you want" (a.k.a. donations) unless you deleted and re-uploaded the mod (thus breaking auto-updates for anybody who had the old version).
2) The real tragedy here is that Valve's also turned off the "pay what you want" option in addition to the listed price options. So if I do want to accept donations for my mods, even understanding my "cut" is only 25%, I can no longer do that.
What percentage do the actual content creators get usually in a blockbuster game release? That probably provided a floor for what Valve/Steam consider reasonable.
Is that 25% of gross or net of sales taxes or ...
The first update came as a set of specialized armor for
Oblivion 's ridable horses; released on April 3, 2006.
Although gamers generally displayed enthusiasm for the
concept of micropayments for downloadable in-game content,
many expressed their dissatisfaction at the price they
had to pay for the relatively minor horse-armor package
on the Internet and elsewhere.[85] Hines assured the
press that Bethesda was not going to respond rashly to
customer criticism.
Valve's Half-Life 2 was the first game to require
installation of the Steam client to play, even for retail
copies. This decision was met with concerns about
software ownership, software requirements, and issues
with overloaded servers demonstrated previously by the
Counter-Strike rollout. During this time users faced
multiple issues attempting to play the game.
Utter nonsense. Have you never played an abandonware game from the late 80s and early 90s? "Enter the first letter of the third word on page 14 of the manual"? I used to get pirated Amiga 500 floppies with the copy protection stripped out and a little boot animation from the pirates inserted.
Valve introduced Steam to the PC gaming world... but then again, it's their product. And when all is said and done, Steam has been a significant net benefit.
Google Neverwinter Nights premium modules.
Yes, but no. Sure, they made the game, but why should they take such a big cut of someone spending 6 months modelling 3d models, coding features, recording sounds, etc.? A lot of games are still alive right now thanks to their modding community and the hard work of modders.
Those people are not creating a product off the back of the big games. They are modifying the current game to make it better. They owe nothing to the game developer. If anything, the game developer owe them for fixing their game.
Take a look at the community patches of various games. Some of them fixes up to half the bugs of a game, some fix all the bugs of a game. Why should the game company take a big cut from that? "Thanks for fixing our game! Here, we will sell your patch, now take 25% of the profit of your work!" ... Makes no sense.
The game companies should be the ones getting a small cut. They are getting free content, free support for their game, free bug fixes, free publicity.
I would rather work for free than get the wool eaten off my back.
Also, the amount of work one developer did in 6 months modding the game is probably still only an insanely small fraction of the work that went into coding the game engine being used. Which is probably written by dozens of programmers for months if not years.
Last, if you don't want them to make money on your mod, mark it free. This is totally an opt-in feature. No one is forcing modders to do anything.
I've been following the evolution of the situation very closely, as i'm actually a big believer in paid mods.
Valve's problem, I believe, was trying to take an existing ecosystem/market that wasn't geared towards financial rewards, and tried to force it on it. Even if 75% would have gone to the mod developers, the community would still resist the change, since that's what the human mind is programmed to do, and tight communities like those operate like a hive-mind, causing the outburst to be exponentially stronger.
Edit:
Forgot to add, all the talk about "open collaboration cannot happen in an ecosystem with financial incentives" - I call BS.
Compare this to the world of software development and open source - which is thriving. Mega corps & the little guy/girl building production quality libraries and systems which generate big ass revenue streams.
What's the difference between a mod's code and an [insert your favorite package manager here] package? Right, there's graphic assets, but maybe someone's missing a collaborative graphic design market?
Game development is heading the same directions as the start-up world - from an industry where only the big boys can play, to a collaborative effort where the execution matters & creativity thrives.
Open source software companies rarely generate money from software, it's almost all in services. Games don't have an equivalent services model e.g. "Hire iD rep to come to your house to install the latest Quake Mods $175/hr, minimum engagement 6 months FTE"
So far the paid mods have generated $10K total. That's like 1% of the cost of the incremental email the program has generated for Valve employees (yes, I mean pissing off the Internet costs you a million bucks in just a couple of days).
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/33uplp/mods_and_ste...
It's a bit like the crazy excuses people make for pirating games.
I think the biggest problem most people had was that they forecasted Steam's mod marketplace as being swamped with garbage mods that offered no real value and were nothing more than a quick cash grab. This would result in the modding community becoming a race to the bottom as modding became less of a hobby of passion, and more of a trash market. Looking at what's been greenlit on Steam lately, seeing the garbage that's been flooding the mobile phone market these past few years, and witnessing the bullshit DLC is these days, I don't think those predictions would be too far off.
The low barrier to entry also opened up the opportunity for people to rip existing free mods and sell them on Steam, hoping to cash out before they got pulled.
