Steam Adds Support for Paid Mods

I didn't see anywhere in this announcement that said any of this money was getting funneled to pay for quality control. So, you pass the 24 hour refund window and find that the mod is breaking the game or inducing some sort of memory leak, the only course of action is to ask nicely on the mod page and wait and hope? No thanks. Plus, many members of the modding community are going to be at each others' throats over who made what and who should profit from which work. This sounds like a legal nightmare.

From the QA section: If you find that mod has broken or is behaving unexpectedly, it is best to post politely on the Workshop item's page and let the mod author know the details of what you are seeing.

The huge negative reaction to this completely baffles me. People claiming this will destroy the mod scene are being very over-dramatic.

The main complaint I'm seeing everywhere is also VERY petty - "I now have to pay for a mod that I could've gotten for free a year ago!" My only response to that is tough shit. A mod will cost what, 5 dollars? Maybe 10 dollars at most? MAYBE - if it's really well made - 15 dollars? In any case, all of these are not a huge amount to pay, and people are insane if they think this'll kill the free modding scene.

Even the best mods are often janky as fuck and cause compatibility issuse with each other. Which is fine, because it's free content made by the community, for the community.

The difference between this and say the dota workshop, is that it is regulated. Anyone can submit content, but that doesn't mean it will make it into the game/store.

Given Steam's current trend of greenlight, early access and releases, being flooded with absolute crap, I just feel that this will just be another cluster fuck of unfiltered rubbish.

The really well-made mods, do deserve to be rewarded, but I guarantee you will see pages of people trying to sell you weight limit increases.

A donation button would be perfect and I wonder what this will do to tesnexus.

At some point, Valve is going to ditch this video game nonsense and shift to making all of their money through arbitrage trading TF2 hats.

Or do they do that already...

Why download mods when you can just use a console window to create your own army of dragons? Messing with the game by using console commands in the Skyrim and Fallout games has always been my favourite thing to do in those games.

This news doesn't really affect me, as I don't really use mods, outside of a few that do things that the developers really should have done themselves (eg. the fix for Dark Souls 1 on PC). To me, the idea of messing with a game's core mechanics just because I didn't like the way the developers made the game just doesn't appeal. That's why I like the console commands, as it tests how much you can get away with just within the default parameters of the game. It can funny to watch mods in action once or twice, but it's not really the way I play my games.

I feel as though that maybe introducing a way to give donations to mod creators rather than paywall mods would have been the better way to go about this. But this would have also come with issues, as some probably would have refused to update mods if they don't get a certain amount of donations.

Steam 'feedback' continues to be absolute garbage. I gave up on it after people were outraged that Capcom had the gall to charge money for RE5 DLC after they had spent time bringing said DLC across to PC and migrating RE5 from GFWL to SteamWorks. I can understand the outrage in this case, mods are meant to be a community based thing, and paywalling them makes it seem as though The Man is coming to ruin it's jive. It's just the inability to coherently explain their anger is what annoys me.

Valve needs to think of a way to reintroduce quality control on Steam, it's recently become a place where both garbage mods and garbage games can make themselves known and sellable. The limits on accounts that have spent less than $5 was a good step forward.

Edit: It should be noted, (I didn't read it anywhere in @jeff's article), but the mod creators receive only 25% of the money. The rest goes towards Bethesda and Valve.

I'm confused. The mod creators can still put out their stuff for free if they wanted to. Valve is giving them the option to charge people, and now Valve is the enemy? Can someone explain the logic here?

I'd be okay with it but Steam takes a huge cut of it just like with greenlight and monetizing mods will stifle some creativity as making mods for these games has always been a hobby for most people. Full conversions of games have come out for free because fans love the game and want to enhance it for themselves and others.

If anything I think this will drive away creators from Steam workshop and maybe decentivize someone who wants to do it for fun and put their stuff out for free, while attracting people who want to make money off the people who will pay for their 'CLEAN SKIN MOD'.

Also the potential for abuse here is high. What is stopping me from taking a Mod that someone else made for free and selling it on the Steam Workshop. Modding isn't a closed network thing its run through multiple websites and checking all the complaints this will generate for steam would require an huge workforce of checkers.

