@slashdance: Early access paid mods?

I think it's great. I was really into the Morrowind mod scene back in the day, and people worked their asses off to make amazing things and were met with... well it's the internet. People like the steam comments in this article. If you aren't an asshat and want to support em do it. If not, then don't. Simple.

But people kinda suck a big fuck.

I'd say it's a negative. Valve have made a lot of changes over the last few years to make more money, generally without offering much value to their customers for said money. The trading cards for instance, exist solely for Valve to keep getting their percentage of the transactions.

This seem like another "sure, let them sell these things, so long as it's always in our ecosystem, and we're always getting a cut".

I don't hate Valve or Steam, but they're another corporation run by enough people who care more about profits than games, and generally that doesn't bode very well in the long run.

@phiroth: That's on a level I can't even consider.

Also, "Pay what you want" actually means "Pay what you want by choosing one of these prices".

@slashdance said:

End times confirmed.

i'm REALLY unsure about all of this. imagine of skyrim or oblivion or any other game that is hideously broken or buggy long after release had their unofficial patches behind a paywall.

i want to support creators, but this seems....dicey.

So in theory, I'll be able to pay Valve and game developers to get patches and bug fixes made by unaffiliated third parties that they never did themselves? That's brilliant!

On the surface this seems like such a short-sighted and blatant money-grab, I'm a little impressed.

@richyhahn4: Problem arises when a game hinges on 1 mod. Durante's mod basically made thouzands of people finally enjoy Dark Souls on PC. With this system in place, he could have chosen to put his essential mod behind a paywall.

i want steam amiibos!!!!

Exactly. I can't at all understand any anger from this announcement.

The absolute worst possible outcome is that Valve doesn't filter shit well, most of the offerings are overpriced, and so no one uses it. Then it'll disappear and people will make and download mods as they have in the past.

Folks seem to conflate their feelings about "I don't think this will be an effective pursuit", with "OMG! How could they ruin everything like this! AHHHH!". Just because something might be implemented poorly doesn't make it also some kind of war crime.

My simple question in that case is why did they mod before there was even the potential to make money? If it was all about making a living doing what they like doing, there should be a slew of new people who decide its now time to start modding, not older modders suddenly deciding to charge for their content.

Are the people who are against this also against official paid DLC? If not, why is it okay for professional developers to charge for extra content but not amateur developers? These mods are all optional, and there will still be free ones. The possibility of garbage flooding the store aside, I fail to see what the argument against this is, besides "I want free stuff!"

Gaming is already the single most expensive of the major entertainment mediums and just keeps getting more and more expensive. Pay to play, DLC, Twitch subscripts, patreon exclusives and now paid mods. I feel like this thing I love is trying to drain money out of me at every possible opportunity.

You may say "thats just business" but I can buy a book, movie or album without feeling like I'm being nickel and dimed why is gaming so damn different?

seems pretty cool to me. but I don't really use mods much to begin with as usually they're just cheats.

i don't have too much of a problem with it, my concern is the actual game company getting harassed because the mod doesn't work that they paid money for.

I think it's great that people who want to make stuff for games will have a method to get money directly from users who appreciate their content, I know I would like to just buy dota 2 sets straight from the cosmetic creators if I could.

Skyrim cosmetics may be a weird place to start, can't wait to see how much clean faces and big booties go for.

While I like the idea of modders getting paid for their work, I fear how the companies involved are going to modify this in the future. Already the revenue share seems a bit skewed to favor companies, since the creator gets only fourth of the money done. One would think that Valve and Bethesda weren't hurting that bad for money that they needed majority of the revenue but I guess one would think wrong.

It's also easy to come up with some nightmare scenarios where companies decide to encourage paid mods over free content, since it's actually profitable and they don't have to create the content. This could lead some kind of class-based mods where you can buy cool mods with better features or get free boring stuff with less features.

But that just my jaded mind probably, it's not like microtransactions in games could be hundred dollars or something like that or games including them could be skewed a bit on the grindy side on development ;)

It's possible that people get more quality mods if modders think that there is money to be made but it would probably be naive to think that companies will not want to leverage this much more if they see it profitable.

