Valve shuts down paid mod system after pressure from gamers
bbc.co.ukLet's not underestimate what Valve has done here. At first they tried to give passionate content providers a way to also make some money. That's a huge thing. Most modders can tell you about it. Then they screwed up, which can happen if you try something the first time. I think it's okay, but I understand why people are pissed. Then the boss himself comes and talks to people on reddit to see what is going on. He gets informed first, includes peoples ideas in his opinion, before making a decision. We know many big companies who wouldn't even thing about such a move. Finally they decide to shut it down as a failure and give back the money. All in all a very strong move. This at least made me believe in Valve again, after the last months slowly shipped away on my support for them. Kudos!
Given that the "passionate content providers" only make 25% of what users pay, I think that's a very generous interpretation.At first they tried to give passionate content providers a way to also make some money.Edit: It doesn't matter if it's Valve or Bethesda or the tooth fairy that takes the remaining 75% - the fact is this system does little to accomplish the goal of "giving passionate content providers a way to make some money" - indeed it's so wide of the mark it's hard to believe that was seriously the intention.
If you make a Mickey Mouse sequel using derivative assets, how much of a cut would Disney want? Keeping in mind the assets would be open to competing high-caliber studios (back to the Skyrim example, just allowing for free modding generally precludes competing triple-A's from producing anything, but give them say a "fair" 75% cut of expansions or complete sequels to a competitor's bockbuster game, taking advantage of all their lore, characters, graphical assets, and game engine?).
If you make a Mickey Mouse sequel, it doesn't require users to first buy a copy of the original movie.
Using a mod does. These two things are in no way comparable.
Just to add to your point: I wonder how many copies of Arma 2 were sold explicitly because of the DayZ mod. How many copies of Half-life were sold because of Counter Strike? Warcraft 3 and Dota? I could go on.
Developers should be ecstatic that modders want to build off their game as a platform. It can only bring them additional money as people buy their game for access to hugely popular mod. I can understand the desire to monetize this, but too much and you freeze out your modders and you get nothing.
This is what's always driven me mad about the battlefield series. There's were some great mods springing up and I wish it was capitalized on and encouraged.
I feel like Arma 2 saw the Project Reality demographic and said "Lets go for that"
Absolutely right! Think how differently it would be if we had to pay $50 for Half-Life and another $10-15 for the counter-strike mod. Everyone would lose.
It's pretty darn hard to make a derivative work without understanding the source material. I suspect your immediate dismissal of this analogy is more related to your strong personal greed for entertainment, which appears to be a fundamental human feature.
One wonders how that could have evolved. Someone should do experiments where they deny access to three company episodes to chimps, to see if they freak out as badly as the internet generation does when they can't get their favorite things.
75% should go to the modders. If people are buying the mod, then the mod developer deserves most of the cash for the mod purchase. Remember, the player needs to buy the original game too. Those funds don't go to the mod developer.
Except in this case the 75% was going to the studios (Valve got their flat 30% cut, as with everything, and Bethesda elected to charge a further 45%). The modders were getting 25%.
You misunderstood.
75% is not to the mod developer, 75% was to Bethesda, and 25% to the mod developer.
This is what pissed people off. (Also, the developer would only get paid if he got 100 USD to receive, meaning that he needed 400 USD in sales, meaning that probably most developers would never get any money).
As mentioned by the guy above you, 30% was to valve, and bethesda determined the rest. A 30% cut is similar to what you'd get from the app store and in my opinion is reasonable for the costs of hosting and perhaps supporting the mods.
This all seems like an attempt to app-storify mods. I really didn't think it was a bad thing.
I haven't been paying extra close attention to the whole fiasco, but there's something that I don't understand.
Are people really more in favor of modders getting 100% of $0 rather than 25% of $X?
Is there more to this debate that I'm missing?
The core of the issue came down to the effects on the modder community.
1. Modders are hobbyists, not professionals. Many modders came right out and said they would no longer make mods under this system, because the pressure to charge means it becomes a job. They no longer would have the option to just walk away from the mod. 2. Piracy. Modders have explicitly made their mods available for free. Once you have a system where they can be charged for, you have freeloaders putting someone elses mods on steam to make money. Steam provided no protection against this, the only resolution would be filing an individual complaint or invoking DMCA, and Steam was leaving that entirely up to the mod owners to figure out. 3. This was seen as a hostile move towards Nexus, the biggest provider of mods for the games in question. As soon as this was announced, mod makers began removing their products from Nexus out of concern that they would be dishonestly put on the Steam store. As Nexus is an ad-supported service, fewer mods means less income, and it would not be due to a capitalistic business reason.
In the end, most modders don't WANT to be paid for their mods, because it's not a profession. I saw plenty of support for a donation system, however.
But the reason it's not a profession is that it's currently not possible to be paid for it.
Make that possible and you'd then have some professional modders and some amateur ones.
In this case I believe that allocating a dollar value to work done for the love of it, significantly devalues that work in the eyes of its creator.
Yeah, this is like the chapter out of "Drive" where they tried paying people to give blood but ending up decreasing the number of blood givers... they'd rather feel charitable then earn money
> Many modders came right out and said they would no longer make mods under this system, because the pressure to charge means it becomes a job.
Unless I'm missing something, nothing happened that would have forced mod makers to start charging, right?
You are correct: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/33uplp/mods_and_stea...
Sort of other people could post and charge for your mod.
If you also posted the mod for free, nobody would have a reason to pay for a re-posted paid mod. If you're both charging for it, then that goes into the realm of intellectual property. That's a change that could be painful in a world of previously free mods, but something not uncommon in other places.
It's an app store. The question comes down to: would you rather have an ecosystem of only free (or donation-driven) mods, or would you rather have some mods be paid mods? I really don't think the move to paid mods is as apocalyptic as reddit was making it out to be.
You’re assuming perfect information. Amazon sells plenty of ebooks you can get for free on another site.
Honestly, they could have pulled this off. If they made a new game with the option to sell mods and had some sort of review process doing due diligence that would have been something else. Or even some sort of auto check for conflicts. But, this seemed like a horrible money grab where they wanted to extract 75% of the income without doing anything.
In the end, most modders don't WANT to be paid for their mods, because it's not a profession.
That's an interesting perspective. Sounds like there are some valid criticisms of the system Valve has put in place.
To me it seems that gamers have cut off their nose to spite their own face in this regard. It seems to me that a paid modding ecosystem would be a big win in favor of gamers.
If lone hobbyists can improve a game so much, can you imagine if a studio of 5-10 could make a viable living from modding?
I think another valid pov from most of the gamers is the dislike for the system that has been growing where once you purchase a game there are usually a series of other purchases associated the game to get all of the content that somebody else has been playing. It's extremely frustrating to many of the players to have to continually purchase little bits of the game, and this trend has been started by "day one DLC (downloadable content)" and persisted with "pay to win" freemium models. In the end it seems most people saw this as a cash grab by valve, pushed by Bethesda to milk even more money out of their players. They see the charitable donations currently being given and want to translate that to earnings that a game can make, and this doesn't sit well with the fans.
That POV doesn't seem very valid in the general case. It's extremely similar to "I already bought a ticket to Avengers, so why are they charging me again for the rest of the story?"
There are some cases where companies have been overly greedy and compromised the core game to sell mods, but the general hatred toward expansion content seems to come mainly from a desire to get things for free rather than a rational complaint about harm they've experienced from expansion content. You'll also see a lot of gamers suggest that charging $60 for a game is morally questionable (unless you're Nintendo). The freak out over paid mods seems to be that variety to me — it's really hard to say that the existence of community mods devalues the core game. People just don't want to pay money for things.
It's definitely that in part, I would have to agree with you. This generation of gamer grew up with the relatively easy ability to pirate games instead of pay for them and steam sales on PC. So there is some resistance to paying for it even if it's not outspoken. My own personal reasoning (now that paying for a game isn't saving weeks of allowance) relies more on resistance to change on the way things have always been, with a bit of skepticism on the way they are monetizing the mods with the split amount.
After playing multiple games by Bethesda that have been relatively unpolished compared to what the modding community has done, I see the move as a cash grab by Bethesda in releasing a game and cashing in on people who just want the game to be more playable by selling the mods to other players as free generated DLC content. I understand that the modders have a lot of a headstart on the work as well, given to them by Bethesda, which is why I wouldn't support modders selling mods on their own. I think the free + donate model has worked very successfully in the past in both motivating and (I assume, but can't be sure in generalizations) compensation.
My last note on the issue is that at the very least this move should not be implemented on a fully developed modding ecosystem where the mods have already intertwined to a degree that this causes a single person decisions to need to be made by multiple mod developers. With mods using other mods, it would be acceptable to have to buy the used mod if that was a design decision by the original modder, but that information was not present as the ecosystem developed and I think it introduces a great deal of harm. As a source I cite all of the trauma that Nexus experienced in the wake of this system being released.
>It seems to me that a paid modding ecosystem would be a big win in favor of gamers. If lone hobbyists can improve a game so much, can you imagine if a studio of 5-10 could make a viable living from modding?
I think the worry is that the move would have killed the lone hobbyists. Even though you could argue that this feature is pure value-added as it doesn't stop anyone from modding the same way as before, it would have reshaped the community. So you'd have a few great mods by semi-professional studios but it could also discourage the hundreds of passionate modders who enjoy putting quality before marketability. In my opinion, the Android and iOS app stores are a good example of this.
Many mods are interesting because the modder solved a personal problem of his.
And some mods do end having a "studio" backing... For example the Network Addon Mod for SimCity 4, it started with several individual modders solving their own problems with the game, and now it has a official "NAM Team" that act as a professional team (they give release dates, have deadlines, make their own installer, etc...)
>If lone hobbyists can improve a game so much, can you imagine if a studio of 5-10 could make a viable living from modding?
If this was viable, you'd think that studios would consider paying small teams to continue patching and generating content for games for some years. </?>
Obviously this has happened with a few games, but one minor argument I've seen put out over the weekend was something along the lines of "why don't $studio just hire these guys?", and some sadness that it might happen even less often.
>If this was viable, you'd think that studios would consider paying small teams to continue patching and generating content for games for some years.
If you're Bethesda then maybe you don't get out of bed for less than $10,000,000. This leaves the door open for small teams that will be more than happy with a much smaller pay day.
> In the end, most modders don't WANT to be paid for their mods, because it's not a profession. I saw plenty of support for a donation system, however.
So in the end, most modders don't WANT to be paid for their mods, except they do WANT to be paid and call it a donation?
When you buy something you have some expectations. You'll want the mod to be stable, be updated along with the game, play along with other mods.
If you are the seller, and you got paid, that means work. Give support or get shouted at by dozens of angry customers. Reply to emails for months to come when a competitor modder added your mod features to his mod and why the hell are you charging 4.99 if it's worth 1.99 and now you need to refund your costumer.
Donations, on the other hand... explicit intent and different expectations from everyone involved.
Also, it might be neither "most don't want to be paid" nor "most want donation", and both sets might have a very small intersection.
Donations normally also happens after someone has used the work, rather than upfront.
plus that the seller requires to set a price, which may be too high/low .. but using donations happy customers can pay whatever they feel is ok for them
A donation doesn't instill the same level of responsibility to the product. A donation is to support a hobby, a payment is to support a job.
Then do the Patreon model where the modder is "hired" by the community. The modder/s decide a minimum wage, and then see if the community is willing to continue to support the mod creation.