I don't think the complaints were at all hollow and plenty of high quality mods exist without paying 45% to the publisher + tip to Valve.
I don't mind the idea of mod creators earning money from modding. But the thought that Bethesda would be profiting off of releasing broken games rubs me the wrong way real bad.
But the frustration in this instance is mainly about the specific implementation. Paid modding was being forced onto a game and a mod community never designed to tolerate it. There were simply way too many complications for it be simply a case of: pay money, eventually get better mods. Skyrim modding is too haphazard and a legal and ethical mess. Plus it is a community that had survived for years and produced many quality mods without any formal financial system to aide it at all.
As an avid gamer it is quite frustrating to see people dismiss this outrage as "gamers not knowing what's good for them" or "entitled gamers not wanting to pay for something they expect to be free" when it is a lot more nuanced than that.
With this system, if a guy wanted to drop his full time job, and do modding full time he could if it was popular enough. Now, that would be more difficult. Resulting in less content.
For example, suppose I ask for a friend's help moving to a new apartment. The friend says yes, and the move is finished after a full day of moving boxes. At the end of the day, I tell him thank you, and give him $5. The friend is insulted. Do I value him that little? What he would happily do for free, he refuses to do for $5.
The same is true for mods. A modder may pour his/her soul into making a mod, all the while thinking of how people will enjoy the mod. The modder has a few friends, and they enjoy discussing it. Now, the modder is offered a pittance. Suddenly, it is an insult, because the amount is so low.
Unless you are offering sufficient monetary compensation to outweigh the loss of the social incentive, you lose. No, it isn't "rational", but it is how people work.
If you had a decent way compensating them, the more popular mods could have full-time people.
Adding financial incentives to a community built on a share-and-share-alike mentality skews things a lot. I can see this whole paid mod thing working, but it's going to take a much gentler approach than what they did here.
In fact I can't think of a single real high end open source project which it's development isn't fully supported by an army of paid developers.
If you have financial incentive, more modders will come on to the scene and do it full time.
As an adult I shrug of 1 dollar for this hat, 2 dollars for this shiny hat but I remember well being younger with a very limited budget and trying to decide which 50 dollar game to get knowing full well I would most likely not even play the game I didn't choose.
These mods are on top of expensive games, when a sword is a dollar and a horse skin is a dollar and the sky UI which is required for 80% of other mods is 3 dollars.. how can most afford this?
I worry about kids ability to understand budgets when a few dollars seems so small now but adds up at the end of the month, at the end of the year. Especially when it is now extending into the modding community.
0-1,000 downloads = nothing
1,001-100,000 downloads = donate button
100,001-1,000,000 downloads = big donate button
1,000,001+ downloads = set your own price, 50% share to modder
http://www.bethblog.com/2015/04/27/why-were-trying-paid-skyr...
TL,DR: Bethesda doesn't deserve the 45% of the sale, specially when they are charging 60$ for the game. IMO, they deserve 0%, for they have created nothing (and were already paid for the game/tools). And mods had value to the game, and increase it's lifetime.
Two problems with paid mods:
1 - most modders are heavy modders (about a hundred mods at a time). Knowing that, I can see some players realizing they will spend more than 100$ in a game.
2 - This can becomes Bethesda's business model. It can lead to a Elder Scrolls 6 with lackluster content, waiting to be filled with (paid) mods.
I don't have a problem with paid mods. I just think Bethesda is getting greedy. Does adobe get a cut from Photoshop plugin sales? Does Unity get a cut from Unity developed games?
How to implement paid mods:
- Help modders choose a copyright license
- Help track/prevent copyright infrigement. Many mods use other mods or are "mod compilations". And track unauthorized mod uploads to the market.
Not true at all. They created an attractive gaming environment and a mechanism for modding. They should get some percentage, like a royalty, but taking twice as much as the people who write the mods is patently ridiculous.
Isn't that what paying the $60 for the game pays for?
That is not unheard of. Afaik the free version of the Unreal engine has a royalty system. It's kind of the same thing with the Source 2 engine, except instead of paying royalty you promise to only publish on Steam.
That's 1/15 of the revenue share that would be in place at the Workshop.
Except, for, you know. Skyrim. A game engine and toolset attractive enough that people want to build in it so badly, they're willing to do it even though there wasn't a way for them to get paid for their efforts. Maybe you've got higher standards, but that's more than I get when I pay $60 for most games. Of course, I only paid $7.50 for it, but.
