You can check out the full AMA here. One of the most interesting things to come out I thought was this quote (although it got downvoted a lot):

Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers. If something doesn't help with that, it will get dumped. Right now I'm more optimistic that this will be a win for authors and gamers, but we are always going to be data driven.

Have you guys had a chance to read it? what do you think?

Yep, sounds super reasonable to me. Seems like 99.9% of people's complaints are based off of incorrect assumptions.

So, the internet.

I never once doubted their intentions at all.

It's just that given their recent track record with other new Steam features, I expect things to somehow take a turn for the worst...wait or is it worse?...which one is it?

I read some of it earlier and a lot of it came across as reasonable concerns to me. I still think an optional donation button would be the best thing to do.

@believer258: Isn't a "pay what you want" button with a baseline of $0 effectively the same thing?

Looks like some people are angry that Valve gave modders the ability to legally charge money for their stuff... Which strikes me as a bit unreasonable. I'd be more concerned for how this might transform the Workshop into another Greenlight. Insightful stuff from Gabe though.

It's too early to say what's what with the program, one way or the other.

Regardless of their intentions they should probably get to implementing some oversight or curation on this stuff as soon as possible. The Skyrim Workshop is currently devolving into Wild-West-like conditions at an alarming rate.

still think is messed up that modders only get 20% of the money, makes it so small shitty mods have more potential to easily make money

My only issue is that Valve is taking a majority of the money because......???

@viciousbearmauling: I don't think Valve are getting the majority here. Valve and Bethesda split the 75% and I'd be willing to bet Valve are only taking their standard 30%, meaning Bethesda are taking 45% and getting the most.

I could be wrong about the percentages, I'm just guessing from the cut Valve takes from other sales, but either way Theyve stated that the publisher sets the split. Ask Bethesda why it's so high.

Why is no one taking Bethesda to court over this along with Valve? They have as much of a hand in this as Valve does, if not more, as they are the ones that determine the cut a mod creator makes and how much they take (Valve's cut is a constant, I don't know how much, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's lower than or at 25%). All Valve did, at most, was provide the tools for this to be a thing. It is Bethesda that made the final choice and gave the tick of approval to paywall mods for Skyrim.

People are acting like this is the end of the world, but I really don't see publishers jumping onto this train, especially considering the backlash occurring right now.

Do you think other publishers would be jumping on the train if there wasn't any backlash? If people weren't acting like this was the end of the world?

To be fair, I was at work and read what I read from that thread on my cellphone. I haven't read anywhere near most of it. I was under the impression that a "pay what you want" button would have a minimum payment required, but I could be totally wrong.

I just think that the whole modding community thrives on some rather delicate things (for instance, sharing mods and allowing others to use your mod - you're expected to give credit when you take someone's mod and incorporate it into your own). And throwing in the ability for modders to make you pay could throw the whole community out of whack. It just brings up so many questions, especially about ownership. Also, it could make the whole thing look like the App Store on Apple devices, and nobody wants that. I mean, having popups in Midas Magic? Are you fucking kidding me?

@believer258: Yeah, Gabe explicitly stated that you could do a "pay what you want" button with a baseline of $0.

That said, yeah it could all turn into a great big shitshow, but I'm glad Valve is at least trying something. The status quo where modders invest thousands upon thousands of hours to provide millions of people with enjoyment and the best they can hope for is to fall into the .0001% that actually manage to earn voluntary donations or get a job in gamedev is a far cry from ideal.

@theadmin: Thanks for sharing this! Even though I'm an old man who still doesn't understand reddit so that was kind of an ordeal to get through. I want to bring this little back and forth to attention, as Gabe very eloquently explains a point I've been trying to make:

Q: I think that this whole debacle has created a split in the Skyrim community with modders angry at each other for "selling out" and the players mad at the modders because we see it as a cash grab, and everybody's pissed at you and Bethesda. The community plus the mods have kept this game alive for four years and now we're all mad at each other and I feel this will be a clusterfuck to the end. Whenever that will be. However you end this, I hope you do it for the right reasons.

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A: Sky rim is a great example of a game that has benefitted enormously from the MODs. The option for paid MODs is supposed to increase the investment in quality modding, not hurt it.