The beautiful aspect of this compared to selling products is that everyone involve know what is expected from each other, the responsibility to fix bugs is established in the beginning, and its very hard to sell someones else mod as your own.
There is a former maxis employee doing exactly that for high quality building mods in cities :skyline. Its working well for him, but that has partly to do with the his former job, the pure quality of his work, and the press attention hes garnered. I suspect it was the timing of maxis closing and Cities releasing that helped the most, although his models are excellent in every way. Its just that even with great art, without some attention you will languish.
It would be a great thing if Valve implemented a Patreon model for modding instead of direct pay. That would let people get the attention their great work deserves, streamline donations, and not change the nature of the modding community in the process.
I think it would be a great model indeed.
A black and white webcomic I read runs a patreon page, and get $3k a month with only 800 patrons. The author was previously unknown, and managed to reach this point purely on the quality of his/her work and the readership it gathered. Looking at some of the major skyrim mods with millions of downloads, I suspect they could easily gain more than 800 patrons.
So they want to get paid, they just don't want any responsibility towards their product or the people who give them money for it?
Yes, to use your slightly off description. But there's nothing wrong with that if the people offering the money understand what the expectations are before donating.
That comment is mostly by gamers, not modders. Also, the difference is that one assigns a worth, while the other is someone saying 'hey I appreciate what you do'.
> That comment is mostly by gamers, not modders
Ah, the ol' "look I want you to get paid for your work, I just don't want to have to be the one paying you. Don't worry, I'm sure tons of people will. Just not me."
Why would making it possible to make money from them make it impossible not to charge for them?
The system in place didn't do anything to protect the mod from being uploaded fraudulently. If I wanted a $0 price tag on my mod, I especially wouldn't want to spend time I could otherwise be working on my mod policing the store to make sure nobody is selling my mod. Fix that and you fix a lot of the issue.
That's a pretty nontrivial problem to solve technically.
Well, I guess the other issues listed here were nontrivial enough to make a solution unfeasible, or Valve probably wouldn't have backed out.
People are in favor of offering donations and having the modder get the full donation, not being asked to pay for added content. This includes full-fledged mods to a single weapon skin. To make things worse, it seemed that the store became flooded with half-assed content as a means for modders to make a quick buck. Furthermore, some mods required other mods, if the mods that were required started to charge, it became EXTREMELY prohibitive to piggyback.
Most gamers are aware of how Valve became so big and it's through the modding community in HL1 and eventually HL2. Can you imagine how prohibitive it would have been for Counter-Strike to grow if they charged $10 for the mod (obviously when it was till a mod =< v1.6)?
On top of that, some mods were genuine improvements over the original. For instance, there is a huge Skyrim UI mod that is a vast improvement over the vanilla. Some people were actually afraid that game companies would use this pay for mod system as a way to double dip. "Let's release a half-assed UI, let some modder charge for his better UI and take 45-50% of his sales."
They sold Counterstrike as a retail release when it was still a mod. The donation stuff is a sure way to make sure almost no one ever even considers paying.
Eh, yes. But at this point it had a gigantic following and was no longer considered to be in "beta". That said, if you had HL1, you could still download it for free, whereas if you did not and you just wanted CS, you could buy CS. There is a distinct difference.
As far as donations, there is no way you can assume that. Sure, a vast majority won't pay, but I'm sure there are those out there who are generous enough to throw a dollar or two out there to support the modder. Shit, it works for server admins.
Edit: Donations also work for people who contribute nothing and just stream themselves playing games. Some do very well, so I would venture a guess and say a modder putting out quality content could gather a few bucks.
That's not really comparable, they sold a version of Counterstrike that did not require a copy of Half-Life to play, so at that point it wasn't really a "mod" any more.
I think people are used to the apple cut when thinking about the 70% and getting angry, rather than using an already marketed brand to start with, no starting in obscurity.
What I was more concered about was the 'quicksilver' effect. When apple hired the dev who made the tool, it just stopped getting updated.
Everytime a game was patched or updated, what % of the mods would then become unusable, despite paying for it? Can't complain when it's free, but if you paid for the mod is there an expectation of it being working for a period of time? What was that period of time?
As I understand it the games industry has made some "innovations" since I was a gamer back in the 1990s - such as pre-orders, paid early access, DLC, micropayments, retailer-exclusive content, Google Play and Apple App Store, releases of buggy and untested games that just plain won't run, extensive DRM and so on.
Many gamers feel [1] where in the past you paid $a for a complete game, today you pay $a for a fraction of the game then an extra $b and $c and $d and $e through these extra mechanisms.
I suspect some people saw the 75% profit margin, and felt this was more about adding on $f, a new mechanism to transfer yet more money from gamers to big publishers, rather than anything to do with rewarding mod creators.
That seems like an argument that any percentage is fine as long as it's above zero. But certainly people can debate over what a fair percentage is.
Yes, they are. For example, extend your percentage to 1% instead of 25%. Then it becomes obvious you would be just putting a burden on consumers with actual moders profiting only marginally, and the activity as a whole will tend to decline, since it'1) less attractive as an economical activity, 2) less attractive a hobby, since that might be seen as a low paying job instead, and 3) less attractive for consumers given poor/scant products. The 25% is a milder version of this effect, but I don't find it hard to see why people were upset.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
It also appears to have created quite a feud among moders which were or weren't going to charge for their work, since some mods are quite intertwined.
So it was a combination of effects. I do think the basic idea is worth of discussion, but it's certainly debatable if anything other than pay-what-you-want actually fosters the moding community.
As much as the idea of paid mods pissed me off, I 100% agree with this. Anyone who was getting upset over the 25% to the modder was just using it as an argument point and not serious. If they were serious then they would have come to the same conclusion you did and realized 25% of something is better, monetarily, than 100% of nothing.
That doesn't hold up. The argument that Y% of X is better than 100% of 0 for 100 > Y > 0 doesn't seem to hold up if we set Y to be really low, say .01%. Thus we accept that at some point, a certain percent of some amount of money is a 'slap in the face' compared to it being free and based on donations. That some people think that is at 25 instead of .01 does not mean they have a hidden agenda.
I'd say the person who can rightfully make that argument is the person choosing to sell or not sell their content.
Yes, but you cannot judge 25% sufficient (a priori) like that, just as you can't judge any % insufficient a priori. It may very well be too low and damage the community. And clearly the consensus was that it is too low.
My point is independent of who deserves to make that argument. I am merely saying that those who do make that argument are not always doing so with a hidden agenda.
Fair distribution is one of the situations in which rationality breaks down. See the ultimatum game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimatum_game
It's also a sting as others have mentions because the customer already must have bought 100% of something to get assets the will use. The publisher skimming 75% off 100% of the value that modders created for free seems a bit shitty.
Especially when there's still no requirement for the original developer to have made the modders lives any easier to get this benefit.
There's a lot of other context to the issue. -Mods that depend on other mods -Mod dependencies being removed from Nexus and changed to paid mods on Steam -Mods stealing work from other mods
If you read Gabe's responses he starts poking at the "Wow wow wow, why is this bad?" and learns a few things.
> Given that the "passionate content providers" only make 25% of what users pay, I think that's a very generous interpretation.
True however market rate for platform/store is 30% + 20% royalty if you use an IP + 5%-10% for engine or more for publishing dollars.
Many regular game breakdowns are the game developer only get 40-60% revenues, 70% if they have no other costs on most stores including Steam.
With the paid mods Valve took 30% (industry average although it should be challenged -- set by Apple), Bethesda took 45%, 25% for royalty and 20% for their take. Leaving 25% for the content creator.
Other developers could have given up to 50% to the content creator which is as good as many developers get on an original title. Valve probably wants to give more but they can't because other developers would be scared away due to unfairness since Valve owns the platform. 25% is low yes but it is more than people make at a crappy job or more than anyone gets at their day job in terms of ownership or points on profit/work.
I think with the backlash it is good that people can influence companies but much of it was black and white. Mods will always exist with or without Steam. Free mods would only grow with a paid mod side market as any economy grows when money is added in, the free side would have grown. Many of the sharing issues could have been alleviated with a shareable license the creator could add. Pay what you want with a simple breakdown could have been default like Humble Bundle. They also should have launched it with a better breakdown on the initial developer and game chosen.
The mod market will get money invading it again as it is immense and we live in a capitalist system where nothing of sufficient size evades money, but it will be smarter next time. Over the long term, it will make mods more prevalent and overall quality will go up at the top. There may even be a mod professional job someday, I think it is good when people can make income from making or playing games. If you can make money doing what you love then you can spend more time doing it. And donations aren't enough for good mod makers to keep doing it when there are other things they can do.
As far as I understood that was a value set by Bethesda, not Valve.
The latest I've seen is that Valve gets 30%, then the publisher decides what the rest of the split looks like. If they had released the exact same system, but said the modders get 75%, I think this whole ordeal would have been avoided. It's interesting to me that it was apparently better to give modders nothing than to give them 25%.
I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful. They produced the game and made their money on game sales. If they continue to be responsive to bug reports and/or adding new features to the game then perhaps I can see a small amount going to them.
Valve taking a cut I understand as they handle the sales and distribution platform. I'm not sure I think 30% is fair, but that's a different issue.
As a revenue split I'd be much more on board with the modder getting 75% and the rest being to everyone else.
Of course, then you need to consider how mod dependency is handled. And you have to look at how long term mod support is handled. What happens when the modder goes away or Bethesda releases an update that breaks existing mods.
The whole thing is a big nasty ball of problems.
> I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful.
So, you agree that Valve should get some part of the sales, because they are the ones (Steam) actually taking the payment and assuming some of the upfront risks of processing payments (fraud) and, because of the network effect and the customers they bring (read ... marketing)
But Bethesda who developed the actual game that brought the modders and gave them a platform to derive their work on, not to mention creating the actual game and game engine and putting it in the hands of the actual customers; they should just get nothing out of this whole deal?
I agree that the whole thing is a big hairy mess, and as a developer and an underdog myself I agree that the split should be approximately reversed, but I'm not sure there's much else we agree on.
What about mods that the publisher can't do?
I played GRID a lot and found the "any car any track" mod which was awesome. Codemasters didn't do that for some reason. There are mods that add Ferraris, Codemaster aren't licensed to include those cars. They were even in the trailer for the game and got pulled.
There's mods to include stuff the publisher couldn't even care[1] to sort out. Why should they get any cut of money for that. Would they even be allowed to take a cut? I assume this kind of stuff sits in a grey zone at the moment.
I think this will always be a problem if you couple the distribution and the day-to-day service in the way steam does.
If you think about it, those mods probably wouldn't be able to be sold either (forget anyone taking a cut)
Unless a deal could have been worked out with Ferrari. But good on you for asking something different!
I agree maybe not the best example, but it illustrates about problems than can come up from combining services in the market. Hypothetically if steam was _just_ a package manager and the mods payed to for the convenience of users to install it. It shouldn't matter about the content.
Maybe a better example is Red Alert 2, I still occasionally LAN play that and there's a community patch to replace the IPX stack with TCP/IP so it can still work. as IPX is completely gone from windows 8+ I think.
That's a great example of a mod that just plainly repairs a deficiency in the original game! I was in fact struggling to think of one.
It's clear that this game is abandoned and there's no further support coming from Westwood Studios for it, not to mention that it won't be coming available on Steam any time soon. As troubled as this analogy is, ...
