I've read on other forums that Steam was facing DDOS attacks and such. Pretty pathetic that it came to that for some people, if true.

That's true, but I think the EULA for Morrowind and for Oblivion, Skyrim before paid mods were introduced on Steam has shaped the community into what people take for granted today and many of us still thinks it is just so.

IMO it's way too hard to change that just like that and doing that takes some time perhaps a new generation of modders, mod users could change that but not by us, which is similar to the "Rome wasn't built in one day" phrase.

One thing that consumers want is free or cheap. If some of the good mods were only 50 cents, how much of a backlash would we have compared to now? On Skyrim, pretty bad, but on a new IP, not nearly as bad.

This ecosystem needed tweaking and policy changes, absolutely. But there was no need to tear it down and remove the opportunity from authors.

Sure modding starts out as a labour of love for most if not all of us, that doesn't mean it always has to be that way for everyone.

This system presented an opportunity not only to people who were looking at this as a way to try and make a good profit, it was also speaking to those who thought it'd be cool if they managed to get a couple of bucks while still something that they love.

In what world is that a bad thing?


I fully support this system coming back and hope it's sooner rather than later.

I agree. The idea wasn't half bad, the implementation, however......... I honestly think that shouldn't charge over 50 cents for most. For the end user? 50 cents for wet and cold and other great mods is a great deal. For the creators? 50 cents per download is a great deal, even with cuts from the big companies.

And that was a problem with individual items, not the implementation of the system.

Prices were of course going to be off at first one way or another, it's uncharted territory for a game like this. But it's better that these guys started high to end low rather than starting low and raising prices.

The way refunds work needed some adjustment and a curation system needed to be introduced. One user on another forum suggested a one time fee to "set up" as an author which would have alleviated a lot of quality concerns.

As for the legalities people keep mentioning I'll mirror what I've said everywhere, valve and Bethesda both have substantial legal teams, there's now way in hell this system wasn't airtight or damn close to it everywhere it was available.

Every single possible aspect of what Beth and Valve did and the way they did it was wrong in every possible way on every possible level. That's why they recanted their heresy.

I make mods. I make them for fun, to see if I could and to change things in the game to what I prefer. I only ever uploaded them to The Nexus to share them with friends. I never use The Workshop and I never would because:

1) it breaks games by Stealth Updates, which is one reason why Arthmoor pulled his out last year;

2) it is not a Mod Manager;

3) it does not care about compatibility or load order;

4) it would update things when other mods the updates relied on had not yet been updated;

5) It takes all control away from the end-user and makes unwanted changes to your hard drive without permission, rather like a virus does.

I always played Skyrim off-line to avoid Stealth Updates which always broke the game until a new version of SKSE was ready. I STILL always play Skyrim off-line, as I do not see any point at all in wasting money and download allowance playing a single-player game on-line.

The very idea of paid mods was anathema to the modding community. There was no way it was ever going to enable mod authors to become semi-professional mod makers full-time.

It was things like this:

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/65034/?

and this, the most popular Mod on The Workshop:

and the petition with over 100,000 signatures within a day or two that shamed them into reconsidering and going from this:

to this:

Common Sense and Sanity won the day.

The petition in favour of paid mods had 10 signatures last time I looked.

~

I really don't understand this sense of entitlement that quite a few modders have developed over the past couple of days.
The TES modding community started when people decided to share their creations with each other. You didn't make a mod for other people, you made a mod for yourself and shared it with other people. Quite a lot has changed since then, but the modding community is still all about sharing.

You share resources, you share tutorials and experience, and you share mods. That's how it's been for the longest time and that's how it should continue to be.

The absolute last thing you should want is for TES/Fallout modding to turn into something like the Google Play marketplace. Ughh...

Greed in favor of sharing ...

I'm not going to pay for mods when I feel 75% of my money gets "wasted" (from my point of view). It would make more sense to just donate, giving 100% to support the modder. Especially since modders probably won't ever get a decent cut selling their mods on Steam.

I'm not against paid modding, but I will never buy mods from Steam. I think this outrage was for the better. If or when they try to bring paid mods back, modders will hopefully get a better deal.

The entitlement argument could made both ways. Yes, it was free beforehand. As long as they don't lockout free mods, I see no harm in letting creators deciding what they want to do with their work. Modding can be very costly at times for a few reasons. Some will do it for free, some will charge(hopefully cheap).