About half of Valve came straight out of the MOD world. John Cook and Robin Walker made Team Fortress as a Quake mod. Ice frog made DOTA as a Warcraft 3 mod. Dave Riller and Dario Casali we Doom and Quake mappers. John Guthrie and Steve Bond came to Valve because John Carmack thought they were doing the best Quake C development. All of them were liberated to just do game development once they started getting paid. Working at Waffle House does not help you make a better game.

(the emphasis is mine)

Be careful slogging through the dross of the past few days. As usual, there's a lot of angry misinformation out there.

As I explained in a different thread about that Midas Magic situation (so the "you" isn't you, but rather another duder I was replying to):

"I'm not sure if there's some confusion here, but this wasn't exactly "pop-up advertising", as the title of the thread implies. It was apparently a person who had a paid mod on Steam that didn't interrupt gameplay at all, along with a free version hosted elsewhere that would rarely pop up a request to buy the full paid version.

Maybe that's what you're talking about, and what you find distasteful, and that's fine. But to me at least, there's a huge difference between a free thing asking the user occasionally to upgrade (like many shareware games I played in the 90s), versus a mod that randomly shows me another fucking Game of War: Fire Age ad, or something."

Seems like a fairly solid discussion on the issue between people and Gabe... He's had some pretty reassuring answers (no more censoring criticism / adding a donation button) and some answers that just suck:

Q: What was the thought behind monetizing mods?

A: The goal is to increase the total investment the community makes in extending its games.

Fact: The Skyrim mod community seemed to be doing just fine in continuing to add more to the game. I don't think forcing prices onto lesser known game's mods is going to help extend that games life.

Now if only we could get an AMA going on this whole "allowing shit to clog up Steam and how Early Access games are ruining everything" topic.

I'm just a little fearful that this will turn modding into something way worse for modders, people who pay attention to modding scenes, and PC gaming in general. It's kinda like the last bastion of community-driven things in PC games - remember skins? Yeah, those are often something sold as DLC these days.

But in any case, I've got other things to worry about and I'll watch this one from the sidelines and hope that maybe things turn out well. And maybe next time Valve won't just quietly slip this out without really telling anyone.

Only 25% going to modders is insulting. Valve's MO now is throw some half assed idea out there and see what people tolerate...which is insane. Steam has had a really interesting ride. They went from sucking, to being amazing, to lagging about, to now starting to suck again. I used to be pro-Steam, but its getting harder now.

This was seemingly Valve either dealing with publishers directly, or caving into their demands/whining. This will do nothing to promote the mod community, but in fact it will only make it more toxic.

@starvinggamer said:

So nothing I spend my free time on is worth anything unless I'm getting paid for it? I can't just, you know, build a cabinet because I find carpentry pleasurable and relaxing? What about playing video games? it's a waste of time because I'm not getting paid for it, right?

Believe it or not, people have "passion projects". Not everyone does something solely to benefit their wallet. Sometimes people do shit because they want to. Because they find it enjoyable. I find it strange that so many here are failing to grasp that adding money to the mod scene isn't going to make things better, but worse. Modding communities like the one found around Skyrim are very close; everyone borrows from everyone else, everyone builds on top of each other, making something better than it was before. All this shit is going to do is make a bunch of people who were previously passionate about the things they create paranoid and fearful that they're going to get ripped off, or that someone's going to start demanding money because they used animations or textures a modder took down from the Nexus and rehosted as DLC skins on the Workshop for five dollars. You're not going to see more collaboration, or more testing to make mods compatible, you're going to see less.

This is the one thing that Valve should have had the good sense not to fuck with it. Not even from an ethical, or moral standpoint (if you even give a shit about that sort of thing), but purely from a business perspective, determining legal rights alone would be a goddamn nightmare.

And none of this even touches on how shit Valve is at curating, or customer service.

Which is based on... your intuition?

You may be right. I may be wrong (as is often the case). But I at least know that definitively saying either way at this moment is just foolish.

And yes, people have "passion projects". But note the key word there... passion. Do you really think that the ability to profit from one's passion is going to decrease their interest in excelling at it? Is it rational to think that maybe these folks have always wished they could support themselves independently working on their passion, rather than having to squeeze out time in their daily life separate from their unrelated job?

So you maybe make other people cabinets for free, and that's awesome. But it'd be completely irrational and unfair to expect the same feelings from the millions of carpenters who want to do that stuff for a living. And I don't think it's too much of a stretch to imagine.that, if cabinet making was a traditionally free enterprise and people expected to get that stuff for nothing, we'd be seeing a whole lot more shitty furniture in the world.

@joshwent: It does bother me! Even if it isn't as egregious as the pop-ups on free versions of games in the app store, it still sucks that there is now a free version of a mod that asks you to pay for it.

I would not be bothered if, say, the mod included an ad in the corner of loading screens that says "are you enjoying Midas Magic? Please, purchase the full version!", or if it asked me that while the game was doing its initial load, or something. But if it pops up in the middle of gameplay, that's an example of something that I never want to see when it comes to mods, even if it only happens once every four hours or so. That's one of the app store trends that make me very, very wary of the direction this could point the Steam Workshop.

Fair enough. But that actually seems like a good argument in favor of paying flat out for these kind of expansive mods, if the modder chooses to charge for them. Remember that the pop-ups were only in the free version, and the paid version has all of the new content, and nothing to detract from the original game experience. In this case, the Steam Workshop version is the best one.

Not to mention that those kind of intrusive pop-ups would likely be the result of a donation option that many are suggesting, as most of those donations would skew much closer to $0. As you say, in any mobile app store, the barrier to entry has been reduced to F2P, and many devs are forced to counteract that by constantly nagging the player to pay up.

But modding communities have never been based around making something to make money. They have always been about making something as an enthusiast hobby, putting together some kind of add on or change to something you really enjoy and love because you really enjoy and love it.

Anyway, as I said above, I've got other problems to worry about, and I don't actually have a large stake in any of this. I'm not a modder or someone who pays a lot of attention to mods. However, modding communities seem like one of the last places where a creative community could flourish and you could make entire websites, like the mod Nexus sites, devoted to it, or you could create something like the Morrowind Overhaul (which is a massive collection of Morrowind mods made by various different people that would be impossible if all of them were exclusive to Steam workshop and required payment before use), or you could go and find people coming together to make something like the FTB launcher and modpacks for Minecraft, and it disheartened me to see a big company try to stick its fingers in that and turn it into another thing to print money for them.

While I like the openness that Gabe is enabling I think this pay to mod idea is kind of dumb. I can't blame Valve for thinking this way though, open source innovation is a very slippery slope, as far as I am aware there is no endogenous economic model that properly encompasses it. But given how open source innovation is so poorly understood, the downside is much higher than the upside.

The issue comes down to information pricing, you would need mod reviewers to signal to people which mods are worthwhile, which to be done properly would require media and the profit potential of mods is too low to afford that whole package(the mod has to pay for the media, the developer, the modder, steam, etc).

This modding kept skyrim alive, by virtue that the game now lasts longer and the sequel now has expectations of lasting longer, Bethesda's profits have increased. Even if Bethesda make more money by milking this rather than the increased value that occurs passively, which is unknown, its highly unlikely that this adds more value to consumers. Just FYI in the history of IP(with the exception of branding) there is no evidence of increased consumer welfare from monopoly rights. People who don't read the literature are convinced that intellectual property is good but the truth is this stuff is driven by lawyers and developers, there is no evidence that it works. There is evidence it makes them richer but no evidence it makes the consumer better of(by law the point of IP is to increase innovation NOT to increase profits).

Valve isn't forcing anyone to put a price on their mod. If the only thing that stopped modders from putting a price on their mods was that they couldn't do it. Then those people never had good intentions when making mods. What really incentives making mods? People say its a love for the game and sure, that works for smaller things. I have seen so many mods being cancelled over the years that looked promising because it was simply something people do on their free time and an after thought. If this could make modders have a bigger incentive in making mods that would be the best thing that happened to modding. People are too fast to conclusions, nothing says every little thing will get a price tag. Most things can't because they won't sell and furthermore lots of people still do mods for their love of the game and will put it out for free. Just making it possible to charge for your mods doesn't mean everyone will or should.

This is just so silly.

Steam is not curation, its a storefront. There is not limited amount of space there, and it doesn't "clog" steam. Just don't buy it. Stop buying Early Access and wait for games to release and it doesn't affect you. Nothing is forcing you to buy the bad games or the early access products. It being there doesn't make Steam worse. I hate the idea that Steam should go back to as it was before where getting on Steam took years on greenlight.

Whoah buddy, slow your roll and please stop putting your gross words in my mouth. Where did I say anything like that? Yeah, you can do stuff because you have fun or it's your passion or for whatever reason, and now the people who would like to earn money for their hard work have a legal, safe, and easy-to-implement option to do so. Maybe the Valve system is shit. Maybe they won't be able to figure out a way to properly protect creator rights and they'll have to scrap the whole thing. But at least they're trying something.

Gabe is aware of the iterative nature of mods (I mean, obviously), and he said that if this doesn't work, they'll get rid of it. Worst case scenario, some people make some undeserved money, but is that really better than nobody (who would like to) making any money?

I read some of the AMA. There was a interesting bit in there when Gabe had a conversation with "NexusDarkOne" the owner and operator of the Nexus sites. He wanted Gabe to take a stand against Steam Workshop being the ONLY place mods are allowed to be distributed due to developer DRM written into their creative content tools. Gabe said he didn't like the idea of telling publishers what to do. Sounds like a reasonable response, but let's not forget that his is the platform that all these mods would then be slaved to.

NexusDarkOne wrote:

...we're talking about the functionality of Steam being used to fundamentally change a principle tenet of the modding community that's existed since the very beginning. That is, the principle that the sharing of mods can be free and open to everyone, if they so wish, and that that choice remains squarely in the hands of the people who develop those mods. Please, do not misunderstand me, I believe I've made myself clear that if certain mod platforms want to explore paid modding then they can, for better or for worse, but I am categorically against the concept of mods only being allowed to be shared online, with others, through only one platform. I'm against the concept of modders not having a choice. While a lot of melodrama has ensued from Valve and Bethesda's actions this week, I absolutely believe that you would be destroying a key pillar of modding if you were to allow your service to be used in such a way.

Gabe agreed that "the sharing of mods can be free and open to everyone", but he stopped at that. Now, Valve has everything to gain in this reformation and the Nexus to lose, so I understand NexusDarkOne's passion (perhaps even desperation) and Gabe's silence. I sure enjoy the ease of Steam for my PC gaming, but this control is a downside of the Steam monopoly.

@atwa: Which is why I think a simple "donation" button is a much better way of handling all of this over giving people the option to set up a paywall on a mod that could be complete garbage (think about how many people will be burned from this)

------

Ask any developer to make a list of things that's important to the success of a game and I would guarantee you that having eyes on it in the front of the marketplace is close to the top. There are so many lesser known games that suffer from having to share that space with so much crap/barely working games, and quickly fall out of that front page .

Except a donation is hardly compulsory. If modders want to try and make money they should have a legal avenue to do so. It's not up to us to determine what a modder's time is worth, it's up to them, and then we just have to wait and see if the market will bear it out. And if a modder is ok with donations, they can use this system to create a simple "donation" button as well.

That AMA is par for the course as far as Valve communication is concerned. He really doesn't answer much of anything. Almost all of the answers are a variation of "We want to make things better" or if asked about a specific issue "We'll figure it out as we go".

You can't run a business as big as Steam is now with close to 10 million concurrent users on good intentions alone.

Uh do you honestly think valve gives a crap? This is a money play, don't care what their cut is, they want some easy cash money and saw this as a way to get it. People had been modding for decades without a pay incentive or even needing steam for it. Don't act like the status quo suddenly changed overnight and there was this big outcry of modders needing to get what they deserve for their work. There wasn't. This is just Steam and Bethesda trying a cash grab and seeing if it plays out.

The thing I didn't read about this yet is this ... if publishers do have a potential income source in mods doesn't that incentivize them to make their games moddable in the first place? Wouldn't that be a good thing? Maybe it's because even though I'm a PC gamer I can't recall when I last used a mod but the argument that modders should have the opportunity to get paid for their mods seems strong to me. I don't have all the facts but if the 25% for modders, the rest to Valve/Publisher thing is true that seems a little off and should probably be changed.

They want to make things better, but under what universe did they think what they have released so far is a good system. Anybody with half a brain or mildest modicum of interest could see what a tangled snarl this would become. You would still get complaints with a good system in place, but what they have currently has completely aggravated the situation.

That is cool of Gabe doing this Q&A.

@karkarov: Unless Gabe is lying this has made Valve about $10k so far and cost them about $1 mil in support costs sooo, not a cash grab? Unless you think the people at Valve are incredibly stupid/bad at making money.

Unless I missed something and Steam is forcing you to charge money for mods, what in the fuck are you going on about?