I think it's still clear that in a hypothetical scenario where Steam gets the rights to distribute RA2 and Westwood (EA? who owns the rights to C&C series now?) has still washed their hands of support for it long ago, it would make sense for Steam to give the mod authors the option of sending back some percent of the gross (1-10%) to the rights holders for the game. Sort of a "vote with your dollars" kind of thing.
Of course if we are really talking about sending "extra money" to EA to say thanks, as a mod author or gamer I'm probably going to need to vomit right away, but replace EA with some other hypothetical not-shitty company (the ghost of Westwood) and I think you've got a deal.
This whole scenario just makes me reflect on the relatively recent development of Apple deciding that they can't allow any apps in their phone store that mention support for any products competing with Apple Watch (misfit, fitbit, etc)
The way this played out just goes to show who really owns the greatest share of the attention of Valve and Steam (it's the game companies, not the mods or the community.)
Well, if Bethesda gave the game away for free and wanted a source of revenue from mod makers, sure. But it's quite established that a strong mod community results in continuing sales for the game beyond a normal product lifespan. In some cases, the price of product remains higher than normal because of the strong sales due to the mod community. Bethesda has already made money on the backs of mod makers.
A proper response to this is to give all the remaining money after Valve's cut to the mod maker as a thank you to the community.
But this doesn't even address the other problems that people have been pointing out.
> But Bethesda who developed the actual game that brought the modders and gave them a platform to derive their work on, not to mention creating the actual game and game engine and putting it in the hands of the actual customers; they should just get nothing out of this whole deal?
Mods represent value added to the game that wasn't provided by the original publisher. Each mod "fixes" a deficiency in the game, adds, changes, or removes something the original developer did not do from the baseline game. The changes add value to the publisher's bottom line by increasing the value of the game, thus stimulating additional sales.
Thus the idea that modders both increase demand for the game, increasing the publisher's sales, AND want the lion's share of the money paid for mods is repugnant.
I don't see how the idea that Steam should get a share approaching 30% is any less repugnant than that. Visa gets less than 4%, and they are the ones that are really processing the charge. Valve eats that much, and whatever they get paid over that is simply for their role in facilitating the transaction
If any of these three parties declined to provide their own involvement, a sale does not happen. So all of them are reasonably entitled to a share. But not necessarily a whole third.
I agree that Half-Life developers should not be the ones getting the majority of the sticker price of CounterStrike, insofar as those people are disparate parties and the popularity of CounterStrike drives sales of HL and even surpasses Half-Life in popularity. But it is impossible to deny that CS does not have a game to sell at all without HL.
They did sell "CS-Only" discs without the ability to play Half-Life in single-player mode, didn't they? And, Valve still got a cut? (What's that? They never did? Hmm...)
Edit: There is obviously some risk for Valve, too. Maybe more than Visa in the long run, but I think they will pass on the risk to those who they pay, just like Visa. They do get to hold the money, and they can decide who gets paid.
> I don't see how the idea that Steam should get a share approaching 30% is any less repugnant than that.
If you don't understand they 30% is reasonable, then you haven't tried to sell a game in the last 5 years.
That 30% you're paying increases your sales by a factor of 50x, and game developers are quite happy to take 70% of a much larger pie.
> to take 70%
We were talking about the mod sales. Nobody is taking 70%, unless you counted the original game sale as part of the pie. Maybe we should.
The split as I understood it to be defined was: Valve takes 30% (arguably OK, but I'd argue for less), Game dev gets 45% (passive income hacker, woo!) and the Mod dev gets 25%.
I think it would be perfectly reasonable for Mod devs to get 45% of the sales of their own mods, but Valve asked Bethesda to define the split. What self-respecting PIH is going to give themselves or their own company less than 50%, really, if they are unilaterally the one making the decision about who gets paid and how much?
You are also right about one more thing, I don't have the first idea about selling games. But I would argue it's more work to build EITHER or BOTH a game engine and a mod than it is to sell it. In other words, Bethesda's cut should not be less than Valve's, in my humble opinion, and those mods would NOT have been for sale (or for free) without Bethesda and their game engine.
(Or at least, we would have entirely some other developer and game to thank for their share in this controversy.)
Bethesda did get something. They got my purchase of the original game plus all of the DLCs. All at initial sale prices to boot.
Do they deserve more than that?
I don't know about deserve, but if you want to talk about incentives for behavior, you really can't go wrong with something that provides both "increased sales volume and lifetime" and "an ongoing share of the grosses".
If you want game developers to promote a helpful environment for mod developers, grab some money and pay them something out of it. Definitely!
> I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful. They produced the game and made their money on game sales.
They produced the game engine, and are letting people develop on it for free. And them getting a cut from people piggybacking on their work and making money from it was distasteful to you?
'Piggyback' is a loaded word. Its something we all do when we use a compiler or desktop machine. Yet those folks don't stick their hands into our revenue stream.
> Yet those folks don't stick their hands into our revenue stream.
Game engines do. And they used to tack on $100,000 up front, to boot.
Not all game engines, some are free to use.
Some are, true. But the ones with lots of features, that everyone really wants to use—the ones that you can make games for multiple platforms, and that big development houses use—those... are not free.
[0] Actually if you look at some of the big engines, they are becoming free, or require a small royalty to use, and it sure as hell isn't a 75% cut.
It's much less than 75%—but then, you only get the engine, you don't also get the multimillion dollar award winning game to build on top of. If you make a mod for Skyrim—say, a new dungeon—you're adding that to the existing game and assets and dungeons and all that. You don't have to build everything from scratch, and you don't need your new content to be enough by itself to get people to buy it. A game with 1 dungeon, who would buy? But a mod that adds 1 dungeon to Skyrim, sure.
So yes, 75% is high, but the conversation should be, what cut should everyone receive, not, why does Bethesda deserve a cut at all, which most of the conversation actually is.
Well, I could say that the fact the assets already exist in the game that I paid for, then the assets have already been paid for whether there's a mod that makes use of them or not. The other factor is that the game assets the modder is using is only available to players who have purchased the game. The assets have been paid for once, what this system is asking that the assets be paid for more than once. Mind you, not paid for by the modder, but by the player who has already paid once for those assets. To expand that to an obvious conclusion; let's say there is a sword asset in the game I paid for. I pay for ten mods that make use of that same sword asset in different ways. Which means I have paid for that same sword eleven times. Which is free money to the developer for doing absolutely nothing beyond providing the initial game I already paid for.
Also, are they going to have different percentages based on amount of usage of game assets? So far I haven't seen an indication of that.
As I have said before, if Skyrim had been free then I could understand the position. In this case I feel it is in the best interest of the company and game to let the modders go forward without interference. But hey, that's just my opinion, it's their company and their game so they can do whatever they want.
LOL, exactly.
Hell, why don't musical instrument makers get a share of royalties for music made with their instruments?
> Hell, why don't musical instrument makers get a share of royalties for music made with their instruments?
Hell, why don't game engine developers get a share of royalties for games made with their engines?
...oh, right, they do.
Microsoft doesn't get a cut of Jetbrains' IDE "mod" revenue, though, despite the fact that Reshaper and similar products "piggyback" (what a loaded term) onto Visual Studio and other Microsoft products. Microsoft already got their cut up front.
Same thing for Bethesda - it's not their value-add and they don't have a moral right to take a cut. On the other hand Steam is providing a value-add here - a market and financial transaction services.
Yes.
I paid full price for the game and all of the DLC.
Part of the reason I did this was due to the ability of the game to be easily modded. I knew with modding the lifetime of the game was much greater.
Why should they get 40% of mod sales for doing nothing? They already got paid for making the game.
Now, if they are still providing good customer support with timely bug fixes around the mod system, then perhaps I can see a small portion going to them. Otherwise, why do you think they are entitled to a share of the mod revenue?
> I paid full price for the game and all of the DLC.
> Part of the reason I did this was due to the ability of the game to be easily modded. I knew with modding the lifetime of the game was much greater.
So you paid full price for the game because you knew people would spend their time and effort making things for you for free... and now that there was an option for them to get paid for their work, you get pissy?
I knew the mod community around the game would provide value long past the original game.
Did I say I never donated to mod authors? Did you ask?
I'm not pissy, but it sounds like perhaps you are.
> Did I say I never donated to mod authors? Did you ask?
What difference does it make? Even if you were a good citizen and donated, there aren't enough people donating for it to be a dependable income stream.
> it sounds like perhaps you are
133,000 people who claim to represent gamers signed a petition saying that modders should work for free, how dare they think they should get paid. I'm not a mod author. I'm not even a mod user. But I'm someone who believes in paying people who make the things I like, so that they can keep making more. This was an opportunity for a new marketplace, a new way for people to start making content for games—and for some, support themselves by making that content. An opportunity for anyone to use the IP of another company—which I don't think exists in any other industry. Can you imagine what it would take for Disney to allow anybody to legally make and sell their own Mickey Mouse cartoons? But no, it had to get shat on by entitled assholes who want people to make and make and make and give nothing back. You say it sounds like I'm pissy? Damn straight I'm pissy.
The part where they also got to sell the game engine to customers, the developers, and then take a cut of the developers profits too?
You don't buy the mod, and get the game to run it. You have to buy the game, then buy the mod. If they want more money for the game, they can increase the price.
> If they want more money for the game, they can increase the price.
That still doesn't get the mod developers any money.
Also, I wasn't aware that Bethesda had released their game engine for free. Care to give a link as to where they've done so? As far as I'm aware you still need to pay for a copy of it.
Their game isn't free; nor did I claim that it was. What is free, however, is they don't charge you any licensing fee to create a mod for it.
> It's interesting to me that it was apparently better to give modders nothing than to give them 25%.
It's due to perceived "fairness"
This 75/25 split by Valve reminds me of the psychology experiment the Ultimatum Game: "'Inequity aversion' is so strong that people are willing to sacrifice personal gain in order to prevent another person from receiving an inequitably better outcome." https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-brain-work/200911/...
Inequity Aversion only exists in America and other Westernized countries btw. We're WEIRD like that.
Different cultures respond differently to the Ultimatum Game. Be wary of those studies that only use "Anglo-Saxon American College Kids" as test subjects, which is a group of people that isn't even representative of America in general.
http://bigthink.com/praxis/are-americans-the-weirdest-people...
>>> The revelation that rural Peruvians handle the ultimatum game so differently from American respondents led Henrich on a MacArthur Foundation-funded research trip to more than a dozen more locales around the world, where he found wide variation in the average offers of player #1 and this curious result: “in some societies — ones where gift-giving is heavily used to curry favor or gain allegiance — the first player would often make overly generous offers in excess of 60 percent, and the second player would often reject them, behaviors almost never observed among Americans.”
>Inequity Aversion only exists in America and other Westernized countries btw.
Monkeys do it:
http://www.livescience.com/2044-monkeys-fuss-inequality.html
That's not quite the same. That game involves two people trying to figure out who gets what from a pot of money they did nothing to deserve receiving. Mod makers did work that may deserve compensation. One example is a possible bonus for the people involved, the other is a possible shafting for the people involved.
Yes they wanted 45% so Valve slapped on another 30% while not providing any or minimal QA from Valve or Bethesda for that other 75%?.
As with the Store or Greenlight before outsourcing tasks to the community (reviews/greenlight votes) doesn't mean Valve isn't responsible for the stuff they offer in their store. A 24h hour refund policy is simply laughable when non-waiveable EU consumer rights regulations require 14 days.
