Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

So, I was personally involved in a HL mod called The Opera, which for some of you who may vaguely remember, is a mod based on the high action shoot 'em up films by John Woo, also known as the Hong Kong Blood Opera genre. The game was the first ever example of animated fabric(trenchcoats) in Half-Life, a tech that carried over to Action Half-Life.

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.

Paid mods are fine, they should have led from the back, not the front, somehow. The rates were bad, and the launch mods were just... crap useless crap.

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.

I haven't been paying extra close attention to the whole fiasco, but there's something that I don't understand.

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?

> non-waiveable EU consumer rights regulations require 14 days

I don't think this is true in the case of purely digital products. As far as I am aware of the german implementation of this regulation it explicitly allows to waive the rights before the first download. Like many companies steam does this during checkout ("I agree..").

The idea to sell unofficial third-party add-ons for third-party products sound generally a dangerous concept, and doing so without any quality control or responsibility sound to me as inviting destruction. If you pay for a product, and it randomly breaks at a later date because of a patch, someone is going to have to take responsibility. If its not the game developer (they didn't get paid), and its not the mod developer (its not their fault that the game got patched), its likely going to be the store who pocked 75% of the money. Add to this the infinite ways mods can interact with each other, or mods that depend on other mods, and the legal requirement to sell mods created by private people seems impossible in the best of lights.

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.