I think the concept is great but the implementation is poor, i feel this is just an avenue to ruin modding in the sense that anyone who makes a decent mod will have no real incentive to not monetize their mod since their making what is essentially free money for somthing that normally people would never have paid for, however this does also give way for a higher quality of mods too, which i feel will just cause a really weird divide in the community, but still only time can tell.

That is some Fox News tier poll wording.

The specifics are not perfect. That said, mods have always overwhelmingly increased my enjoyment of at least every Bethesda game. Now those mod authors have a chance to make some money, which is a good thing.

Not trying to seem overly judgemental, but that sounds fundamentally selfish.

The "negative impact" is that now you'd have to shell over a whopping 99 cents for a thing that someone spent likely hundreds of hours on which has already improved your game experience. And now that the mod creator may see some income from his work, he may be more likely to improve on it in the future, costing you nothing more other than that initial purchase.

How dare they!?!

Now there is a reason for those mod developers to keep it updated. Perhaps they would have abandoned the project but now there is an incentive. Also @majortoms there is nothing stopping people from putting up their mod up for free.

I have no problem with paid mods. It is easy, if the mod is just crappy or some stupid reskin of an armor you just don't buy it. If it is a good mod with some cool custom stuff nice.... but they want like 20 dollars... you don't buy it. If it is a dlc/extra island with unique stuff level mod and they want 5-10 bucks maybe it is worth rewarding the creator. All you have to do is not buy the mods if they suck or are over priced, or just not buy them at all.

3 Questions:

1-Did the modding community ask for this, or is just Valve/Bethesda?

2-Modding is done by amateurs in the sense that they are not covered by contracts and work laws; what happens when there are controversies between creators of a mod, assets being "stolen", ideas being copied, help gets uncredited, etc.? Is Valve going to assume the role of judge?

3-When the most succesful mods will spawn multiple clones (a la games on mobile markets; ie. Flappy Birds, Threes, etc.) is Valve going to intervene? Will they rule in favor of the "original" mod only when the same tech assets are used? Will they say anything at all?

I don't like the look of this at all.

The modding community has always been something to thrive on the fixation of its own peers and creators; rather than the wealth of others.

If it really came down to it, I wouldn't mind paying for decent-quality mods with an array of features that are actually worth the money. Though, there is no chance I will ever pay for a mod through third-party companies such as Valve, especially if they are going to take the majority of the cut. As for the game developers, it wouldn't bother me in the slightest if they were getting 25-35% of the cut to themselves, I think that would be fair at least.

I'd prefer to donate my money directly and willing to the mod developer, instead of paying the narcissistic bigots at Valve money they do not need right now.

@random45: A lot of mods are based on other people's work. There are already a lot of people putting mods on the skyrim page that didn't create that mod. I've heard that some moderation is happening, but even with only 1 game offering mods, some are still slipping through. That's going to happen exponentially once more games gain mod support.

Also, buying a mod makes it a legal transaction. This means that customers are protected and should receive a working version of the product they purchased.This means that you're now not only in a business relationship with the developer of the game, but also the developers of your mods. So whenever a mod is up for sale, it has to be working AT ALL TIMES. This means modders will have to support the mods they made, otherwise they can't sell it. Now this mod can be broken anytime something happens to the files of that game, an update, someone else's mod, whatever. Your savefiles might get corrupted, mods might conflict with eachother, maybe you can't get in the main menu anymore. Sure you can refund a mod within 24 hours, but that still means that existing users might see the mod breaking later on; when the mod updates or the game updates and breaks stuff. At that point, you're SOL. Especially because Valve seems to keep their hands off approach, asking customers to contact modders and hope they'll update the stuff that breaks.

I think the idea of steam offering mods is fine, and a donation button for your favourite modders, sure i could get behind that. But there are too many problems to be still worked out to offer paid mods.

So whats to stop someone from getting the mod and then posting it for free elsewhere. Like really its a mod there's no drm on mods.