I spent a lot of my time as a young teenager on the custom ladder in Warcraft 3, where people played home made maps which essentially amounted to mods. This was the birthplace of Dota and the place where many of us were introduced to tower defence. Every time someone uploaded an original or fun new map people would take their map and tweak it in some fashion or another and slowly the maps would evolve. The versions of Wintermaul that people were playing years after the original were definitely improvements upon the original.
If new maps/mods on the custom ladder had cost money this would never had happened. I'm sure Duke Wintermaul wouldn't have been happy with all the remixes of his vastly popular mod if he had been selling it himself. And, although he might have updated his mod to improve balance and the such he most likely would not have come up with several of the features that were included in the late versions made by others.
I see people saying that modding is for hobbyists and I have seen several modders claiming that they will never charge for a mod and that may very well be the case. For now. Once paid mods are released they will slowly seep into the community and the modders of the future will have been raised with paid mods instead of free ones. Once upon a time video game companies would sell their games in retail and then support it for free, now they charge for the support cost through subscription fees, dlc or microtransactions. If customers are OK with paying for it, why should they give away their work for free? The same thing goes for modders.
Second, I wanted to echo that there's a concerning parallel between paid vs free mods and free to play gaming. In both, I think the proposed solution _COULD_ be better. Some mods are ridiculous. (Skyrim on Morrowind? Some of the system shock 2 total overhauls?) I would _love_ easy, consistent, and safe channels to compensate the authors, and some sort of paid system seems fair in that sense. Similarly, if a game can be released free and keep passive costs going through balanced means (Path of Exile comes to mind) you CAN walk the line of "ethical microtransactions" or whatever the hell you call it nowadays.
But it's SO EASY now to point out failures in the f2p model, games that just gave up any attempt at legitimacy to pursue profit (which can be far more... subversive, in a f2p environment as opposed to selling traditional games, e.g. zynga). The worst part to this, to me, is that it's becoming the norm, as you say. People "are OK with it", and it eventually becomes accepted practice, and games that were once pillars of buy to play (guild wars 1 comes to mind) have sequels that essentially let you whip out a credit card for most of the end game gear, and fans who will _FIGHT_ you if you suggest this in any way moves towards "bad f2p".
I see a lot of potential for the cornucopia of modding creativity and availability we saw to fade in preference for monitization, and the true impact of this may not be seen for decades. (Is there really a difference in gamers who grow up being inspired by and playing with the hilariously accessible mods all over the place, and those who just play box products, or mods blackboxed so they behave as such? Selfishly, I can't but think so.)
Now that is cool.
Providing compensation may allow teenagers to justify their time spent on mods leading to more time and energy spent and offer them an early and valuable taste of the business world.
On the other hand innovation usually comes from the ground up. Look at Valve's most profitable title right now, (Dota) that was a mod of WarCraft. Had it been a paid mod it may have stifled the contributions and evolution of the game. Valve may very well be poisoning the pond they're fishing in?
This can become pretty dangerous for games that will start popping up with relatively limited amount of content in them but with 'Infinite possibilities through modding', developers leaving it up to fans of the game to provide additional content, either free or paid. What happens when these assets or mods aren't maintained by the 3rd party that created them? Will the game developer simply remove these or maintain them?
I guess that's what things like second life covered though.
One game that I love that has very little in the way of story is Don't Starve. It has a great mod system that uses Lua to provide so pretty amazing mods to the base game. Basically the entire game is written using the mod system with only the lowest level engine parts being compiled code.
It is not hard to imagine that this business model could have been used with mods. Mods would be prohibited from being paid-only, and an opt-in subscription could be implemented. Users would sample mods risk-free (financially at least) and could support the development of mods they deemed worthy.
How about minecraft? Tee shirts, lets play videos, outright donation buttons, last but not least advertising encrusted download sites.
Something not discussed here, that did arise in the MC community discussions about the valve store, was synergy, which usually is a four letter corporate word, but it actually applies this time where a modpack project like feed the beast has 115 mods, and the compilation is stronger than the linear combination of any individual mod. Also if each FTB mod charged a modest $3 that means a working FTB modpack would be about $345, which suddenly isn't so modest. Its basically impossible to get an individual mod designer out of Ramen Noodle territory without making modpacks expensive enough to destroy them.
Not going to trust Valve as much as I used to until they start being constructive again, of course. It's one thing to recognize a bad decision and backtrack on it (something most video game publishers would never do), but it's another to not make the bad decisions in the first place. Valve tends to be heavily concerned with testing and user acceptance, and it seems weird that they'd push a feature like paid mods without going over it with a fine tooth comb first.
To me, paid mods seemed like an experiment in self-publication on Steam. Like how Valve used Team Fortress 2 as a testbed for many features that would eventually be used in Dota 2, it seemed like paid mods was a test of something a lot larger, especially considering their stance on the existing Steam Greenlight. Setbacks like this will probably mean we won't see what they were planning from the beginning for a while.