The other thing is the quite astronomic payout cap at $100 which means any hobbyist has to sell $400 ore more, depending on taxes before he see any of his efforts compensated. This further shows that Valve was not interested in amateurs but this was all about professionalizing the modding scene to a few contributors.
> so Valve slapped on another 30% while not providing any or minimal QA from Valve
Valve was charging 30% for operating the storefront, handling payment, the value of having spent years building a site where people are willing to come and pay for things, the value of having built a service that would allow modders to make money building off of another company's work, and so on. Valve's 30% was well deserved.
Heaving dealt with Valve customer service a few times, the 30% is definitely not going into training, hiring more or providing responsive and helpful customer service. Valve only get's away with it because they run a de facto monopoly.
> the 30% is definitely not going into training, hiring more or providing responsive and helpful customer service
It should, certainly, and it's not, but I didn't claim that it was.
> non-waiveable EU consumer rights regulations require 14 days
I don't think this is true in the case of purely digital products. As far as I am aware of the german implementation of this regulation it explicitly allows to waive the rights before the first download. Like many companies steam does this during checkout ("I agree..").
That Steam allows it doesn't make it legally binding or compliant with current regulations which override any TOS/EULA in a given legal region.
http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/consumer_affairs/consum...
«In the case of digital content, the cooling-off period expires when the downloading or streaming starts.»
Says you can't waive it; for digital downloads the 14 day period get's annulled once you start downloading/streaming, not at checkout. Since many more things can go wrong with software(games) then compared to linear media (books/music/video) that implementation is still questionable.
Untouched by this, at least in Germany every product sold (including Software) comes with two years of warranty ("Gewährleistung") which is established between the consumer an the reseller (at point of final sale, in this case Valve SARL) which first requires the reseller to provide a working product ("Nacherfüllung") if that's not possible the customer is entitled to a refund. Not that that this is found in many online shops in Germany, but those are the regulations that Valve has to follow by when selling software (games) to German customers.
And don't forget they were trying to minimise the potential competition and challenge to their revenue streams that modding represents.
Oh so you think Valve has no negotiation power over this kind of things?
And okayed by Valve.
In a way, this reminds me of the old joke:
> A man asks a woman if she would be willing to sleep with him if he pays her an exorbitant sum. She replies affirmatively. He then names a paltry amount and asks if she would still be willing to sleep with him for the revised fee. The woman is greatly offended and replies as follows:
> She: What kind of woman do you think I am?
> He: We’ve already established that. Now we’re just haggling over the price.
The important bit here is that mod developers can get paid. How much is a matter of negotiation and revising.
So the closest analogue to computer game "mods" in the book publishing world is "fan fiction".
Note that 25% is pretty generous when you're creating a derivitive work off of someone else's IP. See Kindle Worlds http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1001197421 for an example of the kind of deal you'd be lucky to get.
> Note that 25% is pretty generous when you're creating a derivitive work off of someone else's IP
Your opinion is in the minority, I'm afraid. By and large,the gaming community (on reddit at least) has spoken, and Valve took heed.
Fan-fiction doesn't require you to have bought the original work to read (though having read the original may affect your enjoyment of the fanfic).
Honda doesn't get a cut if I have my car modded at an independent shop.
> Honda doesn't get a cut if I have my car modded at an independent shop.
Not yet at least. However car (and tractor) manufacturers are moving to make such activity illegal using encryption and intellectual propertly laws.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, just that our current regulatory regime supports this model.
Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright.
Yikes.
This little subtopic can't be summed up in a sentence. Valve didn't set the 25% number, and that's the important part. Bethesda opted to take over 40%.
Actually, I think both launching it and canceling it were ill-conceived moves.
The first - obviously didn't align well with the community's (more like the mod users) intentions. The canceling - Upset quality producing modders who think they should be compensated for their time and effort, and now makes them part "part of valve's greediness" in the eyes of users.
Seems like they didn't think all the way through in both moves.
> Seems like they didn't think all the way through in both moves.
Yes, it looks pretty bad, and it makes Valve look like a bunch of amateurs. And this is coming from someone who generally likes what they do.
The thing is they always do shit like this. Steam had tons of problems in the early days. And remember when Greenlight was launched? Total shitshow. Valve doesn't always think things through all the way, but eventually, they work out the bugs and the result ends up being pretty damn good.
> Valve doesn't always think things through all the way
Sure, but they are not like in the early days, they have experienced people now, and tons of cash, and should not be making the same mistakes over and over again like they were beginners or something. It just reflects badly on the whole company.
I think and hope that they will try again with another game that isn't out yet or at least has no strong mod community yet. That's what they decided as the biggest problem, experimenting on a big community instead of a small one.
Hijacking for visibility (I'm so late to the party..)
Valve has not ended the paid mods programme. They've only turned it off for Skyrim.
From the Valve post:
> We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop.
They're very explicitly removing it only from Skyrim.
Personally, I'm completely okay with the paid mod system - and I think the reason it failed so spectacularly was because of Bethesda and the invisibleness of the "Valve takes 30%, Bethesda takes 45%" - But it is important to note
Yes, sorry, didn't say that clearly enough. The real mistake here was starting with the biggest mod community they have. You should first try to find a good system without being so public about it. And that's what they will change. Iterating with a smaller project.
I'm personally incredibly hopeful for Tabletop Simulator.
The Skyrim community was just a bad fit, and Bethesda a terrible overlord.
Valve are people and people make mistakes. With that said, lets make sure that we pay attention to how FEW mistakes they make.
I think Valve/Steam (and Bethesda) really screwed up on this one. Although the idea of modders being fairly compensated for their work is a great idea the execution was poor at best.
Only 25% going to the content creators? Really?
And a poor returns mechanism, getting a refund gets you banned from the steam store for 7 days to stop abuse. That's a poor returns policy when you're buying things like mods that might be of really poor quality once you start to use them.
I agree with everything you said, but it seemed like a lot of the more nuanced feedback on this was drowned out by a subset of gamers having a screaming tantrum at the suggestion of paying anything for a mod, regardless of where the money was going.
I'm hopeful that Valve will eventually try this again on a new game with a fairer compensation structure and a better community infrastructure in place. I'm not so hopeful that that same subset of gamers won't have a tantrum all over again.
It might be something that could work for a new game, but in the case of skyrim, I don't see any kind of paid mod system working.
Skyrim has a very complex modding system, and a lot of skyrim mods have dependencies on other skyrim mods, so when you start putting any mods behind a paywall things get dicey real fast.
It could only see this working in a game where mods are simple and standalone.
I wonder what kind of infrastructure could fix this. Imagine a official phone store where anyone could upload a app, and no platform API that dictate what the software can do.
In the case that a phone got bricked, can the store owner just shrug it off? If malware was injected, who is to blame? When something suddenly breaks because conflicting apps, is that the customers fault? Does it matter if the app was sold 14 days ago, 30 days ago, 1 year?
It would make for a nice reading for a solution to this problem that would handle all of this, while retaining fully compatibility with consumer laws and customers trust in the market.
I've learned that there's at least two hard rules when it comes to money for digital services
1) It's almost impossible to start charging for something that was free
2) It's almost impossible to go from one time payment to subscription model.
If you want either model you better start out with them or you're going to have a vengeful mob after you. I've seen this repeated time after time with catastrophic results. I was actually surprised that Adobe got away with it.
I wonder what would happen if GitHub placed a clone fee and split it between itself and the repo owner...
If that was an option, but not the only option, it could make for an interesting addition to their business model.
* Public repositories (fork for free) * Premium repositories (fork for a fee) * Private repositories (restricted to content owner who pays the fee)So basically, GitHub offering a service where users could charge for software, and get the source code as well? And not just a core dump, but be part of a community building up that source? ...That's a pretty solid idea.
My understanding is that that's how software distribution used to work back in the mainframe days - you'd get the source to build in your specific environment, and you could modify it to add whatever functionality you needed. Then binary distribution took over as platforms became more intercompatible.
And you still can do that—supply the source when you sell an app. But to be able to not just give your customers the source, but to give them access to a GitHub project that they can follow, and submit pull requests to, and pull new updates and so on from... plus, to not have to set up your own storefront, and manage the source permissions and whatnot. That would be a very nice feature for GitHub to have.
^ this.
If anyone is interested in building it, send me a note, I'd love to be involved (but totally lack the skills to do it myself).
Heck, me too—I can think of several projects I worked on but eventually gave up on. If there was a way for me to get paid for it, still work on it, and have other people help out as well? Without having to operate my own storefront?
I think the more important thing is they actually responded to their users. Valve is a model company. Live and learn.
Yet people (primarily redditors) were swearing up and down that our complaints meant nothing and that we were wasting our time and that Valve only cared about money.
Like seriously, have those people been paying attention? If anybody is going to listen to their userbase, admit their mistake, and do a 180, it's Valve.
The sentiment probably comes from experiencing Valve's customer support, which is a lot like Google's - either
- the automated system solve your problem, or
- you have enough influence to generate bad press for them, or
- your problem will most likely be ignored.
Gabe has acknowledged how horrible the customer support is and they are, supposedly, working on a solution.
I count myself fortunate to have never needed to interact with the customer support. <knocks on wood>
The time for a solution was ten years ago. It has always been quite bad.
I don't to sound like a pessimist but reading the blog post on Steam I can't help but notice:
"We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating."
Translation: "We'll let it go this time". It wouldn't surprise me if the next Bethesda game had that very same system baked-in right from the start.
Yeah, they ONLY removed it from Skyrim. Other games will be getting it (although probably modified).
If Bethesda/Steam know this feature is coming, they can create tools to help make it actually successful.
For example, they can require mod makers to explicitly assign a license to their work before publishing the mod. Even allow encryption/signing of mods. That alone would have vastly reduced the "this jerkwad stole my free mod and is charging for it!" problem.
Why would that be bad?
It's probably mainly a matter of personal opinion, but while I agree we should find a way to encourage better and more professional modding, I think that this particular implementation would create a technical/legal/ethical mess out of something which has worked well for the past decades. In short, they half-assed it, and it being one of the first implementations of this kind of system (and thus setting a huge precedent for other games) it should absolutely not be half-assed.
The particular problems I have are:
* Developers are already shipping less and less finished games knowing that they can pile on some more content afterwards in DLCs, for a steep fee. Knowing that they can just provide modding tools and let the users create the content themselves and still get a huge part (45% in the case of Bethesda) will just encourage the release of even more broken games.
* That's not even considering the fact that it encourages modding to go from a relatively open thing (you can open any mod in the mod editor software which you can get for free and add stuff to it yourself, and even redistribute it with the permission of the author) to a closed thing: there would be a big incentive to tack on some DRM to stop other people from "stealing content" from paid mods and create their own.
* Finally, it would turn the Steam workshop marketplace, which is already a mess, into the same thing that different app stores have become: a complete mess filled with garbage copycats trying to con people into giving them a few bucks.
I do not have a solution, but I think there should be more thought put into it. For the moment, patronage style remuneration and crowdfunding are the best solutions we have.
Exactly. People don't mind if companies screw up like this just as long as they know when to admit they were wrong.
Too afraid to lose users to proceed with their vision.
They still think that "the problem" was that they were asking for mods to be compensated(and that the exiting mod community doesn't like commercialism), not that they were keeping 3/4 of it.
