181–190 of 282 posts
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Why would making it possible to make money from them make it impossible not to charge for them?
The system in place didn't do anything to protect the mod from being uploaded fraudulently. If I wanted a $0 price tag on my mod, I especially wouldn't want to spend time I could otherwise be working on my mod policing the store to make sure nobody is selling my mod. Fix that and you fix a lot of the issue.
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What is the correct number they should have used, and how did you arrive at that number?
It is believed that Valve takes 30% from any commercial transaction (google it, although none of the link I found seemed 100% reliable). IMO, Bethesda should not get any money (see my post) That leaves 70% for the modder. Seems acceptable to me.
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> 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.
That still doesn't get the mod developers any money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The system in place didn't do anything to protect the mod from being uploaded fraudulently. If I wanted a $0 price tag on my mod, I especially wouldn't want to spend time I could otherwise be working on my mod policing the store to make sure nobody is selling my mod. Fix that and you fix a lot of the issue.
That's a pretty nontrivial problem to solve technically.
Let's not underestimate what Valve has done here. At first they tried to give passionate content providers a way to also make some money. That's a huge thing. Most modders can tell you about it. Then they screwed up, which can happen if you try something the first time. I think it's okay, but I understand why people are pissed. Then the boss himself comes and talks to people on reddit to see what is going on. He gets…
At first they tried to give passionate content providers a way to also make some money. Given that the "passionate content providers" only make 25% of what users pay, I think that's a very generous interpretation. 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 t…
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.
I just don't think gamers understand, if you pay for high quality mods, your gonna get more high quality mods. It's a bit like the crazy excuses people make for pirating games.
Clearly, that's a simplistic view of the world. The iOS app store (and, I expect, Play too) is choking on shit-quality shovelware, while I pay zero for Ubuntu and a whole range of other high-quality open source tools that have tons of volunteer contributions. 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…
I just don't think gamers understand, if you pay for high quality mods, your gonna get more high quality mods. It's a bit like the crazy excuses people make for pirating games.
They do understand. A huge amount of the outrage and criticism on sites like reddit, 4chan and NeoGAF acknowledge that the basic idea of paying for mods has its potential to reward creative modders and result in some increase in quality modding. 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.…
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.
I just don't think gamers understand, if you pay for high quality mods, your gonna get more high quality mods. It's a bit like the crazy excuses people make for pirating games.
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You say a share is fair when it's what the market currently offers. That's obviously a remarkably stupid definition of fair.
Generally on HN we like to say why we think something is bad, rather than merely labelling it as stupid. Free market value is a common measure of fairness. You might disagree (eg, you could argue Steam has a monopoly on PC gaming, likewise non-official app stores are rare on cell phones, so it's not a free market), but you should state why.
I focused the problem with his argument into one sentence that made it intuitively understandable. Then I stated my opinion. I thought that'd be enough explanation.
Free market value is often obviously unfair.
For example, in many companies the highest managers receive a hundred times the average salary in the company. Nobody works for one hundred persons. They just get so much because they can take it.
Prices in the market are heavily distorted by - among many things - incomplete information, time delay, entry barriers, racism, stereotypes and criminality.
That digital distributors agreed on taking 30% doesn't make it necessarily fair. It is fair if it includes so much work such that so much money is necessary. However, I doubt they have so much cost to make their income per employee fair.
Why is it not fair if they earn so much? Because they don't do so much more for the society than for example the average firefighter and therefore shouldn't earn so much more money.
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Yes they wanted 45% so Valve slapped on another 30% while not providing any or minimal QA from Valve or Bethesda for that other 75%?. As with the Store or Greenlight before outsourcing tasks to the community (reviews/greenlight votes) doesn't mean Valve isn't responsible for the stuff they offer in their store. A 24h hour refund policy is simply laughable when non-waiveable EU consumer rights regulations require 14 d…
> so Valve slapped on another 30% while not providing any or minimal QA from Valve Valve was charging 30% for operating the storefront, handling payment, the value of having spent years building a site where people are willing to come and pay for things, the value of having built a service that would allow modders to make money building off of another company's work, and so on. Valve's 30% was well deserved.