TL;DR: Like the idea modders getting paid, companies may ruin free modding in the future.

I LOVE the Skyrim modding community. I love it so much that I've donated to modders that have worked their asses off to make that game even better. However, even the best of mods, have issues and only AFTER I played with it in a mostly stable state, did I donate.

I can understand the percentage cut. Otherwise you could release a shell of a game for 99 cents on Steam, then sell the actual game as a "mod" for it for $59.95, thereby avoiding giving the Steam store its usual cut.

That would be a huge hole big enough to drive a Eurotruck through.

I'm all for giving mod developers options that allow people to support them.

What I dislike is having things like Wet and Cold get a price tag added onto it out of nowhere, and suddenly now they're completely dropping their support for older versions of the mod that didn't cost money.

I also have to question the viability of actually paying for mods. As someone pointed out on the steam forum, the "starter" pack of paid mods costs more than the Legendary edition of Skyrim. This also prompts that there is eventually going to have to be the conversation of whether things like Nexus mods can even exist anymore.

I'm not paying more money for mods than I did for the actual game itself.

I don't like this, why couldn't it just be a donate button? And why take a cut? Really gross. :(

Mods are usually of dubious quality in the first place. I would never pay money for a mod without downloading it first to see if it's a quality product. I usually always play games with mods enabled and even the highest quality of mods that have gained a huge following (for example, Europa Barbarorum or Kaiserreich) always have a laundry list of bugs and typos. In my experience, I've had a lot of mods go south on me over time, either because the original game has been patched and the mod is no longer compatible, the mod has been abandoned or the mod has changed for the worse over time. A perfectly functional mod is always hard to come by. I wouldn't feel comfortable investing money in a mod that hasn't already been completed (most mods seem to be in a perpetual early access).

I hope that publishers allow modding teams to make money and don't take all the profits. Mods are what make PC games stay relevant, if anything mods already make a ton of money for games and ask for nothing in return. I have bought a lot of games solely to play the mods for them (Silent Hunter 3, Medieval 2 and Rome Total War more than twice, basically all of the Paradox catalogue). A lot of mods also have a huge list of contributors and it might get a little shady when money has to be distributed out, it's shitty to think that guys who worked on a mod for years and backed out recently will be seeing no money from this new "pay for mods" scheme. Also, how will the money be distributed exactly? Do the mod leaders get all the money and have to decide who to give it to and who gets how much of a percentage? I can see this stuff tearing apart a modding team.

I think the negatives grossly outweigh the positives here.

From what I've seen, it's sort of like a donate button, but not really.

The language they use is "Pay what you want", and then conveniently left out the option for $0.00. Which honestly feels more shitty than just having a straight price in my opinion.

A donation option would of been much better.

I think Steam trading cards have proven that selling useless and overpriced shit can be a very effective pursuit.

This is bound to fail in a more spectacular way than Greenlight. What about mods that stop working after a while (due to game patch for example) and the creator doesn't bother to fix it? What about mods that include a bunch of stuff taken from other (free) mods, you can't really place a copyright claim on edited config files... What about mods that place copyrighted content in games and charge for it now?Not to mention the floodgates of garbage paid mods that will make it impossible to find anything decent anymore...

I wouldn't mind paying for really well made and well supported mods, and selling them is not much different from selling TF2 hats or DOTA2 gear. But in those games the content is much easier to check for the above problems. You can't check big mods for problematic content because you never know what the modders are changing...

I would like to predict that Half Life 3 will be free and be supported by paid mods.

Ugh. Donation buttons people.

$8 for a mod?! fuck that!

True story: creators get 25% of sale price, so that's 2 dollars in the creators pocket. Valve/Bethesda will split the other 75%. SEVENTY-FIVE PERCENT! WHAT IN THE FUCK.

I voted "People Who Might Put in Hundreds of Hours of Work on Something Might Now Be Able to Support Themselves While Doing So", but it's a fucking lie. People are going to bitch that the good mods cost too much money, and you can thank Valve/Bethesda for being greedy fucks. The modder will make money...yes.