Ignoring the issue of the price split, modders should have the ability to sell their work.

The only reason I didn't try selling my mods before now was simple: Bethesda, as the IP holder, didn't allow it. A few days ago, they changed their minds, as is their prerogative, and allowed for a short time for modders to sell their work. And people got up in arms because mods had always been free before. Basically it turned into one huge appeal to tradition argument on the part of the non-paid mods people, "because it has always been done that way!" was the rallying cry, more or less.

Of course, we could take the same line of reasoning and apply it to the concept of mods, but no one seems to want to do that. Imagine a pre-Morrowind world where people argued that Bethesda shouldn't allow mods, because it would "corrupt" the lore that Bethesda had previously created with Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire, and Redguard. It's essentially the same appeal to tradition argument.

Bad idea for valve/beth to take an IP that had free mods and decided on a pay scale. I wouldn't oppose a paid/free mod system on the next game. I just hope I don't see DLC type prices for those mods.

It's about much more than that

It is? Please enlighten me, I'd like to have a better understanding of the argument.

My biggest objection to the whole thing was the impact I thought it would have on the nature and quality of the mods themselves. Money changes things.

How would the money cause Bethesda's handling of modding to change over time? How would it effect the sharing of assets between modders when money turned them from fellows to competitors? How would the desire to make maximum profit for minimal effort change the nature of the mods that were produced?

Maybe I lack imagination, but I couldn't see the answers to any of those questions being an improvement.

When it's tried again, and it will be tried again, the modder should be treated as a dev making a Bethesda product. As a Bethesda product, it would be owned by Bethesda, not the modder. Bethesda should be responsible for QA. Buyers of the product should have all the rights and privileges that they do with all other Bethesda products, including the ability to take the construction kit and make their own derivative products from its assets just like they can the base game and official DLC.

The argument is this . . . from the beginning mods were required by Bethesda to be non-commercial. Out of this sprung a vast and vibrant community of modders who created wondrous creations purely out of their love and passion for the game and desire to share it with others. Introducing a profit motive would corrupt the community, dividing it and leading to less openness and sharing. It's just human nature to behave differently when money is involved.

Doing such a thing will affect the sharing of knowledge. Modders will be less inclined to share what they have learned should the person they share it with use their ideas in the mod they plan to monetize.

Mod resources. Modders will be less inclined to share their resources, or upload their resources, should people use or steal them in order to monetize them.

Compatibility issues. Some mods require others to work. What if the mod you need is also monetized? Thus the cost mounts. This can also in turn promote lesser quality mods due to such issues, as people will need to rely on their mod not needing any assets or other mods to function. Those who have played and heavily modded Skyrim know that quite a few of those good mods need others to function, if not work at all.

The return period is 24h which was pretty pathetic. If the game updates, or another mod updates and the mod you paid for breaks, then your [censored] out of luck. Such a system will not work for larger mods.

The Steam Workshop is a complete and utter mess, with Greenlight being even worse. There is no quality control, little moderation, and so on. Should paid mods ever exist then they sure as hell shouldn't be on there.

The 25% cut was an insult to be frank. The amount of work and effort that some modders put into their creations deserves far more. Not to mention, the mod authors also have to moderate their work, patch it should there be problems, and so on. Because now they aren't just dealing with mod users, they are dealing with customers, of which have rights.

There are other good reasons out there as to why this was a bad idea, but my brain is currently half asleep 'tis 1am here.

Really? That's not how I remember it. I remember starting modding because I wanted to make some cool stuff. I would have loved to have been able to sell that cool stuff, from the very beginning of my modding career. Giving away my work was a side-effect of trying to make the game engine do things that it was never designed to do. Sometimes I wish I hadn't gone down that road, considering the amount of hate-mail I would get because people tried to add 50 mods to their load order at the same time and blamed me when their game broke.

I am not sure what you mean by "that's not how I remember it." Are you denying that a vast and vibrant non-commercial modding community sprung up? Are you denying that the history of the modding community has been (mostly) open and sharing when it comes to issues like sharing knowledge and resources?

Or are you just saying that you personally never had any altruistic motives when you started modding? I'd suspect that most people don't. They just want to make cool stuff, like you said, and in a community where commercial profit is prohibited, there is no incentive to hoard knowledge or resources. So, whatever they create tends to get shared because there is no particular reason not to share, if there is no possibility of making money off of it.

