Steam Adds Support for Paid Mods

Skyrim is the wrong game to debut this system. Why try this on the community of a 4 year old game? Are they expecting more people to try modding? I would assume the people still enjoying the game and are willing to pay the mod authors have already done so - directly. Also, here's the install instructions for the mod you just paid for:

http://skyrimsurvival.com/home/artofthecatch/

@captainthunderpants: Reminds me of the Paranautical Activity kerfuffle. That didn't end well... and then the game was back on Steam.

Yup, top 5 Skyrim mods of the week or something. Says something both about the popularity of the game and the modding scene that they're STILL doing that feature every week.

@nodima: Yup, and Skyrim sold a ton of copies. Like, more than you would think if you have kind of been putting Skyrim next to Oblivion or Morrowind equally in terms of cultural penetration. Skyrim has sold so many copies the previous games might as well not exist, its insane.

"Remember how most mods were at least commendable because they were fueled by love of the game? Yeah, that sucked, huh."

It's great that modders can start making some money from their work, but this is going to inspire such a tremendous tsunami of crap. The good ones will still work their way to the top, but I'll be much more hesitant to try any of them without a few thousand reviews.

Hey, I'll buy a TC any day of the week. But a simple mod?

@haze said:

Because video games are so goddamn expensive you have no idea. I don't mean this as a condescending thing at all. Video games even to the well meaning individual are more expensive than anyone thinks.

That's the context for video games in general. Concerning Valve specifically, they have employees whose jobs are to come up with novel micro-economies for a platform people are already willing to buy a lot of shit on. That's where the "just business" part comes in this case. Valve has successfully implemented these economies before and it would be a dumb move, from a business perspective, not to fully utilize that.

Also in each case you listed, book, movie, and album, have gotten a lot more complicated in the past few decades as well. Streaming, online storefronts, digital distribution, all these things have affected other media as well. In some cases to make them cheaper, in some cases changing the structure of how you're paying for what you're getting.

This seems like a garbage system. I would be okay with supporting modders. Some people are very passionate about their mods and put a fuck tonne of work into them. If I want to toss a few bucks towards someone doing good work that I enjoy that's cool.
But most mods for Skyrim aren't that great. I can see this devolving into some dickhead charging people for some super powerful iron sword or something and making a pretty decent amount of cash. Compound that with the fact that Bethesda and Valve get 75% of the profits... it just seems skeezy to me. Make it a donation then we can talk. Give creators the option to put their mod out for free and I would be okay with this.

The end is nigh.

Fyi, I'm totally all for this. I believe passionate people deserve to make something out of their thousands of hours of work. As usual the best mods that aren't junk will make their way to the top, and stuff that doesn't work or sucks will be returned before the 24 hours so people won't be bamboozled into wasting their money.

All this negativity reminds me of when people got salty that Jeff bought a Lexus and kept referencing how our memberships were paying for a life of luxury. People on video game websites are only happy if the people behind the content they love are barely hanging on by the skin of their teeth like a scrappy underdog, and if they achieve any financial success than their traitors or something. I'm getting off track. If anybody should be the recipient of a feel-good purchase it should be a dude in his bedroom who has spent hundreds of hours making cool stuff for games.

Do we what percentage of the sales the modders actually get? My level of cynicism is inversely related to what percentage of each sale actually gets back to the mod maker. Because I can imagine Bethesda just milking the long tail of its user base for every dollar they can without actually making any new content.

Man, that's one close ass poll. If you busted your ass to create something, its always nice to gets something back.

as a mod creator, and aspiring game developer, I can say that I fully support this idea. any system, and I mean ANY system, is subject to abuse and shady shit. That doesn't mean the system should be avoided. Mods take more time to create than you can imagine. Considering there is already a refund system in place, I fail to see how this puts anybody at risk for anything. I won't be charging for mods I make, but a few years ago I might have. I think the backlash is more pessimism than realism.

@friendlyphoenix: I hadn't thought of that angle but you're right, this is going to change the modding community completely on that level. It all just seems to have had so little thought put in to it at this point

The moderation of this process has to be fucking top notch.

There is already a *flood* of people uploading mods they did not make for cash then claiming copyright infringement on the originators!

Valve is going to have to curate this right, or pull a Blizzard and turn this off in a few months.

as opposed to not hosting the workshop, and not building a marketplace for modders to receive compensation?

from valve's own legalese:

The percentage of Adjusted Gross Revenue that you are entitled to receive will be determined by the developer/publisher of the Application associated with the Workshop to which you have submitted your Contribution (“Publisher”), and will be described on the applicable Workshop page.

it's unclear what valve's take is, but it's DEFINITELY NOT 75%, because that figure does not account for bethesda's taste. also important to bear in mind- as stated above, IT'S BETHESDA THAT DETERMINES THE MODDER'S CUT.