Also this is absolutely a terrible idea not because I'm against paying for stuff but because most mod makers are fucking insane like really head on over to the minecraft mod forums and look up what happened when the yogbox came out or look up the Skyrim Gategate meltdown by Arthmoore. Really while a good number of modders are people doing it for fun most of them are downright crazy and the mods they produce are for stuff like making their perfect skyrim waifu, that is lore friendly, and happens to have buttplugs in it. Modders are weird man like head to nexus turn safesearch off and click the best of the week and be prepared to bleach your eyes out.

Fie! The end times are upon us. The first portent was but a scroll ago, and we chose to denounce it in the same breath as we embraced it. And lo, the end of our era has arrived; all walks of life will now be resigned to but a mere few attires, the hills and valleys will lose their lustre, and the magnificence of our world will be reigned back in to our overlord's designs. No more shall we celebrate the cool, the odd, or the downright uncouth - instead, we enter the end times. We have paid the price, and only now do we see what it hath wrought.

Woe upon us all! We are doomed! May those lucky few that survive remember our mistakes, lest they be doomed to repeat them.

I'm all for supporting mod developers, but this attempt really seems short sighted and ill conceived. There's little protection for consumers and the modders themselves seem to get the short end of the stick.
Things like there is no way to determine mod compatibility, no way to beta test, no way to ensure the modder will keep the mod up to date, no way to get a refund (from what I can see), modders using work from other mods and applications (SKSE comes to mind), and I bet this list will be as well moderated as the Greenlight games. This just seems like a quick gimmick to make Valve and Bethesda a quick buck. I think it cheapens Bethesda's products with no real benefit to anyone other than the suits.

I'm all for mod creators being able to charge for their creations, however, i heard that apparently the creators only get 25% of the revenue? Not sure if that is true, but if so its pretty fucked. I guess valve and bethsoft get the rest

No problem with this. If you don't want to see paid mods. Theres a filtering option. Just because content exists doesn't mean you have a right to it.

As for 25% cut. If that shits popular, for a $10 mod that gets 10,000 downloads. That's a lot of money still. How many artists/programmers out there are going to be making 25% of a profit for a game. Yeah that's a very simplistic way to look at it. But shit. This could be a big thing for a lot of modellors/artists/programmers. Not just in skyrim, but future games.

And maybe other devs will be more generous with the cuts modders get.

@coaxmetal: The supplemental terms of service state the following:

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.

I would imagine Valve gets an unknown cut with the rest going right to the publisher. To quote my own forum post from earlier, maybe I'm being overly negative but I can't see publishers bending over to give modders fair deals on this.

If this was done like the way they were doing DOTA 2 stuff it'd probably be fine but as is it's just going to flood the workshop with bullshit. I love Steam but their storefront is already so lousy with iOS ports, dating sims, and garbage FTP or Early Access games that I haven't been able to find anything worthwhile just by browsing casually for years now. If I wanted to shop on desura I'd go to their website. They want to open this up to all workshop games eventually? The guy up there said what they should have done instead, donations.

Going back and reading this again, it really fucking depresses me that what I wrote only barely qualifies as hyperbole. Thank God Steam added a "Popular" qualifier to their new releases section on the featured store page.

Honestly, most of the time I forget about the whole Steam Workshop mod thing for games since I mainly use NexusMods for Skyrim and Fallout 3.

I'd like to remind everyone about the official motto of GiantBomb: 'Videogames are dumb'. It'll be fine guys, I mean, I'm ok with it crashing and burning down if it all comes down to it.

The only bad thing about this is going to be the complete lack of quality control that plagues Steam even now.

Anybody who is complaining simply because they want free things from people who put a lot of work into something, you sound like a load of selfish assholes.

This kills a lot of stuff to be honest. I'm not saying mod creators shouldn't get paid for their work, they should. but it brings up so many problems, many require patches to work together, many mods get abandoned and left half finished. Some mods work fine for a while and then lead to script overlord or corrupted saves. Many mods are collaborative efforts among people from all over who know each other only by user name. Many mods employ Voice Actors, does that set a precedent for paying them? It means that it might be harder to make mods with VO which, as far as i'm concerned, in a requirement for story-based content in these games.

It just seems like an experiment that might end up killing one of the best things about computer gaming.