Valve kept 30%, Bethesda kept 45% and modders got the rest. It's not just Valve's fault.
Wow, Bethesda is sure greedy in a self-punishing way. I mean you have to buy the game before buying mods. Surely 5-10% would be enough.
I'm sure from Bethesda's perspective, they own the IP and built all of the tools for the modders. It made sense in their meetings, but failed in the community.
They said something along the lines if "25% is an 'industry standard". I think they referenced to the hats, knives and whatnot being sold on TF2/CS:GO marketplaces.
Ditto. I'd quite happily pay for mods - they add value, there's more a chance of bugs being fixed, Steam would make installation less of a hassle. But 25% going to the authors is awful. The game's original creators - who already benefit from increased sales - additionally get more of the revenue than the actual mod creator.
It's an example for the perfectly accepted greed in the corporate world.
Valve claims that 30% share is fair while having one of the highest income per employee of any company. That means that their share is too high.
It's more than what the government demands from you, while the government is _much_ more important than Valve is for any business.
The CEO of Valve argues that money steers the community. That's true, and it leads to slavery, drug trafficking criminal organizations and war if the government doesn't regulate. Commercialization does not only have good consequences. Though being able to extort more money out of the masses might skew your vision on that.
Just because it sells doesn't mean people like it. It might be lack of alternatives.
I'm not in principle against money. If you really think that you should, offering a service to make payments to the authors easy might be good. But among many things, DON'T BE RIDICULOUSLY GREEDY.
Let's suppose now that to develop the infrastructure for your service was really expensive and the market volume is not big enough to get the investment back with small percentages.
This is an interesting situation because even if you are "forced" to offer it with 25% share for the author some authors will use it due to lack of alternatives.
Right now I don't have a good solution to this problem. Maybe lower your cut according with the return you already got until you arrived at a fair share? Maybe the best would be if you didn't offer your service at all...
Apple takes 30% of app store purchases, in-app purchases, and iAd revenue. Google takes 30% of Google Play purchases and in-app products. 30% is a reasonable share for the maintainer of a network to take.
As for the 25% to the author of the mod, that does seem unfair, but I don't think that was Valve's decision. I think they left that up to the game producer, Bethesda in this case. Bethesda chose how to split the remaining 70%.
As an aside, Valve's income per employee is totally irrelevant. Their 30% fee is set by market forces. If they lost billions of dollars this year or if they hired 10,000 people to handle support calls, the "fairness" of a 30% fee is not affected. It wouldn't become more fair just because their income per employee ratio changed.
That 30% is set by market forces. It's what we've all generally agreed a marketplace can charge for operating the infrastructure. In this case, Valve has a challenge, because there are multiple parties splitting the remaining 70%. So they might need to lower their fee to let the game producers and the modders take larger slices of the pie.
Apple, Google and Valve all only get away with taking 30% because they managed to establish more or less of a monopoly on stores in each of their respective ecosystems.
Steam is arguably still the most permissive of all of those since it allows redeeming keys purchased directly from the developer or places like Humble Bundle Store which are reported to take a smaller cut.
You say a share is fair when it's what the market currently offers.
That's obviously a remarkably stupid definition of fair.
Read my comment again. I never said that a share is fair when it's what the market currently offers. You're simply inferring something I didn't say.
I explained why the 30% is a reasonable rate as compared to other marketplaces.
And as an aside, I argued that income per employee is not a good metric of fairness. I never argued that 30% is fair or unfair, as I think that is frankly a pointless debate.
But I did say that, to me, 25% going to the modder feels unfair. So, I get why you might think I was arguing 30% is fair – though that was not my intention.
In general reasonable implies fair.
Yes, there might be situation where you can only decide between two unfair solutions and one is less unfair, and one could argue that that one is the reasonable choice. This is because reason-ability and fairness are not binary. Still, the tendency remains: if you say X is reasonable you imply X is fair.
Income per employee is not a good metric, you are right. However, if your profits are very high you must raise salaries if they are not already too high, lower your prices or invest to be fair.
I hear what you're saying. People use the words interchangeably, but in this context, I think there's an important distinction between fair and reasonable:
- Fairness is a moral judgment.
- Reasonableness is a logical argument.
That's why I argued that Valve's taking 30% is reasonable but not necessarily fair.
Reasonableness usually implies more than just a logicality, including fairness. To then say that the 30% cut is reasonable means that to say that it's fair.
Let's assume reasonableness were equivalent to logicality. Then, for a decision to be reasonable, it must satisfy some logical conditions. I'd argue that is in our case maximizing a fixed metric in relation to all other possible options. One either doesn't value fairness in the decision-evaluation metric, the 30% cut is fair enough or it's unreasonable.
So, putting it all together, we get
(1) 30% is fair (enough),
(2) one doesn't value fairness prominently in decision making metrics or
(3) the 30% cut is unreasonable.
I'd say the 30% is _not_ fair (enough). That leaves one to pick (2) or (3).
Generally on HN we like to say why we think something is bad, rather than merely labelling it as stupid.
Free market value is a common measure of fairness. You might disagree (eg, you could argue Steam has a monopoly on PC gaming, likewise non-official app stores are rare on cell phones, so it's not a free market), but you should state why.
And I like HN for demanding explanation. Shout-out to all the skeptics!
I focused the problem with his argument into one sentence that made it intuitively understandable. Then I stated my opinion. I thought that'd be enough explanation.
Free market value is often obviously unfair.
For example, in many companies the highest managers receive a hundred times the average salary in the company. Nobody works for one hundred persons. They just get so much because they can take it.
Prices in the market are heavily distorted by - among many things - incomplete information, time delay, entry barriers, racism, stereotypes and criminality.
That digital distributors agreed on taking 30% doesn't make it necessarily fair. It is fair if it includes so much work such that so much money is necessary. However, I doubt they have so much cost to make their income per employee fair.
Why is it not fair if they earn so much? Because they don't do so much more for the society than for example the average firefighter and therefore shouldn't earn so much more money.
> For example, in many companies the highest managers receive a hundred times the average salary in the company. Nobody works for one hundred persons.
I don't think anyone's actually making that argument. Rather they'd say the highest managers may be providing 100x or more value to the company.
>Free market value is a common measure of fairness.
Free market value is a fantasy. No market is really free. No value is set by a free market.
If what you are saying is that in theory under certain completely fantastical assumptions that market value is fair and otherwise it's not, then yea, I agree.
I certainly agree that freedom isn't absolute: there are more of less degrees of competition in a market. However that doesn't preclude supply/demand setting values for things.
> while the government is _much_ more important than Valve is for any business.
Hah. If only that were true. The government's only positive role in commerce is ensuring political stability. Lots of times, they fail hard at that one job.
Once you have political stability, then the government becomes a power broker. The tax system is really an elaborate financial instrument for big business, has been ever since the dawn of mercantilism. The value you gain from the government is proportional to how close you are to the giant sums of money being funneled through it.
Sure, there are things like welfare programs that ensure an adequate baseline of minimum prosperity, (i.e. the homeless in the US won't starve to death, and might get a bed to sleep on a couple times a week) but you only really benefit from them if you really need them, and relying on them is no fun. And we only have those because those of us close to the poor, who can't just shut them out, threw enough of a fit to force the elites to.
The rest of us, lower and middle classes, small and medium businesses, including entities like Valve, don't get squat from the government. We have to earn our own keep, we can't rely on the government to bail us out.
The government is entirely too small to help out the rest of society in any meaningful way. They can try to pass laws, but laws breed loopholes and suck for the same reason Valve's lofty initiative failed, it's impossible to consider the incentive structure of the new world you're creating with a law until you actually enact it and see what's going on, and there's only so far hiring experts will get you. Legislation is a long, slow slog towards a saner world on the aggregate, and a vehicle for pork in the particular.
The only thing worthwhile the government provides US businesses is in just being there. Great that we have one, but extremely hard to point out specific things it does that aren't already being far better done by other commercial entities.
Unfortunately, I think this concern will be lost in the noise. The most noise on this issue seems to have been that gamers do not want to pay for mods and not that modders feel they are being unfairly compensated.
I really don't have an issue with paying for good mods and in fact I was really excited by the initial announcement because I would have totally gotten into game modding if I could earn some significant supplemental income doing it.
This is true, and if you read into it you'll find that it wasn't anything to do with Valve, but actually Bethesda who defined the 25%, they've already profited immensely from the game and I found it quite hard to swallow that they were not stiffing dedicated content creators.
I struggle to see why Bethesda has any say at all. They need Valve/Steam more than Valve/Steam need Bethesda. What, are they going to launch their own paid mod system? Who would waste their time with that? Seems to me like Valve holds all the cards...
edit: And maybe Bethesda would've taken their ball and gone home for any less, but I'm sure Valve could've found another developer. They probably should have ,given Bethesda's bad reputation for making games that need bug-fixing mods, terrible DLC, and the vastness of the FREE modding community.
In business terms, you could consider giving a cut to the modders a marketing expense (you might sell more because the mods increase the value of your game, perhaps?). But you can also consider it as providing a platform that modders exploit commercially, and you can squeeze them as much as is sensible in any commercial relationship.
I think the number of people buying a game because of a mod is rather small, so business people will see things more from the second viewpoint.
Really? I'd never buy Half Life 1, since late 90s graphics looks pretty poor these days, but I'd happily pay for it to use Black Mesa.
Better yet - from another post here:
> "How many copies of Arma 2 were sold explicitly because of DayZ? How many copies of Half-life were sold because of Counter Strike? Warcraft 3 and Dota? etc."
I don't understand, Steam hosts mods for free, so why would they want such a huge chunk? Then Bethesda just needs a minor incentive for developing the mod tools, which were already funded for the creation of the game (I imagine they use the same tools, if not something more advanced, correct me if I'm wrong?). In fact the mod tools don't get updated all that often after being released as far as I'm aware.
I dunno, a mod store could raise the support necessary for running a store by an order of magnitude or two. Plus, to their credit, it seems like they were spitballing and ready to revise.
EDIT: Actually, they will get a favorable reaction to a much more reasonable compensation (say 25%) to content creators now that the community has gotten the worst of its reaction out. It might even be calculated.
When Steam is hosting mods for free, then they are effectively just hosting files. They transfer so much data, I can imagine this would be effectively zero cost for them.
Once they start charging for something, the entire payment infrastructure is now part of the picture. They need to pay merchant fees, assume risk for disputed transactions, arrange for the money to be split up and transfered to stakeholders, etc. This may not account for 30% (who knows) but it does make sense to charge something.
The biggest issue for me was 'library' mods. ie mods that sole purpose is being used by other mods. SKSE for instance. They were virtually unable to profit of this system. However, if Steam handled mods dependy, they could retribute mods like this. That could actually be very good for AppStore, and free libraries : each sale in the appstore could also profit to the ones that created the basic build block.
So you would willingly pay full price for your standard game, whether it's half-life 3, skyrim 2 or whatever, and on top of that pay for mods just because it makes your UI nicer and you like that sweet axe skin?
The whole EA getting off Steam fiasco is something similar, except a new policy in Steam wants 30% of anyone's revenue for DLC even if you setup your own payment system, and distribution system. So Steam would be getting money for doing absolutely nothing.
As a user, I'm totally fine with that. PC game distribution was so braindead that third parties (Steam, etc.) could strong-arm their way into un-bundling. Having chosen a payment and download system I'm not inclined to let game publishers try to force me into a different one, and whatever financial incentives Valve can apply to make that painful is great.