Allowing people to monetize their work is a great thing, since we're not subsidizing them otherwise. We've come to assume that small/independent artists are basically slaves to society, that they do their art for art's sake or for some perpetually growing portfolio for some future hypothetical job, that they have to be a starving artist to be legitimate. Fuck that, these people often create great things and it's great that they can get more direct support and not have to beg for donations.

I love how when money is involved suddenly everyone is all against DLC. The defensive nature people take the second someone asks them for a single penny for something that they put hard work into frankly appalls me. It will be a task for Valve to curate this properly but I'm all for the idea of modders getting paid for their work.

Everyone needs to quit being cheap asses and cough up money if they want content.

This has pretty much been my copypasta on every thread about this:

My main problem is moving previously free mods over to a paid system, thats pretty fucked. Im not opposed to modders getting paid for their work, but to me, Paetron funding is the way to go if a modder wants to get paid for their work.

I'm not going to deny that some of the larger mods, like Falskaar, Wyrmstooth, Moonpath to Elsywer, or Wheels of Lull would totally be worth a small entry fee, but free mods are what gave Skyrim its longevity. If the majority of mods move over to the paid system, Skyrim is gonna die off in a big way. Lets hope the Nexus doesn't join in on some sort of arrangement like this (Though you know the body enhancer mods would be the first to jump on that bandwagon).

I guess its a good thing Ive never really been into mods.

I'm cool with the idea. I just don't want everyone thinking that their simple mods is now worth a ton of money. Skyrim is regularly $5. There shouldn't be $6 mods like I'm seeing. I'm down for a "pay what you want" type of deal. But I'm not paying for an OP weapon or texture pack.

The only reason I do not like this is that the modder only gets 25% of the cut.

So far I've seen 'early-access' mods and numerous examples of stealing content from other people and selling it.This is completely and utterly against the spirit of modding which was supposed to be about open collaboration and a love of the game itself. How can you sustain collaboration when your partner can just rip you off and sell your work on the workshop?

I'm out.

Edit: While I don't support the notion of paid mods (at least not in this format), the backlash against this has been pretty heinous. Knowing one of the early-adopter modders personally (i.e. one of the ones personally asked by Valve to contribute), the amount of abuse and death threats currently pouring into his social media inboxes is off the charts.

As a huge fan of modding, and an occasional mod-maker myself, my gut reaction is negative. Ultimately this had to happen and its actually great that there's a way for mod-makers to be compensated monetarily, but I hate the idea of Valve or publishers taking ANY cut.

As far as I know, only authors under the Curated Workshop are allowed to sell their work.

Everyone else has to be blessed by Valve to get under that wing.

That should prevent people trying to sell garbage.

The number of people okay with this is highly disturbing.

Well they are the platform that allows the modders to do the work.

What are they going to do about mod dependencies? You want one mod but it requires 2 others to work. Boom, triple dip.

I can see blatant clones being a huge problem as people undercut the original creator and all talk gets lost in a sea of text.

In what way? Some mods have as much love and energy put into them as DLC and we pay for that, someone who puts in good work and releases a good product should get paid, there is nothing wrong with that.
And if people making half-assed mods charge for them, then don't buy them, they probably weren't worth it anyways.

I don't see this doing anything positive for the end user.

Completely awful.

I can get that modders would like to see a bit of money come their way for their work, but this is the wrong way to go about it.

Apparently Valve are going through mod descriptions and removing donation links.

If that's true, dick move on their part.

I'm pretty glad I got over my tawdry love affair with modded Skyrim. I would play that on and off again for years to the tune of hundreds of hours. Some of the mods are really great, though. I was considering going back this summer to check out what the hottest ones were, but I guess forget that.

Not that these mod creators don't deserve some form of recompense for their hard work, but I had so many problems with mods, and sometimes it takes more than 24 hours to recognize them—especially in a creaking monstrosity of an engine like Skyrim's . The Frostfall mod was awesome for immersion, but I eventually found out it was slowing down my scripts significantly. That would have really sucked if I had paid $10 for it.

I still play Skyrim and my game is modded out to all hell. Seriously, I have 254 mods in my current game changing so many aspects that keep it entertaining to me after all these years. I have many more mods stored onmy hard drive for experimentation and alternate builds. I'm not sure how successful this will be as some of the more popular mods would not be permitted on Steam. Yes, the seedier side of the game community love their sex mods, S&M mods and, of course, the armor that's barely there. These aren't the type of mods which currently populate the Steam Workshop.

One problem I have with this is that the mod community can have short attention spans. It's not unusual to see "the mod no longer supported" or a declaration that the mod creator no longer plays the game. Mods with game crashing bugs can remain broken without a hope of repair. Being free, well you get what you pay for, so it's okay. However, if you pay real-world cash for something and it breaks due to any number of unforeseen changes, patrons will get pissed.

Finally, anyone who follows the mod scene knows that some of the best stuff comes out of Asia, and it's also a place where you can find alternate uploads of Workshop mods. Finding "free" stuff isn't terribly hard.

I am curious to see how this plays out, but I will add that after all my years of playing Skyrim, I've never downloaded any mods off of the Steam Workshop. I've probably got 30 gigs of mods, too.