Donations, Kickstarter, and Patreon on other hand is currently already working to provide compensation to passionate content providers. Valve could have gone this way and made it easier to donate and support modders.
All the really thorough mods (AV, SkyRE, PerMA, Requiem, ASIS, DSR, FNIS, etc) use third-party patchers and automated load order management, which Steam Workshop can't handle at all since all it basically does for Skyrim is dump files in a folder.
At least for it, it all adds up to "even if there are ones worth purchasing, why would I buy mods through Steam Workshop when I have to manage them all outside of Steam Workshop in the first place to use a large number of mods at once?"
At the time it was kind of a big deal, but I also remember another big deal during that time: when Valve bootstrapped Steam and forced everyone to start picking up Counter-Strike updates through the software. Of course, mirrors were provided a few hours after the main release, but, Steam was the first place where the data was available.
This was a time when the main features of Steam were "preventing hacking" and providing a better CDN. The little known game Day of Defeat managed to be scooped up by Valve and the community couldn't wait to see what happened when Valve and the Steam platform supported a game out of the gate -- Team Fortress 2 looked a lot like Firearms mod with sentries, and the communities were on fire talking about Valve meddling with the mod community.
That time, a time I fondly remember growing up during, strikes me as strangely familiar when I look at the conversations around paid mods in Workshop. The funny thing is, though, every game has paid mods now in the form of DLC. The silly hat bullshit in TF2 should never generate real world dollars, this is the virtual equivalent of a mod that your buddy can see you activate. Content like new guns, maps, skins, models, etc used to exclusively come from the community, and infrequently in some "expansion pack" release from the game developers themselves. There's a different problem with game development companies and the incestious publisher relationship; but suffice it to say that the primary game publisher, at least (over) a decade ago when I was more involved with the community, was hugely flattered and took joy when their game was modded.
Not that running a mod team is easy, it's not. I remember distinctly when one of the main map builders for The Opera was hired by Raven. I remember too, when model and skin engineers spent hundreds of dollars on gun rentals and sound equipment to get the "bang" noise for each gun just right. I wish there was a kickass way to pay him on the spot for that kind of investment, but now there are so many "better" ways to run a grassroots development team (crowdfunding not the least among them) and if you actually kick ass and produce high quality game content, you'll just get a job in the industry like other people who kick ass at it. Or the community will bootstrap a development shop and you can try your hand at running a team "for real".
Instead of trying to open up a bespoke "skyrim mod" shop and peddle high resolution horse genitals for $3.99/testicle.
I refused to upgrade to Steam and patched my HL1, CS 0.8 to 1.x with non-Steam-patches. Valve was such a let down since Half Life 2 fake E3 presentation. HL2 was good, but many levels were cut (e.g. icebreaker) and after all HL1 was the better game (except the Xen alien levels). Half Life 3 is running gag like Duke Nukem Forever was for 10+ years.
The greed almost destroyed PC gaming around 2006-2009, it revived due to the casual trend and more players owning a PC/laptop. Nevertheless PC gaming is still strong in certain countries in Europe and Asia. Sadly, the real-time-strategy genre is completely dead (except StarCraft2 & clones) - Age of Empires, Empire Earth, Command and Conquer (3 different series) will be missed.
The people leading the charge were useless idiots too, they are happy to pay for Skyrim and not for quality mods? There should be opportunity for content creators to contribute in a significant way and get paid to do it.
This is just awful execution of a good idea, with the wrong rates for authors and the delivery mechanism. It should have been 15% Bethedsa, 15% Valve, 70% Creator.
I lament.
However, if you create a mod that changes all of the game sounds, using your own recordings, why should most of the profit go to the game company?
If you create a mod that completely overhaul the shader system, why should the game company get the most of the profit?
If you create a mod that makes all of a game's textures HD, using your own textures, why should the game company get most of the profit?
If you create a mod that patches all the remaining glitches and bugs of a no longer supported game, why should the game company get most of the profit?
Those people are already supporting and increasing the games quality. They are pretty much passionate and talented volunteers. Either you don't pay them, or you pay them an honestly. You don't establish a system that allow you to piggy back on their work in order to make profit.
Let Bethesda charge 2 dollars a month for access to their workshop. Modders then get a piece of the kitty for the number of subscribers to their mod.
Quality would increase because modders would want more subscribers, they would work to keep their mods up to date so that people stayed subscribed to them, and modders would not have to build an infrastructure to service and support a customer base as if their entire enterprise was a single mod.
> We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop.