Weird. Newell talked a big game about them figuring out the paid mods thing not that long ago on Reddit. Seemed like they were gonna stay the course on it.
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.
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.
in that respect, we're in complete agreement. the more i think about it, the more i think it's a fuckup by Zenimax. had they taken a small share, leaving at least 50% to the modder, i think the conversation would be remarkably different.
Nope, 60% goes to the modder. I'd sooner throw my money down the drain than reward valve and bethesda for this shitshow they've put up. Until they improve it nobody is getting anything from me.
maybe in a perfect world- but it's still Zenimax's skyrim. it's for the same reason people who remix or sample songs without licensing agreements get sued for millions. you simply can't use a piece of someone else's IP without them getting a taste- for better or worse.
True enough. But they shouldn't get the lions share or anywhere close to it. The game is funded by buying the game. Them having such a large cut inflates the prices of the mods thus depressing the market. Nobody is only to buy volumes of 3$ armours for the game, given the amount of mods people run with on skyrim and their interdependencies. This kind of arrangement simply depresses the demand for mods.
that's certainly a discussion worth having. just speaking for myself- i have no idea what the best split would be. because how do you determine who's doing the heaviest lifting? the modder is doing the actual work, so the obvious answer is them. but then again, it's the publisher's initial investment in the dev team that make the actual modded game possible. perhaps least popular answer would be valve- but then again who knows how much infrastructure (hosting, bandwidth, credit card processing, etc.) actually costs. and they're effectively the ones setting the table for this whole arrangement- so clearly that's worth something.
i think it's fair to say valve needs the money the least, and likely the modder needs it the most- but should that inform the split? i haven't a clue. but i do get the sense that the actual reason valve is letting publishers determine the split between the publishers and the modders is to keep publishers at the table- otherwise, what's the incentive to allow other people make money off your IP?
goodwill? sure. but unfortunately that's not the status quo for these sorts of endeavors.
Having mod support is a reason to buy your game. All this time Bethesda wasn't earning anything from mods, they should provide a continuous service (like actually maintaining support patches etc.). This situation isn't at all like TF2 or Dota2, where Valve funds development with a cut of the mods. The game has been paid for and for plenty of people the existence of mods is a reason to buy the game and for the game to maintain mindshare, incidentally one of the reasons why skyrim remains so popular today on PC.
Valve should get some of the cut as they have to maintain the system, but if Bethesda is doing jack shit for the community then they should get 0.
so 25% to modder (as determined by Zenimax), some percentage to Valve (the popular estimate seems to be 30%), and the remainder to Zenimax (using the aforementioned estimate, that would make it 45%).
is that 25% to the modder still low? i'd say wholeheartedly yes. but to claim steam takes 75% is to spread misinformation.
I believe the crux of the matter, is that people don't care who gets that 75% unless it is the modder.
@tuxfool: I guess I don't understand what you mean by cash grab. I agree it seems like this person would like to now make money off the mod. I guess I don't see why that is a bad thing.
Because when it was made, it was created with the implicit understanding that it was free. This is akin to dropping money in a street buskers pot, then changing your mind and taking it back. It is your money, you're perfectly allowed to do as you wish, but it is very unseemly.
@tuxfool@joshwent: Yeah, you guys are right. I'm getting confused - if you release something as "public domain" you give up all rights to take it back out of the public domain, even if you want to - but releasing it into the public domain and releasing it for free are different things. My mistake.
Yeah. Not that I'm defending the behaviour. Despite it being the authors right to do what they want, simply removing something that was implicitly free (and was created without the intent for profit) to put it behind a paywall very much feels like a cashgrab. The author isn't required to update it or anything but does seem cynical.
@koolaid: Except it sort of does belong to society at large after you've released it for free. Or rather - that's the default position for intellectual property. Once you release it to the public domain it's no longer yours.
Whether this actually applies in this case depends on how/if the modder decided to liscence the thing. Since mods without the permission of devs are something of a legal grey area anyway, I doubt it'll liscenced at all. In fact, if I downloaded the free version of that mod like 3 years ago, could I re-host that for free now? It's certainly not cool to use other people's stuff without their permission, but would there be anything a modder could do to stop something like that? Especially now that there's more than just a name and a credit at stake, how are modders going to protect their work?
No. The creator owns copyright, unless specifically stated you're not allowed to share it at all. So unless the author specifically relinquishes all rights it isn't public domain. Now, if the previous work had a license like the GPL, BSD or CC, then they shouldn't be allowed to remove it.
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