Steam Adds Support for Paid Mods

This does piss me off though in the way that in the old days you paid for the game and that was it. Map packs were free, mods were free, SDKs were a given and all you bought extra was a substantial expansion.

Now everyone has their hands out, you cannot buy a game any more without having to pay double for a premium service and now it is mods too.....

I can just not buy any of it and not care and eventually be pushed away from being a gamer.

You don't actually know so why are you bothering to correct me? You don't know if Zenimax is making anything off this or if they are what the amount is. It's an assumption. The point was that modders are only getting 25%. Who cares where the rest is going? It only matters that 75% of it isn't going to modders and clearly the whole thing is setup to benefit Valve. If Zenimax wanted to make money off modders they could have just charged a flat fee for the Creation Kit but that was never their intention.

Definitely with you on this one. If this becomes the eventual future of gaming you can count me out.

@zolroyce: People are stabbing each other in the back to sell each other's mods and you don't see a problem with that?You don't think a tip jar would have been infinitely better?

Donations are not a bad idea and they have worked on the Nexus - but don't let your memory be so short. Even on Nexus donations *are* a problem. The problem flared up when the Donation Button was introduced, and since then we all got used to it and how it works.

The issue: You are donating to *me* and yet my mod is built on *your* work - you don't get any of that donation.

Mods are super complex when it comes to this. It's honestly not that different from trying to pay everyone at a game company their "fair share". Whose work is based on whose work? Which idea led to which idea? What did we start, but not complete? Which incomplete facets led to different, complete features? Which features are "worth" the most? Who put the most work time in? What represents the core game vs the most popular aspect of the game?

Ultimately, whether you are donating or paying, you will never solve the problem of "everyone getting paid their fair share". You'd need a rather intricate set up to do so. For example, when a modder adds an item to the WorkShop, they could tick off checkboxes that denote all the mods used within their mod, then use sliders to adjust the percentages they believe should be paid out to those mods. See above paragraph for why that is hard from even a logical level, never mind a systems level.

Now, what's nice about donations is they occur *after* the fact, allowing users to try out the mod, see how it works, affects their game, etc. That's the biggest bonus of the Donate button - not making sure people get paid what they deserve.

A solution I might propose is having an "Asking Price" that is basically just a suggested donation. The mod is still effectively free. Then have a "Pay" button. This is effectively just a Donation, but gives the user an idea of what the modder believes is a fair price. I think people would react relatively fairly to this, with some not paying, some paying the asked price, some paying less, and some paying more.

The final problem is percentages. The issue again is the range of mods. A very simple mod which toggles a value in a script does not in my opinion deserve more than 25% (if even). Total conversion mods, mods that add assets and new behaviors, mods where voice work has been recorded, system level mods that re-optimize games - those deserve well over 80%. How you split that is, again, from both a logical and systems level pretty damn difficult.

i don't think you read any of what i posted. i do know Zenimax is making money, because they published Skyrim, and the Steam Revenue Sharing terms outline that revenue is split between Valve, the Publisher, and the modder. and since we know Skyrim modders are entitled to 25%, we similarly know the remaining 75% is being split between Valve and Zenimax.

it's fine if you think 25% is a low figure for the modders, and as i stated earlier- i happen to agree. but to argue "this whole thing is setup to benefit Valve" ignores the fact that there's 3 parties involved, and we're talking about money being paid to a party (modders) that otherwise aren't being paid at all.

@fluttercry: I don't think my saying people should get paid for doing good works equals me somehow being okay with any problems that arises. I'm not, but obviously as this JUST launched and is being placed into the hands of normal people, shit will go down that is unpleasant, hopefully they manage to work through things and come to a fine middle ground where shit isn't broken, and people who do good work can get money for said work.
Maybe a tip jar is fine, maybe what they have now is fine but they need to police it more (hahahahahahaha Steam actually get any sort of quality control? HaaaaaaaaaaahahahaAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHA ohhhhhh shiiiit, oh shit.)
I don't know what the answer is, but I do know the answer is usually something you don't find immediately and I don't like (not accusing you of this) anyone saying it should go back to the way it was so they don't have to pay for mods.
There are mods out there that are stunning and I would happily support, hell there are mods that fix games, mods literally doing the work the devs should have done but didn't, if I pay devs for a game, I'll pay the guy who does their work for them as well.

