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Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers

bbc.co.uk

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

#91

Post by AndrewDucker »

kedean wrote: post #80
ux-app wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The core of the issue came down to the effects on the modder community. 1. Modders are hobbyists, not professionals. Many modders came right out and said they would no longer make mods under this system, because the pressure to charge means it becomes a job. They no longer would have the option to just walk away from the mod. 2. Piracy. Modders have explicitly made their mods available for free. Once you have a syste…

But the reason it's not a profession is that it's currently not possible to be paid for it.

Make that possible and you'd then have some professional modders and some amateur ones.

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

#92

Post by lsaferite »

smackfu wrote: post #77
vacri wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they deserve 0%, for they have created nothing 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.

>They created an attractive gaming environment and a mechanism for modding Isn't that what paying the $60 for the game pays for?

Agreed.

The fact that it can be so heavily modded is what drives continued sales long after the initial release.

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

#93

Post by jondr »

UK-AL wrote: post #23

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. 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.

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

#94

Post by mcphage »

mxfh wrote: post #56
jobvandervoort wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I understood that was a value set by Bethesda, not Valve.

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.

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

#95

Post by carlmcqueen »

One thing I haven't seen written about this yet is where does the nickle and diming stop?

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.

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

#96

Post by Lawtonfogle »

lsaferite wrote: post #70
ux-app wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

As much as the idea of paid mods pissed me off, I 100% agree with this. Anyone who was getting upset over the 25% to the modder was just using it as an argument point and not serious. If they were serious then they would have come to the same conclusion you did and realized 25% of something is better, monetarily, than 100% of nothing.

That doesn't hold up. The argument that Y% of X is better than 100% of 0 for 100 > Y > 0 doesn't seem to hold up if we set Y to be really low, say .01%. Thus we accept that at some point, a certain percent of some amount of money is a 'slap in the face' compared to it being free and based on donations. That some people think that is at 25 instead of .01 does not mean they have a hidden agenda.

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

#97

Post by vacri »

smackfu wrote: post #77
vacri wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they deserve 0%, for they have created nothing 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.

>They created an attractive gaming environment and a mechanism for modding Isn't that what paying the $60 for the game pays for?

And the modders are building on the incredibly successful IP of Bethesda, riding on their coattails. Why shouldn't Bethesda get something like a royalty? It happens in pretty much any other kind of IP - music, books, movie merchandise and so forth.

If you're selling something that's largely due to the popularity of the source material, why is the idea of a royalty problematic?

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

#98

Post by pbhjpbhj »

gkwelding wrote: post #2

I think Valve/Steam (and Bethesda) really screwed up on this one. Although the idea of modders being fairly compensated for their work is a great idea the execution was poor at best. 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…

>Only 25% going to the content creators? Really? //

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 ...

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

#99

Post by mcphage »

lsaferite wrote: post #82
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%.

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?

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

#100

Post by lsaferite »

cbg0 wrote: post #45

The idea of compensating content creators worked extremely well for Valve for games like Team Fortress 2, CS:GO and Dota 2, since they can get access to a large talent pool with no investment. You have people creating assets for these games and getting a cut of profits, which is pretty cool, but on the other hand this means that Valve doesn't have to invest many man hours to create their own content for these games,…

Actually, in abstract the idea of a game with no 'game' but just engine with full mod support sounds interesting.

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.

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