I hope it will motivate game developers to provide tools for their games to be modded, but it could also allow them to dictate what mods are created and both how and where they are distributed. Additionally, game publishers might take for granted that the creative community will provide the majority of the content for the game. I firmly believe this has already happened with the Sims franchise. Each iteration of the game had less and less content leaving the creative community the task to fill in the gaps. It's not impossible to see a publisher releasing a skeleton of a game in hopes that the aftermarket will do the rest of the work for them. In the Sims 4, EA chose to improve the custom content store front rather than improve the content they create themselves. How this will effect the whole of the industry is yet to be seen, but I do believe it will be felt beyond Skyrim and DOTA hats.

With the level of quality control steam have, this is no where NEAR a good idea. Already there are 20+ of the exact same sword mod going for anything from .99$ - 39.99$ and did I mention that NONE of those sellers and the actual mod creators? Some of them have been deleted but looking at steam green-light, lets not fool ourselves into thinking this is going to get "better".

This might be a noble idea to help modders get something in return but boy the implementation is amateur hour.

Gabe? A corporate suit lying, no it can't be! Take him off the pedestal, seriously. Also unless they had to hire a TON of people to take phone calls or emails about this over a matter of days I don't see how it has cost them one red cent in support. They had to have some software guy build it into the UI and test it to make it work. That's pretty much it, and I doubt it cost the software guy one mill in dev time.

As for how much they have made? Who cares. Whatever amount they made is more than they would have made without it. This is a 0 dollar investment for them beyond that initial dev time. Unless bethesda forces some sort of money deal, in which case Steam deserves to take a loss for agreeing to something so dumb.

Steam has done nothing to make the PC gaming community better, but it sure has taken steps to make it actively worse. Greenlight is a bust. Early Access is a downright plague. This is just going to take a giant shit on the mod community. Go Steam.

a lot of peopel (maybe not here) seem to mostly be mad that their favorites mod people might charge for their stuff.

good for the people who put in work :/

At a certain point, a person says something so absurd and unsubstantiated that it is difficult to take all subsequent points seriously. This was that that thing.

Yeah, I was severely disappointed not long after I found that thread on Reddit. It started out looking like a really cool move by Gabe, but it quickly became apparent that he avoided the hard questions and that just seemed to get people angrier.

I did like his little back 'n' forth with the creator of the Nexus, even if it did no favors for Gabe.

if you dont like people charging for their mods then do something about.

make mods and put them somewhere else. but dont get mad at the people who want to take advantage of it.

no one is forcing mods to be paid. gabe said the split is talked about from the maker.

honest, more general question:

a lot of people refer to the ongoing "quality control problem" steam has with it's various components- greenlight, early access, workshop, etc. what is the problem, exactly? if it's a matter of quality content getting 'buried' under the overwhelming pile of garbage- do you not avail yourself of critics? i mean- this very website partially exists so as to be the canary in the mineshaft so you don't have to. won't the good stuff rise to the top as it traditionally has- by word of mouth?

i guess my general question is: how is the quantity of content (be it insidious or otherwise) preventing you from getting what you need? i just have a hard time seeing it with websites such as these and a search field. i mean, i "own" 229 games on steam- and i haven't felt burned by any of them. but then again, i never buy anything sight-unseen.

Seriously Turambar do you actually think steam has done anything for pc gaming other than steam sales and easier co op? It is crazy I know but I could play FPS games online with friends before steam. The sales are convenient but you know if you look around you can almost always find someone else that matches them.

Steam is the Wal Mart of video games. It is cheap, convenient, and has almost everything but you don't want to be there one minute longer than you need to be.

As a direct result, Steam is the chief reason why a very large number of people play PC games, period.

One wonders if this was a labeling issue. I don't see why they couldn't have community DLC which is separate from mods and not open to exactly everybody. Even if it's a nominal difference, it's clearly evident that people can't look past nominal differences. Then also add a donation button to mods and job done.

I think for better and in this case worse, Valve cooks on stuff for a while and goes big rather than doing something small. Introducing a donation button maybe was the right move regardless just to see what would happen with that. Given the amount of exposure on Steam and the amount of money already tied into Steam's ecosystem, then one could see at least a significant bump in revenue for modders. Maybe it's not on the level of Dota 2 but it would be encouraging rather than this hot drama going on right now.

He makes some good points but I think this makes a much bigger point.

Reddit Thread about the Main mod they advertised.