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Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

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Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#141

Post by talmand »

yebyen wrote: post #103
lsaferite wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful. They produced the game and made their money on game sales. If they continue to be responsive to bug reports and/or adding new features to the game then perhaps I can see a small amount going to them. Valve taking a cut I understand as they handle the sales and distribution platform. I'm not sure I think 30% is fair, but that's a different issue. As a re…

> I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful. So, you agree that Valve should get some part of the sales, because they are the ones (Steam) actually taking the payment and assuming some of the upfront risks of processing payments (fraud) and, because of the network effect and the customers they bring (read ... marketing) But Bethesda who developed the actual game that brought the modders and gave…

Well, if Bethesda gave the game away for free and wanted a source of revenue from mod makers, sure. But it's quite established that a strong mod community results in continuing sales for the game beyond a normal product lifespan. In some cases, the price of product remains higher than normal because of the strong sales due to the mod community. Bethesda has already made money on the backs of mod makers.

A proper response to this is to give all the remaining money after Valve's cut to the mod maker as a thank you to the community.

But this doesn't even address the other problems that people have been pointing out.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#142

Post by mhomde »

belorn wrote: post #112
stupidcar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you said, but it seemed like a lot of the more nuanced feedback on this was drowned out by a subset of gamers having a screaming tantrum at the suggestion of paying anything for a mod, regardless of where the money was going. 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 hopefu…

I wonder what kind of infrastructure could fix this. Imagine a official phone store where anyone could upload a app, and no platform API that dictate what the software can do. 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 d…

I've learned that there's at least two hard rules when it comes to money for digital services

1) It's almost impossible to start charging for something that was free

2) It's almost impossible to go from one time payment to subscription model.

If you want either model you better start out with them or you're going to have a vengeful mob after you. I've seen this repeated time after time with catastrophic results. I was actually surprised that Adobe got away with it.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#143

Post by Tenhundfeld »

madez wrote: post #60
nailer wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto. I'd quite happily pay for mods - they add value, there's more a chance of bugs being fixed, Steam would make installation less of a hassle. But 25% going to the authors is awful. The game's original creators - who already benefit from increased sales - additionally get more of the revenue than the actual mod creator.

It's an example for the perfectly accepted greed in the corporate world. 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, a…

Apple takes 30% of app store purchases, in-app purchases, and iAd revenue. Google takes 30% of Google Play purchases and in-app products. 30% is a reasonable share for the maintainer of a network to take.

As for the 25% to the author of the mod, that does seem unfair, but I don't think that was Valve's decision. I think they left that up to the game producer, Bethesda in this case. Bethesda chose how to split the remaining 70%.

As an aside, Valve's income per employee is totally irrelevant. Their 30% fee is set by market forces. If they lost billions of dollars this year or if they hired 10,000 people to handle support calls, the "fairness" of a 30% fee is not affected. It wouldn't become more fair just because their income per employee ratio changed.

That 30% is set by market forces. It's what we've all generally agreed a marketplace can charge for operating the infrastructure. In this case, Valve has a challenge, because there are multiple parties splitting the remaining 70%. So they might need to lower their fee to let the game producers and the modders take larger slices of the pie.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#144

Post by VLM »

bmh100 wrote: post #59

I feel that it's appropriate to draw parallels to Twitch.tv streamers here. Twitch streamers basically follow a patronage model. The main video stream is free, though sometimes higher quality options are not. In exchange for a monthly subscription, usually $4.99, viewers gain access to premium features, such as the ability to chat when chat rooms are restricted to subscribers, exclusive emoticons that can be used in…

I like the idea of listing analogies of existing economic models.

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.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#145

Post by talmand »

draugadrotten wrote: post #68
jonlucc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latest I've seen is that Valve gets 30%, then the publisher decides what the rest of the split looks like. If they had released the exact same system, but said the modders get 75%, I think this whole ordeal would have been avoided. It's interesting to me that it was apparently better to give modders nothing than to give them 25%.

> It's interesting to me that it was apparently better to give modders nothing than to give them 25%. It's due to perceived "fairness" This 75/25 split by Valve reminds me of the psychology experiment the Ultimatum Game: "'Inequity aversion' is so strong that people are willing to sacrifice personal gain in order to prevent another person from receiving an inequitably better outcome." https://www.psychologytoday.com/…

That's not quite the same. That game involves two people trying to figure out who gets what from a pot of money they did nothing to deserve receiving. Mod makers did work that may deserve compensation. One example is a possible bonus for the people involved, the other is a possible shafting for the people involved.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#146

Post by dragontamer »

draugadrotten wrote: post #68
jonlucc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latest I've seen is that Valve gets 30%, then the publisher decides what the rest of the split looks like. If they had released the exact same system, but said the modders get 75%, I think this whole ordeal would have been avoided. It's interesting to me that it was apparently better to give modders nothing than to give them 25%.

> It's interesting to me that it was apparently better to give modders nothing than to give them 25%. It's due to perceived "fairness" This 75/25 split by Valve reminds me of the psychology experiment the Ultimatum Game: "'Inequity aversion' is so strong that people are willing to sacrifice personal gain in order to prevent another person from receiving an inequitably better outcome." https://www.psychologytoday.com/…

Inequity Aversion only exists in America and other Westernized countries btw. We're WEIRD like that.

Different cultures respond differently to the Ultimatum Game. Be wary of those studies that only use "Anglo-Saxon American College Kids" as test subjects, which is a group of people that isn't even representative of America in general.

http://bigthink.com/praxis/are-americans-the-weirdest-people...

>>> The revelation that rural Peruvians handle the ultimatum game so differently from American respondents led Henrich on a MacArthur Foundation-funded research trip to more than a dozen more locales around the world, where he found wide variation in the average offers of player #1 and this curious result: “in some societies — ones where gift-giving is heavily used to curry favor or gain allegiance — the first player would often make overly generous offers in excess of 60 percent, and the second player would often reject them, behaviors almost never observed among Americans.”

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#147

Post by talmand »

mcphage wrote: post #128
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Piggyback' is a loaded word. Its something we all do when we use a compiler or desktop machine. Yet those folks don't stick their hands into our revenue stream.

> Yet those folks don't stick their hands into our revenue stream. Game engines do. And they used to tack on $100,000 up front, to boot.

Not all game engines, some are free to use.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#148

Post by scott_s »

jclos wrote: post #17
fallat wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the more important thing is they actually responded to their users. Valve is a model company. Live and learn.

I don't to sound like a pessimist but reading the blog post on Steam I can't help but notice: "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 st…

Why would that be bad?

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#149

Post by XorNot »

mcphage wrote: post #99
lsaferite wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful. They produced the game and made their money on game sales. If they continue to be responsive to bug reports and/or adding new features to the game then perhaps I can see a small amount going to them. Valve taking a cut I understand as they handle the sales and distribution platform. I'm not sure I think 30% is fair, but that's a different issue. As a re…

> I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful. They produced the game and made their money on game sales. They produced the game engine, and are letting people develop on it for free. And them getting a cut from people piggybacking on their work and making money from it was distasteful to you?

The part where they also got to sell the game engine to customers, the developers, and then take a cut of the developers profits too?

You don't buy the mod, and get the game to run it. You have to buy the game, then buy the mod. If they want more money for the game, they can increase the price.

Re: Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

#150

Post by danr4 »

bane wrote: post #86
danr4 wrote: post #15

Ha! They actually caved! Incredible. 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 huma…

> 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. 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 Qua…

I'm not talking about open source software a-la Postgres, I'm talking about libraries and frameworks a-la Angular/React/Bootstrap and it's ecosystem.
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