But as soon as you introduce money into the equation, pretty much everyone involved is going to start behaving differently. It's human nature to hoard things that have monetary value.

This is pure speculation, and I can easily think of several counterexamples. First, we can look at things like Stack Overflow, where people can ask questions and get answers regarding their programming problems, for free. The people who answer those questions are often expert programmers who have jobs as code monkeys for a company, yet they are still sharing their knowledge.

You have likely never seen OpenGameArt or any of the other asset websites where users offer up their work for others to use, for free.

It could, yes. But there are relatively few mods that require other mods to work, when you look at the entire modding ecosystem right now. Of course, I could be wrong about those numbers.

I agree that the 24hr limit is too small - it should be longer. That, however, is not an issue against paid mods, but rather Valve's return policies.

Agreed. Again, that doesn't detract from the argument that modders should be able to sell their work.

That's a matter of law, of which I have little education. That, still, isn't an argument against selling mods - it is an argument that tries to use the complexity of the world's legal systems as a barrier to entry. Any bugs or errors that a mod, especially if that error or bug is not inherent to the mod itself, is not a blight against that particular mod, but the user who is trying to cobble together a load order. Modders, even if they sell their mods, are under no obligation to make sure that their work is compatible with anything other than Skyrim itself.

It's like a car - I buy the car and then own it. That car comes with a warranty for X miles on the drivetrain and whatnot. But if I start adding non-manufacturer parts to that car, I lose out on that warranty. In the same way, if I buy a part designed for a Subaru and try to stick it in a Ford, I can't get mad at the part manufacturer or demand a refund.

What I meant was that the only reason that sharing and openness was made the de facto standard was because Bethesda allowed nothing else. Plus most people didn't really care for modders' rights, outside of some of the modders themselves. Most people - and I've had long drawn-out discussions about this - seem to think that because a modder releases their work on the Internet then they can do anything they want with it.

I agree with your assessment - when money is involved things will change. But that doesn't mean that modders will suddenly stop sharing knowledge or resources - the open source community is a testament to that.

Nah. You pretty much summed up my post with this last bit. Basically I make stuff I would like to see ingame and share it with like minded people. Would I turn down money? No, but I wouldn't charge for what I make either because doing so turns me into a business entity and I don't need that hassle again. If I was going to make something with the express purpose of selling it, I would ensure it was totally my IP and not dependent on someone else's. In other words, I would attempt I to sell my writings before I attempted to sell my mods. I've posted my writings for free and have given them to another modder to include in one of her mods, so why should I attempt to sell my mods? Besides, not only would I owe Bethesda a cut (and Valve if I had to host them on Steam), but I would also owe a cut to whoever created unique assets for me to use. Let's take Morte as an example: I would have to pay one person for creating Morte's skull with eyeballs mesh, another for the skeletal horse I used, a third for re-texturing both Morte and the horse, plus making his recall tooth from scratch, and finally my voice actor, who without him, Morte wouldn't even exist as he is today. To be honest, charging for mods is a huge hassle that I suggest nobody try again unless ALL parties involved understand and agree to the terms, which is what did NOT happen during this fiasco. So, no, I don't think paying for mods is a good idea, at least for Skyrim. For FO 4 or TES VII it may be a different story, but if it's not implemented on day one, it'll fail as well. There's a lot more to charging for something that's available to sale all over the world than just give me money, which is why the modders who participated in the launch of this got screwed. Don't make a deal with the devil until you read the fine print.

Reneer, a fellow michigander.

Do you believe beth and valve have scrapped the idea of implementing a paid mod system in the future? Cause I don't. I hope they are simply going back to the drawing board and making radical changes to the system to ensure that the valid complaints of the system are addressed.

Some of the changes would mean that the entire catalog of paid mods would have to be reviewed. Such as a proper vetting and quality control system, as well possibly having devs sign a contract stating what their obligations are to sell on the market place.

Now what is to stop modders who want to be paid from contacting beth and trying to get a contract setup to allow them to monetize?

What I see is a lot of hate that valve pulled out and now there is not a middle man to setup a marketplace, and handle setting up an agreement with bethesda.

If you want to be paid for your work, get a job in the industry or make your own game.

^^^ Yep, they will go back to the drawing board. I just really hope they can come up with something that is good for the end-user and creator.