Doesn't Valve bring in the users and the channel to them ?
Used to, I imagine EA is going to sell games regardless of Steam, they have quite a "portfolio" of games that just "sell themselves". The only reason I ever got on Steam was because of Counter-Strike, I imagine the only reason others hear of Origin is because of games from BioWare and DICE.
Modders should be able to ask for donations, nothing more. They should see this as an opportunity to create great content based off of a much larger and more established game. If they want to get compensated, perhaps their great content will take off and one day they can make their own standalone, but until then, donations only. See Counter-Strike, DayZ, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Insurgency, et al.
Two comments:
1) Valve half-assed the implementation (of course) so that existing mods couldn't be changed to "pay what you want" (a.k.a. donations) unless you deleted and re-uploaded the mod (thus breaking auto-updates for anybody who had the old version).
2) The real tragedy here is that Valve's also turned off the "pay what you want" option in addition to the listed price options. So if I do want to accept donations for my mods, even understanding my "cut" is only 25%, I can no longer do that.
Where were you with your rational thinking when the witch-hunt was going on on Reddit? It was so disappointing to watch.
The original content creators are the people who made the base game and own the IP of which mods are derivative.
>Only 25% going to the content creators? Really? //
What percentage do the actual content creators get usually in a blockbuster game release? That probably provided a floor for what Valve/Steam consider reasonable.
Is that 25% of gross or net of sales taxes or ...
It should be the other way around: Steam keeps 25% brokerage.
Bethesda introduced DLCs to the PC gaming world in 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion#...
Valve introduced DRM to the PC gaming world in late 2004: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software)#HistoryThe first update came as a set of specialized armor for Oblivion 's ridable horses; released on April 3, 2006. Although gamers generally displayed enthusiasm for the concept of micropayments for downloadable in-game content, many expressed their dissatisfaction at the price they had to pay for the relatively minor horse-armor package on the Internet and elsewhere.[85] Hines assured the press that Bethesda was not going to respond rashly to customer criticism.
There are alternatives like GoG, that are DRM/DLC-free.Valve's Half-Life 2 was the first game to require installation of the Steam client to play, even for retail copies. This decision was met with concerns about software ownership, software requirements, and issues with overloaded servers demonstrated previously by the Counter-Strike rollout. During this time users faced multiple issues attempting to play the game.Valve introduced DRM to the PC gaming world in late 2004
Utter nonsense. Have you never played an abandonware game from the late 80s and early 90s? "Enter the first letter of the third word on page 14 of the manual"? I used to get pirated Amiga 500 floppies with the copy protection stripped out and a little boot animation from the pirates inserted.
Valve introduced Steam to the PC gaming world... but then again, it's their product. And when all is said and done, Steam has been a significant net benefit.
You are wrong. DRM != copy protection
You can own the DVD with a copy protection and even legally create a backup-copy. You simply cannot own a DRM product, as its bound to a server side check. DRM products may suddenly vanish from your PC, or change its content. Valve already wiped some games and changed the regional settings (removing games from certain parts of the world in retrospect) and Rockstar released an automatic patch for GTA San Andreas (2005) over Steam which altered the game (broke several features like widescreen support, removed several songs from radio stations)
Copy protection is a form of DRM. It is used to manage rights to digital content. You're redefining DRM to mean "the trend of selling licenses rather than software", which is only one form of DRM.
It's the other way around! DRM is a specific form of copy protection. Read the DRM article on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management
And read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection"The term [DRM] is also sometimes referred to as copy protection, copy prevention, and copy control, although the correctness of doing so is disputed."
Bioware was doing DLC before it was called DLC and long before Bethesda.
Google Neverwinter Nights premium modules.
We used to call them "expansion packs". They were the same thing as DLC, just without the DL. (Nobody had enough bandwidth to do large game asset downloads.)
The concept's old as dirt.
Expansion packs or Addons came with a lot more high quality content with many more hours of actual gameplay content on a separate CD/DVD. The CD/DVD can be sold later.
Since 2006, a DLC is usually a minor content like a horse decoration, a car, a few short missions worth 1-2 hours gameplay, etc. DLCs come also with DRM, you cannot sell it later. (Also used in conjunction as pre-order bonus on e.g. Amazon or Steam) (Some still release Addons, some call Addons DLCs, but generally it is the way as described above.)
I'm a little disappointed in the gaming community. I think this was a step forward. I mean, modders cannot legally get paid for their work now (donations at the moment amount to little to no money even for top modders), this would change that. 25% seems small, but when you realize that the modders are using an engine, assets, and pretty much everything else produced by another company and then just adding on to it, the cuts don't seem that unfail: 30% to valve, 45% Bethesda, 25% to modders. I mean, in reality Bethesda did most of the work, and Valve is just taking their normal 30%. Also, the reason you're content is popular is because it is an add-on to a popular game. Which means your product comes out pre-marketed by Bethesda. Marketing budgets for AAA games usually amount to about the same as development budgets. Also, there is a free option. Use it if you want! I see nothing wrong with this, in my opinion.
> in reality Bethesda did most of the work
Yes, but no. Sure, they made the game, but why should they take such a big cut of someone spending 6 months modelling 3d models, coding features, recording sounds, etc.? A lot of games are still alive right now thanks to their modding community and the hard work of modders.
Those people are not creating a product off the back of the big games. They are modifying the current game to make it better. They owe nothing to the game developer. If anything, the game developer owe them for fixing their game.
Take a look at the community patches of various games. Some of them fixes up to half the bugs of a game, some fix all the bugs of a game. Why should the game company take a big cut from that? "Thanks for fixing our game! Here, we will sell your patch, now take 25% of the profit of your work!" ... Makes no sense.
The game companies should be the ones getting a small cut. They are getting free content, free support for their game, free bug fixes, free publicity.
I would rather work for free than get the wool eaten off my back.
Bethesda did not ask for the fix. They have no obligation to compensate them financially.
Also, the amount of work one developer did in 6 months modding the game is probably still only an insanely small fraction of the work that went into coding the game engine being used. Which is probably written by dozens of programmers for months if not years.
Last, if you don't want them to make money on your mod, mark it free. This is totally an opt-in feature. No one is forcing modders to do anything.
> Bethesda did not ask for the fix. They have no obligation to compensate them financially.
This is why this isn't about Bethesda paying or not paying modders. This is about why the hell should Bethesda get 75% of the profit out of a modification that was made on someone's own time and sold through a third party. It's not as if Bethesda was doing quality control, providing support, hosting the mods or providing a marketplace. Steam is providing the hosting for the mods and providing the marketplace, so it makes sense they get that small cut.
Bethesda shouldn't be getting such a big part of the pie.
This is not about some mods being free while other are paid. This is the community saying "No, we don't accept that. The modder getting 25% of profit for something that was done independently, without their support, is unacceptable."
The game company is getting free content, free publicity, free developers. They shouldn't also get the majority of the profit.
edit: fixed some numbers that were wrong (75% profit by company vs 25% profit by modder)
If the community didn't accept it, they wouldn't sell the mods. Just mark them all as free. This is opt-in.
Also, for the record, Bethesda only gets 45%, Valve get 30%, and the modder gets 25%.
> The game company is getting free content, free publicity, free developers. They shouldn't also get the majority of the profit.
You have it backwards, the modder is getting free content (the base game), free publicity (Bethesda spent $100m+ advertising Skyrim) and free developers (everyone who developed the engine/assets/etc.). The modder is getting way more free stuff than Bethesda.
Your argument makes a lot of sense for developper that would create their mods for profit and profit only. They would get free publicity for their products. In that sense, yes, the game company is providing them with free ressources.
However, from my point of view, most mods are not seen or developed as products to be marketed. Most are work of love, personal projects, team projects. Fans getting together to fix a buggy but otherwise good game. In that sense, those developer couldn't care less about the fact that the game company is providing the game for free... they are fans, and all that they want is to make something cool. They add content to existing games for the sake of making the experience better.
Those are the ones that would rather work for free than being insulted by a 25% cut.
I believe the modders should get the majority of the pie. Steam should only get a cut for the hosting, support and mod store. The game company should only get a small cut. They already get a community and free content creators from the modding community. They shouldn't expect to make money out of thin air.
Should EA get money from old Battlefield 2 mods? Should Bohemia Interactive get money from Arma 1 mods? In my eyes, no. The only reason people are still playing those games is because of the modding community. Do take advantage of the presence of those players. Create events, contests, hire modders to create official content. But don't simply get the big part of the pie for simply being the creator of a game you don't even support, release bug fixes or content for.
That being said, I understand that there is a legal side to all of this and the game company must still get money for the use of their game. I however believe that 25% is too small a cut for the modder.
You can't charge based on the modder's intent. If a mod was made out of love vs. money grab is irrelevant. If people want to pay for it the question is how much money should the modder get?
You're saying the 25% is a raw deal. Maybe it is, but that's the mass-market deal. If you're mod is awesome, then maybe the publisher is willing to buy it or pay for it. Counter Strike was a mod that Valve bought and made into a standalone game. If it is shitty, well then you get the mass-market deal or nothing. Everything is a negotiation. If you think the company is treating you like shit, then don't do free work for them that they didn't ask for.
How would you do it? Be glad the that some of the money is send to the modder when you purchase a mod and have modders abandon games that take too big a cut?
From my point of view, if this happens, it would simply hurt the modding community as a whole. Big games like Skyrim will get a big quantity of low quality mods that sells for lower and lower, driving the market down, making the modder already small cut even smaller.
Damn, this situation is complicated. I understand why Steam pulled the plug while they think about it more.
Bethesda/Valve will do some A/B testing with different games to see what the optimal pricing/payout scheme is, but right now modders get absolutely nothing (donations are near 0 even for top modders) so I just don't see how adding the option to get paid (even a small amount) is a bad thing for the community.
As an aside, I actually think the way the payout scheme was pretty fair. I mean valve is taking 30% of everything sold on their marketplace no matter what, so if you write that out and only count the money that could go to the publisher the split was actually 65/35 publisher/modder.
That said, I can understand people arguing too much or too little. All I am saying is that I think, overall, paid mods are a net positive once they shake out the kinks.
Ha! They actually caved! Incredible.
I've been following the evolution of the situation very closely, as i'm actually a big believer in paid mods.
Valve's problem, I believe, was trying to take an existing ecosystem/market that wasn't geared towards financial rewards, and tried to force it on it. Even if 75% would have gone to the mod developers, the community would still resist the change, since that's what the human mind is programmed to do, and tight communities like those operate like a hive-mind, causing the outburst to be exponentially stronger.
Edit:
Forgot to add, all the talk about "open collaboration cannot happen in an ecosystem with financial incentives" - I call BS.
Compare this to the world of software development and open source - which is thriving. Mega corps & the little guy/girl building production quality libraries and systems which generate big ass revenue streams.
What's the difference between a mod's code and an [insert your favorite package manager here] package? Right, there's graphic assets, but maybe someone's missing a collaborative graphic design market?
Game development is heading the same directions as the start-up world - from an industry where only the big boys can play, to a collaborative effort where the execution matters & creativity thrives.
> Compare this to the world of software development and open source - which is thriving. Mega corps & the little guy/girl building production quality libraries and systems which generate big ass revenue streams.