It will be interesting to see where we are in a week or a month or however long with this project.
Seriously though, Steam, Valve, Gabe, quality control, do that.

My hope is that when the dust settles, most of the talented modders reject this concept and continue doing it for free as a hobby.

Then, as many others have predicted, I hope the mod workshop becomes nothing but lists of shovelware crap hideously overpriced, and obvious cashgrabs. THEN, ideally, it would not gross enough to really be worth it.

Sadly, this part probably wont happen because of the sheer BUY MODS in your face right there in steam. Lots of people wouldn't bother to even find out there was a thriving free mod community... to their own detriment.

Then, people band together to make free, legal "clones" of any good paid mods without using the original work. DMCA safe.

I love it. This will encourage more devs to release mod tools and I have no problem paying someone for their work. Kudos to Valve!

@officer_falcon: Yeah there are a ton of crazy mods for Skyrim, from dungeons and houses to custom book art, character models, quest lines, armor, pets etc. It's pretty wild how much you can add to a already large game.

The custom book covers are so good!

Remember when people thought DLC wouldn't get out of hand? And people who spoke against DLC were called paranoid or just overreacting? Yea, history is repeating itself

I believe the crux of the matter, is that people don't care who gets that 75% unless it is the modder.

I like the idea of people getting paid for creating awesome mods, but there are way too many holes for exploitation the it's set up right now. It seems way too easy for scumbags to get money for things they didn't actually make. It could also lead to some infighting in the modding community and a decrease in collaboration if people aren't willing to split the money.

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.

edit: the more i think about it, the more i think it's been a misstep by Zenimax. imagine how much positivity they would have generated if after valve's presumed 30%, they took only something like 10%- leaving 60% to the modder. that way, they take a token amount (which they probably don't need given the sales of skyrim- but what do i know)- but clearly send the message that they're pro-modding, and approve of modders getting paid for their work.

hmmmmm, I'd like to see this play out for a month, and see how well the sales do. The mods for Skyrim are famous and blog worthy, I'd love to read up on mod makers' experences from this.

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.

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 make money using 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.

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.

ha- that's actually the exact number i came to in my head just now. 60% sounds right. i wouldn't be surprised if we other less-tone-deaf publishers hit that mark at some point.

The internet is doing what the internet does by overreacting and sliding down slippery slopes all over the place. I'm going to quote a guy from the first page of these comments because he seems to be the kind of person filling up all of the threads on reddit.

The idea that mods are a 'corporate money sink' runs counter to the very next sentence, which is attempting to argue that people who create mods "shouldn't" do something but should instead do something else. He says it's about the corporations, but acknowledges that it's the choice of the mod maker, and then says mod makers' freedoms should be restricted such that they should be (from the sound of it, anyway) required to request donations instead of charging fees. Afterwards he explains off the top of his head that 'good' mods would make money through those donation requests (apparently not through paid workshop though?) and then explains that Steam has become 'worse' without explaining what worse means because Steam has been adding features. In a later paragraph he changes subjects entirely and mentions how modders don't make enough money from the workshop.

This is every argument on the internet about this stuff right now. The whole monetization system is completely optional, but because people need something to rant about on the internet, and because people would bend over backwards to point the finger at a corporation instead of the people enlisting the services of said corporation, we end up with totally ramble-y nonsense about how the world is falling apart without any evidence to support it.

It's optional. Vote with your wallet. Nobody is forcing anybody to do anything. We can all calm down now.