My major concern with this is how it will impact the modding community in future Elder Scrolls/Fallout games. This modding community has existed since Morrowind and has always coalesced around certain sites where mods and ideas were exchanged freely (Nexus is the major one now) and it's been wonderful at times, frustrating at times, and always kinda weird. By doing this Valve and Bethesda are potentially destroying the most active and long-running mod community there is.

If this starts making a decent sum of money for Bethesda why wouldn't they just lock down the creation kit for their next games so that mods can only be published on the Workshop (which sucks for Skyrim modding, btw)?

I agree. Randy Savage should be in more games.

@hypnotoadbrwowrowrow: No, they are not. The Elder Scrolls modding community has existed for years without the workshop. No one asked Valve to create the Steam Workshop for Skyrim in the first place and, to this day, it is a sub-par option when it comes to Skyrim modding (it works great for a game like Skylines, but Skyrim modding is too complex). One of the major problems with this is that we will see mod authors remove mods from superior sites like Nexus and lock their mods behind a pay-wall on the rather shitty workshop.

And the mod authors need to spare us all the crying. They got into this hobby, just like I did back in the Oblivion days when I spent hundreds if not thousands of hours building mods, knowing that it wasn't a way to make money. They got into it because they wanted to create and help grow a community. Ask for donations all you want, I've gladly chipped in occasionally, but locking your mods behind a pay-wall goes against everything the community was built on.

cool

I love that im going to have to pay for something I was getting for free, let alone something that's been setting the PC apart from consoles for generations. Fuck you, Valve.

The whole point of monetizing everything is so Valve can take a cut effectively out of thin air, they couldn't give 2 fucks about a modder's time and effort. This has been their business model for a while now, to cap the passions and ideas of the pre-dlc era pc fan modding community and turn them into commercial products that they can collect a sweet middleman fee on. Hats, skins, maps, unlocks... dota. Hats (heh) off to them I guess cuz they're raking it in and all, but as someone who remembers the heyday of the hobby modding community, it's sad and frustrating to watch pc games devolve into these gateways for non-stop nickel and dime upselling.

kids today! see back in my day, we used to walk 10 miles in the snow just to get to KB Toys...

in the end, i think this really only hurts people who think mods should be free forever. i have no problem paying for quality work, and i faith in the steam community's uncanny ability to shit on whatever they think is awful to prevent me from buying snake oil.

The modder gets 25%. The rest of the 75% gets split between Valve and Bethesda. Assuming Valve sticks a flat 30% fee like they do on games, then The split between the Modder:Valve:Bethesda goes 25:30:45.

I'd prefer a donation/tip jar system to be honest and I certainly don't like the idea that a dev could be making money off of a community bugfix patch when those kinds of mods are making up for a lack of work on the dev's end in the first place.

I don't see anything wrong with modders getting compensated for their work, as long as Steam doesn't allow it to be exploited. Besides, people are still probably going to make good mods for free. It's just an option for creators to monetize their mods, right?

Have you ever used a mod you either didn't like or found it conflicted with one of your other mods you wouldn't want to be without ? Or maybe a mod to enhance graphics but it was done poorly and killed your performance.

A mod you would have to pay for you would end up relying on user reviews being run by people with unkown or completely different setups than your own.

Charging for mods that lets say add a unique follower, weapon/armor etc is fine and it's no different than what Unreal Tournament is doing. But mods that could fall into what I described above (weather/terrain/water modding etc) is a terrible idea.

uninstalling my skyrim now.

If you really want to mod Skyrim, you generally don't use the steam stuff - since most of the mods don't appear outside of the Nexus site. Someone's already mentioned a donation button - I totally think that should have been the first step, and sort things out from that point before bringing in anything crazy like a monetary system.

Makes me wonder what happens should it become an app store situation.

Umm... you do know that: a) Valve and Bethesda already have your money and don't care if you uninstall it; and b) They will not know that you did so?

As of when I voted, that poll was literally 50-50. Most controversial news of the year!?

Also, I don't wanna have to pay for mods, but I do think these people should get some compensation for the amazing work they do. I just hope the workshop doesn't turn into microtransaction hell.

Sure, go get paid for your hundreds of hours of effort, but I can totally see mod developers move to pouring their work into silos that share nothing with any other content. A lot of the collaborative atmosphere that has defined this particular modding community will be lost as creators go get some of that workshop money.

I do wonder how the SKSE guys feel about the Wet & Cold dude making money off their hard work because nobody considered monetisation when they used the MIT license. Back then, making money off mods was a good way to get a visit from Bethesda's legal team.

I don't mean on valve's side, I mean on Bethesda's. It makes sense to me that Bethesda gets a cut, because then essentially you are using their product to support your products sales (which is illegal and apparently so with music. You can't use someones song, change a bit here or there and resell it all for your profit). As for valve, they're basically publishing the mod if it's on the workshop because of the audience they have, so they do deserve SOME of the cut.