Open source software companies rarely generate money from software, it's almost all in services. Games don't have an equivalent services model e.g. "Hire iD rep to come to your house to install the latest Quake Mods $175/hr, minimum engagement 6 months FTE"
I'm not talking about open source software a-la Postgres, I'm talking about libraries and frameworks a-la Angular/React/Bootstrap and it's ecosystem.
An interesting anecdote from Gabe Newell in the reddit thread:
So far the paid mods have generated $10K total. That's like 1% of the cost of the incremental email the program has generated for Valve employees (yes, I mean pissing off the Internet costs you a million bucks in just a couple of days).
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/33uplp/mods_and_ste...
I just don't think gamers understand, if you pay for high quality mods, your gonna get more high quality mods.
It's a bit like the crazy excuses people make for pirating games.
Most of the money wasn't even going to the modders. With AAA companies increasingly putting out broken/unfinished games and modders making unofficial patches, it's ridiculous to be rewarding the publisher with most of the money and not the modder.
I think the biggest problem most people had was that they forecasted Steam's mod marketplace as being swamped with garbage mods that offered no real value and were nothing more than a quick cash grab. This would result in the modding community becoming a race to the bottom as modding became less of a hobby of passion, and more of a trash market. Looking at what's been greenlit on Steam lately, seeing the garbage that's been flooding the mobile phone market these past few years, and witnessing the bullshit DLC is these days, I don't think those predictions would be too far off.
The low barrier to entry also opened up the opportunity for people to rip existing free mods and sell them on Steam, hoping to cash out before they got pulled.
I don't think the complaints were at all hollow and plenty of high quality mods exist without paying 45% to the publisher + tip to Valve.
I feel like your reply should be a top level post.
I don't mind the idea of mod creators earning money from modding. But the thought that Bethesda would be profiting off of releasing broken games rubs me the wrong way real bad.
Its relatively easy filter out good and crap mods. That's what markets are good at. Good ones will rise to the top and become best sellers, and bad ones will flop.
They do understand. A huge amount of the outrage and criticism on sites like reddit, 4chan and NeoGAF acknowledge that the basic idea of paying for mods has its potential to reward creative modders and result in some increase in quality modding.
But the frustration in this instance is mainly about the specific implementation. Paid modding was being forced onto a game and a mod community never designed to tolerate it. There were simply way too many complications for it be simply a case of: pay money, eventually get better mods. Skyrim modding is too haphazard and a legal and ethical mess. Plus it is a community that had survived for years and produced many quality mods without any formal financial system to aide it at all.
As an avid gamer it is quite frustrating to see people dismiss this outrage as "gamers not knowing what's good for them" or "entitled gamers not wanting to pay for something they expect to be free" when it is a lot more nuanced than that.
As far as I know, you could also release free mods. It wasn't a forced thing.
With this system, if a guy wanted to drop his full time job, and do modding full time he could if it was popular enough. Now, that would be more difficult. Resulting in less content.
I'm not so sure. As soon as you start having monetary incentives, you lose on the social incentives.
For example, suppose I ask for a friend's help moving to a new apartment. The friend says yes, and the move is finished after a full day of moving boxes. At the end of the day, I tell him thank you, and give him $5. The friend is insulted. Do I value him that little? What he would happily do for free, he refuses to do for $5.
The same is true for mods. A modder may pour his/her soul into making a mod, all the while thinking of how people will enjoy the mod. The modder has a few friends, and they enjoy discussing it. Now, the modder is offered a pittance. Suddenly, it is an insult, because the amount is so low.
Unless you are offering sufficient monetary compensation to outweigh the loss of the social incentive, you lose. No, it isn't "rational", but it is how people work.
The problem is these guys probably have full time jobs as well as modding.
If you had a decent way compensating them, the more popular mods could have full-time people.
Clearly, that's a simplistic view of the world. The iOS app store (and, I expect, Play too) is choking on shit-quality shovelware, while I pay zero for Ubuntu and a whole range of other high-quality open source tools that have tons of volunteer contributions.
Adding financial incentives to a community built on a share-and-share-alike mentality skews things a lot. I can see this whole paid mod thing working, but it's going to take a much gentler approach than what they did here.
You pay zero for Google products also but it just as does canonical has plenty of full-time paid developers on their payroll.
In fact I can't think of a single real high end open source project which it's development isn't fully supported by an army of paid developers.
There's also a ton of quality apps.
Well you know what people want: freemium Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans.
We have high quality mods now, from people motivated by love of the game. It's not a given that adding money to the equation would create higher quality mods.
We've had excellent mods for free for years. Absolutely no reason to start charging for them now after more than 20 years of modding.
Leave to it to modders to choose, if they want free or paid.
If you have financial incentive, more modders will come on to the scene and do it full time.
but 25% goes to creators, 45% to bethesda and valves standard 30% fee for transactions?
25% is awfully low, honestly.
What is the correct number they should have used, and how did you arrive at that number?
15/15/70 Valve/Creator/Mod Creator
15% to Valve for merchant fees(this is already crazy high compared to the credit card processors and other payment processor's fees). They shouldn't get the full 30% they charge for game publishing since they already offer Steam Workshop for free and mods don't have the same visibility as games in the store.
15% to the game creator for on-going royalty fees for re-purposing of assets/technology. They would also receive final say in what mods are or are not allowed in Workshop, paid or free. They retain ownership of their original creation and any use or derivation of it.
70% to mod creator.
It is believed that Valve takes 30% from any commercial transaction (google it, although none of the link I found seemed 100% reliable).
IMO, Bethesda should not get any money (see my post)
That leaves 70% for the modder. Seems acceptable to me.
25% is better than 0.
Now its' 0.
I actually think that most people missed the big issue with paid mods. If anyone can upload a mod to steam, that means that it would force modders of free mods to upload these as well - otherwise they're in danger of someone else uploading their content and earning money on it.
You also enter into a Looney Toons lemonade situation where someone can release your exact mod for slightly cheaper.
One thing I haven't seen written about this yet is where does the nickle and diming stop?
As an adult I shrug of 1 dollar for this hat, 2 dollars for this shiny hat but I remember well being younger with a very limited budget and trying to decide which 50 dollar game to get knowing full well I would most likely not even play the game I didn't choose.
These mods are on top of expensive games, when a sword is a dollar and a horse skin is a dollar and the sky UI which is required for 80% of other mods is 3 dollars.. how can most afford this?
I worry about kids ability to understand budgets when a few dollars seems so small now but adds up at the end of the month, at the end of the year. Especially when it is now extending into the modding community.
They should have probably made tiers.
0-1,000 downloads = nothing
1,001-100,000 downloads = donate button
100,001-1,000,000 downloads = big donate button
1,000,001+ downloads = set your own price, 50% share to modder
It's very easy to abuse ratings/downloads when there's no paywall.
I gathered my thoughts in a comment on the Bethesda blog post:
http://www.bethblog.com/2015/04/27/why-were-trying-paid-skyr...
TL,DR: Bethesda doesn't deserve the 45% of the sale, specially when they are charging 60$ for the game. IMO, they deserve 0%, for they have created nothing (and were already paid for the game/tools). And mods had value to the game, and increase it's lifetime.
Two problems with paid mods:
1 - most modders are heavy modders (about a hundred mods at a time). Knowing that, I can see some players realizing they will spend more than 100$ in a game.
2 - This can becomes Bethesda's business model. It can lead to a Elder Scrolls 6 with lackluster content, waiting to be filled with (paid) mods.
I don't have a problem with paid mods. I just think Bethesda is getting greedy. Does adobe get a cut from Photoshop plugin sales? Does Unity get a cut from Unity developed games?
How to implement paid mods:
- Help modders choose a copyright license
- Help track/prevent copyright infrigement. Many mods use other mods or are "mod compilations". And track unauthorized mod uploads to the market.
they deserve 0%, for they have created nothing
Not true at all. They created an attractive gaming environment and a mechanism for modding. They should get some percentage, like a royalty, but taking twice as much as the people who write the mods is patently ridiculous.
>They created an attractive gaming environment and a mechanism for modding
Isn't that what paying the $60 for the game pays for?
The $60 pays for the game, but to develop a mod for it, you're using tools they've made for the game. They didn't have to provide those tools, they're an additional service that Bethesda offers. Bethesda also added workshop support in the first place. 45% is outrageous, but a 10% cut would be acceptable and help fund the development of better tools and improvements to the mod community.
Agreed.
The fact that it can be so heavily modded is what drives continued sales long after the initial release.
And the modders are building on the incredibly successful IP of Bethesda, riding on their coattails. Why shouldn't Bethesda get something like a royalty? It happens in pretty much any other kind of IP - music, books, movie merchandise and so forth.
If you're selling something that's largely due to the popularity of the source material, why is the idea of a royalty problematic?
$60 gets the user the game.
Maybe it's appropriate to liken the royalty to Bethesda, to the per-sale royalty agreements that gaming engines have struck with some developers? Skyrim-as-development-platform is not entirely unlike Unreal-as-development-engine.
Its arguable they should charge a fixed rate for facilitating the creation of the mod. Not a percentage of all downloads. I know, its common for content delivery platforms to charge a percentage, but its far from logical. Its just traditional. In the sense of 'what the market will bear'.
> Does Unity get a cut from Unity developed games?
That is not unheard of. Afaik the free version of the Unreal engine has a royalty system. It's kind of the same thing with the Source 2 engine, except instead of paying royalty you promise to only publish on Steam.
> you pay Epic 5% of gross revenue after the first $3,000 per product per calendar quarter
That's 1/15 of the revenue share that would be in place at the Workshop.
> IMO, they deserve 0%, for they have created nothing (and were already paid for the game/tools).
Except, for, you know. Skyrim. A game engine and toolset attractive enough that people want to build in it so badly, they're willing to do it even though there wasn't a way for them to get paid for their efforts. Maybe you've got higher standards, but that's more than I get when I pay $60 for most games. Of course, I only paid $7.50 for it, but.
Although I think people should be rewarded for their work I don't really don't like where this is headed. As others have noted the statement from Valve reads as if paid mods are definitely coming in a not so distant future. Modders getting paid is all well and dandy until you consider the way mods often evolve and build on top of each other.
I spent a lot of my time as a young teenager on the custom ladder in Warcraft 3, where people played home made maps which essentially amounted to mods. This was the birthplace of Dota and the place where many of us were introduced to tower defence. Every time someone uploaded an original or fun new map people would take their map and tweak it in some fashion or another and slowly the maps would evolve. The versions of Wintermaul that people were playing years after the original were definitely improvements upon the original.
If new maps/mods on the custom ladder had cost money this would never had happened. I'm sure Duke Wintermaul wouldn't have been happy with all the remixes of his vastly popular mod if he had been selling it himself. And, although he might have updated his mod to improve balance and the such he most likely would not have come up with several of the features that were included in the late versions made by others.
I see people saying that modding is for hobbyists and I have seen several modders claiming that they will never charge for a mod and that may very well be the case. For now. Once paid mods are released they will slowly seep into the community and the modders of the future will have been raised with paid mods instead of free ones. Once upon a time video game companies would sell their games in retail and then support it for free, now they charge for the support cost through subscription fees, dlc or microtransactions. If customers are OK with paying for it, why should they give away their work for free? The same thing goes for modders.