Just don't support the people who make those types of disturbing mods. There are a shit ton of mods made by different people that just improve the game: better ground textures, rebalanced skill tree, better ui, better weather, etc. You shouldn't paint all modders with a broad stroke of paint because a small group of people make very questionable mods or there have been infamous incidents with some of them. I'm pretty sure that those types of questionable mods wouldn't even get onto the workshop anyway.

I was ok with it initially. I'm ok with people getting paid for the things they made. However I've been seeing that the creator is getting 25% while Valve and the creator of the game get 75%. I can see Valve getting something as they are the storefront, I don't understand why the company who made the game get's anything, they already got the price of the game from the buyer and seller of the mods. Also Steam and the game company shouldn't be taking that big a chunk. Now it all just seems filthy.

Make up your mind.

This whole idea is stupid, not only are there too many legal loopholes, and pitfalls to this whole thing but it will undermine the modding community as a whole and drive a wedge into it. I agree that mod authors should receive some kind of contribution for their efforts, but that contribution should be 100% optional to the end user.

Hell the Wet and Cold mod author even stated his latest version of the mod is ONLY going to be available through the steam workshop, and it sits behind that new pay-wall scheme. I never enjoyed using the steamworkshop for my skyrim mods, but I'm afraid other authors will follow suite and pull their work off of the Nexus to have a jab for some quick cash at my expense.

Hell I don't even have any assurance that these mods will be functional, or remain functional for the life of the game. I don't like the idea of paying for unfinished or early access games, and I don't like the idea for paying for unfinished fan-works, that could break my game or be incompatible at a drop of a hat days later.. And yet here we are today.

I'm curious as to how this will go when people pay out cash for mods, then a game update breaks it. Right now with free mods, you have "use at your own risk" and no guarantee that it will work 100% or will continue to work after updates, which while annoying, isn't the same as something you've paid money for breaking.

I also wonder if game publishers will have a say in whether paid mods are allowed, or is it a package deal if they allow workshop integration.

I hope this turns out well (similar to the Axiom Verge creator getting Kickstarter money allowed him to sink the time he needed to finish it) Maybe there will be some rising stars and great things could grow out of it.

I wouldn't mind optional payments, or even a "pay what you want" structure. Valve could even implement badges or some other silly measure so you could show off that you support modders.

My gut tells me this will be a shit show, though. Just like MMOs, DLC, free to play, annual sequels, mobile apps, and day one patches (which seem to not be enough lately): when it turns sour I'll move on or just go back to old standards. It just saddens me to see toxic business fads eating up talent and potential.

I really have no problems with people charging for mods. I can see some issues of support and pricing, but over all I am happy with mod makers having the option to charge for their content.

I see a lot of people saying they should just have a donation button. I can;t agree with a donation button being the only option of monetization, they should have the ability to set a minimum price.

Hope this get ironed out over the next few months and we get some really great mods out of it.

Did some basic math for this one after reading stuff from the Workshop FAQs.

Valve and Bethesda takes 75% which leaves the mod creator getting 25% of the revenue but you have to give Valve your tax information and according to Workshop revenue FAQ, the may take 0 to 30 percent as tax. The same FAQ says also that you must earn at least hundred dollars to actually getting the money. This seems highly favorable to the companies involved. You have to be able to sell your mod for 400 dollars to be actually paid and you may still have to pay 30 dollars as taxes from your share. So your 400 dollar sales may actually turn out to be 70 bucks. Which would be 17,5%. So depending on the taxation, creator gets only 17,5 to 25 percent.

"Introducing New Ways to Support Workshop Creators"... yes, but mainly you support big companies and that makes me a bit sad about this.

I think its naive to think this could possibly create better mods. This was the same argument for Early Access, that having the ability to monetize would be a net positive and allow more and better games to be made that never would have had a chance, and look at the whole lot of nothing that seemed to produce.

Nexus has a donation button on the creators profile and on the mod page if the creator wants it. If they paywall it on steam, they must have felt that they weren't getting what they should be for their work.