@venekor: if there are people that see enough value in the content to pay for it then there is nothing wrong for developers to charge for it. It was pretty silly of them to not charge for extra contwnt in the first place. It sure was nice of them, yes, but silly nonetheless from a bussiness standpoint.

With all of this uproar, now would be the perfect time for GOG to release a beta for their Galaxy platform launcher.

This has been fascinating all around.

Gonna copy paste my post from the other thread closley related to this topic.

Multiple arguments going on in this thread and crossing over, leading to people misunderstanding eachother.. so let's clear some of this up. Here are the different topics of discussion, differentiate which topic you're speaking about.

Topic: do modders have the right to charge (factually yes)

Topic: You feel modders should charge for their work

Topic: do you feel modders should have THE RIGHT to charge for their work on another developers finished product.

Topic: How you feel about advertising through a game pausing pop-up

Topic: how You feel about previously free mods being pulled and now having a free and charged version

Topic: the cuts that everyone recieves from the sales (25/30/45; modder/valve/bethesda)

Modders have a right to charge. They should think long and hard about how they want to release/charge/advertise. My feeling is that the mod is a service, like a video game. The gamers never owned the mod after applying it, just like you don't own a game. So the analogy of putting money in a basket then taking it back is inaccurate. After thinking long and hard, I am okay with how the money is split up, though believe that the valve and modder cut should be swapped

I feel like, since the internet got big in terms of doing commerce -- globalization, whatever -- the stances on capitalism and profit have changed in a way that feels odd to me.

Sure, you got the right to charge for whatever -- except maybe your own body -- but that doesn't mean the way you're doing it can't be stinky like rotten fish. And once something's rotten, it doesn't go back to good.

The money to be made on Skyrim -- and I'm sure the margin has been quite good -- all happened quite some time ago. They saw how big the modding community was, UGC selling in other ways (hats are way different), and wanted to milk their IP for every last drop.

Cool, you made a game, made money, you wanna make more. I feel like they're doing it in a way that's pretty fucking shitty to the entire mod communty. I also feel like they're really hiding behind "PEOPLE DESERVE PAY FOR WORK", even though that is of course true.

Also, voting with your wallet is a myth in terms of the entire scale of microtransactions on the internet. Then, publishers moving forward see something as successful, and even if it's not to the consumer's advantage (duh), they're going to exploit those consumers and modders.

e: Who the hell is really worried about huge corporation's bottom line over fellow consumers? That's backwards to me.

I just bought skyrim :)) I've played it on friends PS3 and 360 and finished it. But I just bought it, still downloading it, I hope the no weight limit is free, that's kind of the only thing I want, that and maybe a high quality texture mod.

You paid for the game, mods should be free, I mean there are still free mods but that's bullshit!!

I don't think Gaben got anywhere on his AMA on reddit. A donation button would be much better.

This poll only shows that the community is divided into two 'camps' and that this whole topic is going to disturb the industry for a long time.

I'm personally in the 'let the modders have their share for their hard work' camp and I'm quite disturbed when people think that everything that is done by community should be free. If a modder gets a monetary incentive, then his/her motivation may be a lot better.

As for all those crappy mods... You don't have to buy them. If something's bad, noone gonna buy it. The less people buy them, the fewer new craps will be made. Simple as that.

Modding should not be your last stop on the path to financial freedom, or even creative freedom, because in the end, your content is shackled to this system. You might be able to make some money off it, but you are no better than an artist who signs up to a label. The label owns you.

I don't think your analogy really works. Sure, music labels put the screws to a lot of artists, but it hasn't stopped a ton of people from making a living going that route.

In my head I imagined something like "Nehrim: At Fate's Edge" being available for 5 dollars as unofficial third party DLC. In practice I can get a hammer for 20 cents.

I like Skyrim mods but it's rare when I find one that's polished and content rich enough to warrant paying any money for it.

A pay what you want "0 dollars" option would alleviate most of the heat I think. EDIT: And it seems that Valve will be adding a "pay what you want" option that the creator can set instead of the preset options. Hopefully there will be a 0 dollar one, making it effectively a donation.