I remember when people used to say Valve was the only company keeping PC gaming going. Maybe, for a while they were the head in the field. I used to look up to them, as I grew more and more disgusted with companies like EA, and Activision with their Nickle & Dime strategies. Then Valve started doing it. Few years ago, infact. Sure Steam sales were GREAT back then. But I fail to see how Valve has anyone interest but their own in mind. Back before all this, I always felt they were there to keep us playing PC games. To keep developers interested in PC gaming. I used to love them.

These last few years, I would say they're even more disgusting than EA or Activision. They basically have a huge platform that's really starting to snowball back into the gaming juggernaut it should have always been, PC gaming. They have a majority market share on people's game libraries, and now they want to start stripping us of the freedoms and openness they used to profess about. Serious: FUCK OFF.

@president_barackbar said:

Don't misunderstand me. It's not about only making a living. It's about opportunity. It's about the countless mods that were started and dropped because the creators couldn't afford to work on them anymore. It's about the mods there are never updated because the creators can't afford to work on them anymore. It about the mods that were NEVER started in the first place. I'm sure we will see lets of people decide now is the time to start modding. Most people probably made it work because they were passionate. Now they have the opportunity to devote even more of their time to making cool mods.

@potter9156: Would you actually like to know the answer to these questions? Or are you just being snide? I would be happy to answer your questions if they are serious.

My immediate gut reaction is the first option, but on second thought if a mod is good enough I'd consider paying for it. It would have to be insane or professional quality for me to do that though.

Guys, this debate was already over when X-Men: The Ravages of Apocalypse came out in 1997. If that wasn't enough to be convincing, it was finalized when Counter-Strike 1.0 retail was released in stores in 2000. And then later we got Red Orchestra. Paying for mods is old hat. Get off my lawn.

I felt like one of those crazy old people screaming at people passing by in the street that the world is ending, but back when HORSE ARMOR was announced I screamed and begged and pleaded with people not to support it because it would shove us down a slippery slope from which we would never recover. AND LOOK AT EVERYTHING NOW.

Whatever. We deal with DLC so whatever.

I've been designing a card game that I want to release on Tabletop Simulator as well as eventually a physical version. I want to be able to sell the physical version, but the digital version was always going to have to be free if I wanted to have it on the Steam Workshop. Now, there's a way for me to not just give my game away for free, assuming this all works out. It's not just a mod, it's a full game on the Tabletop Simulator platform. This might be a specific case, but other games probably have different equivalents.

All of this is optional, but it's the content creator that gets to decide which option they prefer. That should probably be the way of it.

This is great in theory, but i can only imaging this turning in to a complete shit fest full of unfinished stuff and cheap copy cat mods, like the appstore.

Just look at all the other similar initiatives steam has implemented, like Early Access, Green Light, and opening up the shovelware flood gates. I'm sure it makes some people a lot of money and provides us with a few good gaming experiences that couldn't happen any other way, but I generally feel it's a terrible mess for the consumer. A mess we would be better of without.

Reap all the benefits while letting the small guy deal with consequences. Valve's little blurb about content permissions is downright laughable and disgusting.

And strangely enough, the rage and claims of injustice and greed here are almost identical to that similarly dumb thing that never affected games in any way. All this has happened before, and all this will happen again, I guess.

Example? What has Valve done, including this most recent thing, that changes how you buy/play games at all?

I bought Skyrim through Steam. I have a bunch of mods I acquired for free online. This won't change any of that.

I must be forgetting some huge atrocity, because in my eyes everything you used to love about Steam is pretty much the same thing today.

How much would you pay for realistic horse vulvas?

I'm all for people getting compensated for their hard work but i kind of wish valve had made more effort to separate this from the existing modding community. Suddenly charging for something that has been free for decades is never going to be easy, they should have pushed for user created dlc (even if it was just a facade). Promote modders as open source, collaborative free agents and introduce user created dlc, tighter quality control, stricter guide lines, higher quality at a price.

So what you're saying is download Nexus Mod Manager. Got it.