@president_barackbar: I would say early access has helped create some great games. I love the game besiege which is in early access. Crypt of the necro dancer is leaving EA which is also a good game. I will agree that early access can be abused but I am very happy it exists. I think it is a terrible idea to limit our options based on what some people can do to the system.

@malestrom said:

The thing is, it could have been designed so much better to prevent abusing if they were more concerned about consumers. Better curation, much more strict rules about publishing on Early Access and so on.

It just isn't Valve's interest because they make money to have it what ever and have as much content in there as they can have, regardless of the quality since every sell counts to them. At least on shorter span of time they make money but since people seem so approving of the lack of quality in general and accepting to wade through nonsense, maybe it won't actually implode into it self even in the long run due lack of quality control.

But I'm usually cynical about things anyway. I just hope things would be done better when they could be done so :)

Well I usually go up to a hundred plus mods when I mod skyrim and if I have to pay 2 bucks for each one that's pretty much gonna be the end of me modding. And skyrim isn't even the only steam game I use mods for. I guess it's cool that people can get paid for the stuff they create now, but if this becomes the norm I guess I won't be modding anymore.

Mods break a lot of the time and some of them just stay broken, this is gonna get real shitty when a new elder scrolls or fallout comes out and people start buying mods that just break after the next patch, which could never be fixed. Dlc is one thing because 99% of the time it will work forever, but I can't see myself buying something that could very likely be broken by game updates and never work again which actually happens pretty often.

That's terrible. I'm okay with supporting people who make mods but I wouldn't even feel like I'm doing that if I purchased these mods. Bah.

I know someone who makes mods and he puts pretty much all his free time into it, so I certainly appreciate the amount of work that goes into it. That said, this is not the right way to go about it in my opinion. I've heard quite a few folks recommend a donate feature which I think would work better and be less hostile to the player base.

I haven't spoken to my mate about it yet but I'd be interesting to know what he thinks, I know he as received a fair amount of donations for his work on occasions. It's a balancing act.

This seems like the kind of thing that should be a "tip jar" and not a required fee. Did they not learn there lesson from the flood of bullshit that came out of green light? Ya some great games came out of that, but a ton of terrible ones did as well.

Yep. Why would anyone be motivated to spend a ton of time to produce quality content and garner a dedicated following to become ever more successful when they're getting paid for it?! People will always make better things when they're not compensated.

Wait...no. It's the opposite of that.

Also, Prison Architect, Day Z, Kerbal, the list goes on. There are a bunch of high quality Early Access games. And the fact that there are many more shitty ones that people have paid for just proves that there are a bunch of stupid people paying for bad things. It's not the system's fault in any way.

If people spend $20 on a mod that changes one NPC's eyebrow color, that doesn't somehow become Valve's fault. I'll always take a messy but open system over something that chooses who has access and who doesn't.

I would like this to work out, but the Greenlight comparison is too apt. Plus, I can see the effect of many mods suddenly requiring money splitting a lot of the fan base and ruining games, which is going to massively piss off a lot of people.

I just want my Companions quest line to be fixed and the rest of my Hircine totems.

They still think I'm on a quest when I'm not and I can't fix it.

I'm all for people getting money for making cool shit. I'm not all for Valve and Bethesda taking the majority cut of the profits for someone else's hard work, especially considering Valve is apparently going around the Workshop and deleting modders' links to exterior donation pages. Just seems skeezy and greedy as hell.

As someone who has actually created a moderately successful Skyrim mod (it was featured on Top 5 Skyrim Mods of the Week), my point of view on this is that it is ultimately a good thing. I don't see how mod users think they have any right to get angry about this - making it so that charging for a mod isn't going to get you taken to court by the game's publisher is fantastic progress, and Bethesda/Zenimax wouldn't have agreed to it if they weren't happy with the deal. It benefits the game's creators and the mod creators, and those who still make mods as a hobby will be happy to give them out for free still. Personally I think the Valve/Game Publisher/Mod Creator money split seems extrememly wonky at the moment, though.

I only hope it means the people behind Skywind might eventually get some support (and not get sued to high hell by Zenimax). Ignore all of that, they said they aren't: https://tesrenewal.com/forums/requests-suggestions-and-questions/will-you-be-monetizing-skywind