Maybe the backlash will be less bad when games get released with paid mod support from the start instead of people taking away their free mod and suddenly making it paid. I doubt that the new Unreal Tournament that will have a similar system will get anywhere near the same amount of heat since it will be a free multiplayer game.

There's some reasons this might sound okay, and there's some reasons its dumb. However there is one overwhelming reason this cannot work. You cannot establish ownership in this market. Anyone can get anything and pile things on top of the mod and sell it on, there are too many things being created to properly establish ownership. Steam would need to hire regulators for putting up mods, which is not feasible and likely too costly.

The big problem I have with this is stuff like SkyUI, now the original UI for PC Skyrim is crap, it's laggy, unresponsive sometimes and just a slog to use.

It was clearly made with a controller in mind and BethSoft did not care to try to make it PC friendly at all and just slapped it in the PC version. The same thing happened in oblivion, the UI was not great and felt laggy and slow then.

Now SkyUI is great, it fixes alot of the problems I myself had with the original UI and those guys did a great job, but to put it up for sale with BethSoft getting 50% cut? Now they are banking on the fact they did a terrible job with the UI. They are making money off the fact that they didn't bother to create a UI that would work smoothly with mouse and keyboard.

Does the crew that made it deserve some compensation? Yes! They did a great job witht he UI, but the consumers should not be the ones paying out. It should be BethSoft buying the rights to it and giving it out for free like the texture pack or even hiring those guys to work on the PC UI for their next TES game. Same goes for the guy who made the resolution fix for Dark Souls, FROM should give that man his dues, not the community.

Asking consumers to pay 60$ and then another 5$ for a proper UI, 5$ for 1080p or even 4k. Hey, throw in another 5 and you will get proper mouse and keyboard support, also buy our season pass for 40$ and pre order the digital deluxe $$$$

imagine being mad because someone has a chance of getting paid to do what they like doing : /

Right, except they are getting 100% of the money made between the two of them if you aren't making $100 within the given time period (I'm assuming one month). It's the same problem we see with YouTube and Twitch: people are creating content, but they aren't making money until someone says they have jumped high enough. That's pretty annoying, to know that a company is making a shitload of money off a populace of people like that and the people are seeing nothing in return. = /

Initially yes this move seems to fall neatly into the 2 categories of this poll. However, there is already a way to get paid for modding: donations. The notion that this hobbyist work should now be sucked up and curated and controlled by the publisher & distributor is not "evil". It is the most banal and cynical of cash grabs and it is baffling to see it come from companies who claim to be so in tune with their customers. Glad to see people reacting against it, though personally I'm betting (like on-disc horse armor DLC), that it is here to stay. This article also doesn't address the stealing of other modders work that valve allows - many mods are built off one or other mods. That to me is where the ethical red flags really pop up. Anyway, would like to see a bit more rigor from GB on these type of topics (not too much though!) Too often it's just "well people are mad about this I dunno!?!" This site is great because it makes personal stands on quality of games. I see no reason that can't continue on issues of gaming culture & industry. (although maybe that is in the bombcast which is the side of the site I've never participated in)

So spiritually, I have no problem with people getting paid for their work. I have no problem with people demanding to be paid for their work.

That said, I'm not paying a cent for any mod. Maybe if I make it big in the trading card/hat market one day.

totally with ya. no intrest paying for a fan made crown on ym character to a dollar

This kind of thinking reminds me of the Nestle CEO talking about water and how its beneficial that we start charging for it as a commodity.

@monetarydread: your really gonna compare paid mods to the practices and ideals of nestle? really?

seriously its just people giving the option to be paid for their work and something they worked hard on

IF they want to.

mods arent a needed commodity to survive. so the neslte/water comparison is not a good one.

I like the idea of this concept but fear the amount of people selling crap/stealing other peoples mods and selling it.

this feels so gamergatey

If you don't like it don't buy it I don't see how this matters at all.