Here's a thought experiment for you: If DayZ could have been a monetized mod would the stand-alone ever have come out?

Popular mods on Nexus receive well over 100,000 downloads. Imagine if you received even 25 cents for that download. That's 25,000 dollars. Currently, Skyrim mods have been downloaded 660 million times from Nexus. Even if you reduce all my numbers to 10,000 downloads at 10 cents you are still talking about $1000 dollars. That's half my monthly salary.

Consider this:

SKI UI has 9,000,000 total downloads. 4,446,000 are unique. 271,000 people have endorsed the mod.

As an independent developer and modder I can tell you 100% as a fact that modding can be like developing a video game. Modders who have built total conversion mods are crazy, pulling off the work you usually hand to a half dozen level designers. A modder is usually a level designer, coder and artist rolled up in one. Many modders are in fact true blue game designers who make mods on the side. Others are just learning. Some modders only ever make 1 mod. Some are *already* living off of Patreon and Donations. For some games being paid for a mod is absurd in terms of realism - it'll just never happen. But for games where modding is a huge part of the community and arguably responsible for keeping a game alive - it is very easy to imagine the top 10% - 20% of modders subsidizing their living through mods. A very rare group can probably not work entirely. And like I said, some are already there.

Anyways, having been part of a mod community, and supporting that community usually through donations, I think this is fucking AWESOME.

Are you seriously asking how putting previously free workshop content behind paywalls impacts peoples' ability to play their games?

Here's one: I used Wet and Cold. Now I cannot use Wet and Cold unless I give them money or if I want to settle on the old outdated version that won't be seeing any more support on Nexus. From where I'm sitting, that looks like a pretty big impact.

I'm against this

I think this is perfectly fine and is a good step forward overall. Yes, this will inevitably lead to a massive flood of garbage and, yes, this means some mods which would have likely been free had this taken place will now cost some amount of money, but it also leads to encouraging modders to polish up and update their work and, honestly, the better content creators deserve some form of compensation if they ask for it (and if someone puts a lot of effort into something and decides to release it for free, that's an entirely fine choice too).

The main issue with the execution of this really will be the inevitable flood of garbage, but at the end of the day it's up to players to decide how much effort they want to spend on wading through this flood and up to commercial modders to learn how to market and otherwise spread the word about any worthwhile mods they make so that they may float closer to the top.

The other big issue, the community-oriented one, will of course be the perception that mods aren't worth money because they weren't allowed to be worth money in the first place. It's kinda funny since this perception doesn't really apply to games as a whole (in general gaming is perceived as being cheaper than ever to get into, but there's simply almost no chance that a major game like Cave Story would release for less than $5 today, let alone for free even though that was very much the case less than a decade ago). Unfortunately, while indie (or otherwise smaller) games as a whole have managed to achieve a perception of 'look at all this stuff available for way less than $50+' through their comparison to commercial games, mods don't really have a 'similar but more expensive' thing to compare themselves to (DLC or expansion packs are pretty much as close as it gets) so the general perception is going to probably continue to be the one indie games managed to avoid, the one of 'look at all this stuff which we have to pay money for which would have been free'.

@noizy: Yes cause at some point you realise your box is too small and you'd prefer to work in a bigger box with bigger tools. I understand what you're tying to say but I dont think it really works with DayZ or any popular conversion mod that get widely popular. Assuming the creators have bigger ideas they want to try out they will probably find working in the confines of an existing game engine too restrictive. In that case making money of the mods will actually help them give the confidence to branch out to bigger(holy shit this almost tuned out into an unfortunate typo! Why is B next to N!?!) things. Its all those chancers looking to make a quick buck that will bring this to its knees and kill it.

"Support the modders.."

Valve keeps 75% of the cut.

Okay.

I was browsing the mods just to see what, if anything, people were charging when I found this little gem. I think this is a) disgusting and should be taken down, and b) part of the problem of having one man being a mascot for a billion dollar business. This mod happens to be the fourth most popular mod right now. This saddens me.

Doesn't Gamespot have a weekly highlight show literally called Skyrim Mods?