First; I wanted to just nerd out a little with you, because the custom ladder you describe were the crucible of my gaming habits as well (geek cred, I think I even have some screenshots somewhere of when I was playing a Wintermaul clone with duke himself, from decades ago) :)
Second, I wanted to echo that there's a concerning parallel between paid vs free mods and free to play gaming. In both, I think the proposed solution _COULD_ be better. Some mods are ridiculous. (Skyrim on Morrowind? Some of the system shock 2 total overhauls?) I would _love_ easy, consistent, and safe channels to compensate the authors, and some sort of paid system seems fair in that sense. Similarly, if a game can be released free and keep passive costs going through balanced means (Path of Exile comes to mind) you CAN walk the line of "ethical microtransactions" or whatever the hell you call it nowadays.
But it's SO EASY now to point out failures in the f2p model, games that just gave up any attempt at legitimacy to pursue profit (which can be far more... subversive, in a f2p environment as opposed to selling traditional games, e.g. zynga). The worst part to this, to me, is that it's becoming the norm, as you say. People "are OK with it", and it eventually becomes accepted practice, and games that were once pillars of buy to play (guild wars 1 comes to mind) have sequels that essentially let you whip out a credit card for most of the end game gear, and fans who will _FIGHT_ you if you suggest this in any way moves towards "bad f2p".
I see a lot of potential for the cornucopia of modding creativity and availability we saw to fade in preference for monitization, and the true impact of this may not be seen for decades. (Is there really a difference in gamers who grow up being inspired by and playing with the hilariously accessible mods all over the place, and those who just play box products, or mods blackboxed so they behave as such? Selfishly, I can't but think so.)
> I think I even have some screenshots somewhere of when I was playing a Wintermaul clone with duke himself
Now that is cool.
I think you make a good point and I agree that I think money will corrupt some aspects of the modding community. But I wonder if the net result will improve it overall?
Providing compensation may allow teenagers to justify their time spent on mods leading to more time and energy spent and offer them an early and valuable taste of the business world.
On the other hand innovation usually comes from the ground up. Look at Valve's most profitable title right now, (Dota) that was a mod of WarCraft. Had it been a paid mod it may have stifled the contributions and evolution of the game. Valve may very well be poisoning the pond they're fishing in?
The idea of compensating content creators worked extremely well for Valve for games like Team Fortress 2, CS:GO and Dota 2, since they can get access to a large talent pool with no investment. You have people creating assets for these games and getting a cut of profits, which is pretty cool, but on the other hand this means that Valve doesn't have to invest many man hours to create their own content for these games, effectively letting the community handle voting for new assets and approving the popular choices.
This can become pretty dangerous for games that will start popping up with relatively limited amount of content in them but with 'Infinite possibilities through modding', developers leaving it up to fans of the game to provide additional content, either free or paid. What happens when these assets or mods aren't maintained by the 3rd party that created them? Will the game developer simply remove these or maintain them?
Actually, in abstract the idea of a game with no 'game' but just engine with full mod support sounds interesting.
I guess that's what things like second life covered though.
One game that I love that has very little in the way of story is Don't Starve. It has a great mod system that uses Lua to provide so pretty amazing mods to the base game. Basically the entire game is written using the mod system with only the lowest level engine parts being compiled code.
I feel that it's appropriate to draw parallels to Twitch.tv streamers here. Twitch streamers basically follow a patronage model. The main video stream is free, though sometimes higher quality options are not. In exchange for a monthly subscription, usually $4.99, viewers gain access to premium features, such as the ability to chat when chat rooms are restricted to subscribers, exclusive emoticons that can be used in any Twitch chat room, and even benefits with other websites and services.
It is not hard to imagine that this business model could have been used with mods. Mods would be prohibited from being paid-only, and an opt-in subscription could be implemented. Users would sample mods risk-free (financially at least) and could support the development of mods they deemed worthy.
I like the idea of listing analogies of existing economic models.
How about minecraft? Tee shirts, lets play videos, outright donation buttons, last but not least advertising encrusted download sites.
Something not discussed here, that did arise in the MC community discussions about the valve store, was synergy, which usually is a four letter corporate word, but it actually applies this time where a modpack project like feed the beast has 115 mods, and the compilation is stronger than the linear combination of any individual mod. Also if each FTB mod charged a modest $3 that means a working FTB modpack would be about $345, which suddenly isn't so modest. Its basically impossible to get an individual mod designer out of Ramen Noodle territory without making modpacks expensive enough to destroy them.
I really think Valve as a whole has been making bad decisions for a while. They've been neglecting to push for the more innovative ideas that they're known for and have instead been adding a lot of shady features to Steam and their games that make them the most money. It's good to see that Valve still listens to the community, and I hope this is the start of them moving back to being fan-oriented rather than turning into another faceless corporation.
Not going to trust Valve as much as I used to until they start being constructive again, of course. It's one thing to recognize a bad decision and backtrack on it (something most video game publishers would never do), but it's another to not make the bad decisions in the first place. Valve tends to be heavily concerned with testing and user acceptance, and it seems weird that they'd push a feature like paid mods without going over it with a fine tooth comb first.
To me, paid mods seemed like an experiment in self-publication on Steam. Like how Valve used Team Fortress 2 as a testbed for many features that would eventually be used in Dota 2, it seemed like paid mods was a test of something a lot larger, especially considering their stance on the existing Steam Greenlight. Setbacks like this will probably mean we won't see what they were planning from the beginning for a while.
The idea to sell unofficial third-party add-ons for third-party products sound generally a dangerous concept, and doing so without any quality control or responsibility sound to me as inviting destruction. If you pay for a product, and it randomly breaks at a later date because of a patch, someone is going to have to take responsibility. If its not the game developer (they didn't get paid), and its not the mod developer (its not their fault that the game got patched), its likely going to be the store who pocked 75% of the money. Add to this the infinite ways mods can interact with each other, or mods that depend on other mods, and the legal requirement to sell mods created by private people seems impossible in the best of lights.
Donations, Kickstarter, and Patreon on other hand is currently already working to provide compensation to passionate content providers. Valve could have gone this way and made it easier to donate and support modders.
The weirdest part of this whole affair is that they started with Skyrim, when Skyrim's mod support through Steam Workshop is fundamentally flaky.
All the really thorough mods (AV, SkyRE, PerMA, Requiem, ASIS, DSR, FNIS, etc) use third-party patchers and automated load order management, which Steam Workshop can't handle at all since all it basically does for Skyrim is dump files in a folder.
At least for it, it all adds up to "even if there are ones worth purchasing, why would I buy mods through Steam Workshop when I have to manage them all outside of Steam Workshop in the first place to use a large number of mods at once?"
So, I was personally involved in a HL mod called The Opera, which for some of you who may vaguely remember, is a mod based on the high action shoot 'em up films by John Woo, also known as the Hong Kong Blood Opera genre. The game was the first ever example of animated fabric(trenchcoats) in Half-Life, a tech that carried over to Action Half-Life.
At the time it was kind of a big deal, but I also remember another big deal during that time: when Valve bootstrapped Steam and forced everyone to start picking up Counter-Strike updates through the software. Of course, mirrors were provided a few hours after the main release, but, Steam was the first place where the data was available.
This was a time when the main features of Steam were "preventing hacking" and providing a better CDN. The little known game Day of Defeat managed to be scooped up by Valve and the community couldn't wait to see what happened when Valve and the Steam platform supported a game out of the gate -- Team Fortress 2 looked a lot like Firearms mod with sentries, and the communities were on fire talking about Valve meddling with the mod community.
That time, a time I fondly remember growing up during, strikes me as strangely familiar when I look at the conversations around paid mods in Workshop. The funny thing is, though, every game has paid mods now in the form of DLC. The silly hat bullshit in TF2 should never generate real world dollars, this is the virtual equivalent of a mod that your buddy can see you activate. Content like new guns, maps, skins, models, etc used to exclusively come from the community, and infrequently in some "expansion pack" release from the game developers themselves. There's a different problem with game development companies and the incestious publisher relationship; but suffice it to say that the primary game publisher, at least (over) a decade ago when I was more involved with the community, was hugely flattered and took joy when their game was modded.
Not that running a mod team is easy, it's not. I remember distinctly when one of the main map builders for The Opera was hired by Raven. I remember too, when model and skin engineers spent hundreds of dollars on gun rentals and sound equipment to get the "bang" noise for each gun just right. I wish there was a kickass way to pay him on the spot for that kind of investment, but now there are so many "better" ways to run a grassroots development team (crowdfunding not the least among them) and if you actually kick ass and produce high quality game content, you'll just get a job in the industry like other people who kick ass at it. Or the community will bootstrap a development shop and you can try your hand at running a team "for real".
Instead of trying to open up a bespoke "skyrim mod" shop and peddle high resolution horse genitals for $3.99/testicle.
I remember the "The Opera" mod. Good ol times. Only a few commenters in this thread are/were actual real PC gamers (not Farmville/CoC).
I refused to upgrade to Steam and patched my HL1, CS 0.8 to 1.x with non-Steam-patches. Valve was such a let down since Half Life 2 fake E3 presentation. HL2 was good, but many levels were cut (e.g. icebreaker) and after all HL1 was the better game (except the Xen alien levels). Half Life 3 is running gag like Duke Nukem Forever was for 10+ years.
The greed almost destroyed PC gaming around 2006-2009, it revived due to the casual trend and more players owning a PC/laptop. Nevertheless PC gaming is still strong in certain countries in Europe and Asia. Sadly, the real-time-strategy genre is completely dead (except StarCraft2 & clones) - Age of Empires, Empire Earth, Command and Conquer (3 different series) will be missed.
Paid mods are fine, they should have led from the back, not the front, somehow. The rates were bad, and the launch mods were just... crap useless crap.
The people leading the charge were useless idiots too, they are happy to pay for Skyrim and not for quality mods? There should be opportunity for content creators to contribute in a significant way and get paid to do it.
This is just awful execution of a good idea, with the wrong rates for authors and the delivery mechanism. It should have been 15% Bethedsa, 15% Valve, 70% Creator.
I lament.
Why should modders get the most? Most of the work is already done for them. You want a bigger piece of the pie? License the engine and make your own game.
Yes and no. For a mod that is essentially changing some variables in order to change some of the gameplay, yes.
However, if you create a mod that changes all of the game sounds, using your own recordings, why should most of the profit go to the game company?
If you create a mod that completely overhaul the shader system, why should the game company get the most of the profit?
If you create a mod that makes all of a game's textures HD, using your own textures, why should the game company get most of the profit?
If you create a mod that patches all the remaining glitches and bugs of a no longer supported game, why should the game company get most of the profit?
Those people are already supporting and increasing the games quality. They are pretty much passionate and talented volunteers. Either you don't pay them, or you pay them an honestly. You don't establish a system that allow you to piggy back on their work in order to make profit.
I would try a subscription model similar to Spotify.
Let Bethesda charge 2 dollars a month for access to their workshop. Modders then get a piece of the kitty for the number of subscribers to their mod.
Quality would increase because modders would want more subscribers, they would work to keep their mods up to date so that people stayed subscribed to them, and modders would not have to build an infrastructure to service and support a customer base as if their entire enterprise was a single mod.
Can someone clarify: Did Valve shutdown the paid mod system, or did Bethesda just turn off paid mods for Skyrim?
> We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop.
Valve... pressure... I see what you did there.
I'm glad you did, because I didn't... I'll just pretend like I meant to say it...
This is why we can't have nice things.
In Gaben we trust!