Artist's Rights Matter - Bring Back Paid Modding : V

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 6:47 am

I've always developed mods in the past for myself. I made mods I wanted for me and then shared them for free on the Nexus out of pure charity. Yes, I made the mods for selfish reasons but giving them away for free was just me being nice. I’ve even gone a step further with such charity on multiple occasions by catering those mods I gave away to fit the desires of the community. I don’t even use some of the body types I’ve converted my mods to work with but someone asked me to do it and I did.

What do we get for being nice? Nothing because nothing was expected as it was entirely an act of charity. We asked for nothing and with the exception of a simple thank you here and there, we got nothing in return. Though for all that charity that we offered and all that free stuff we just gave away, it was not without consequence. We built up and unknowingly supported the mentality that mod developers, artists, don't deserve anything and that all mods, art, should be free. This was of course not our intent but that's what we did by releasing our artwork out of charity. We are partially to blame for creating this mentality.

Since paid modding was taken away, I have taken the time to really consider the events that have transpired. While I had not received any money from paid mods, eventually I would have because my artwork would have sold, of that I am certain. My free mods would have remained free and I had planned to also release a mod for free ever so often simply out of charity for those who could not afford my paid mods. Also because doing so would help keep the quality of my work well known. Such an act would have been like a trend and I can be fairly certain other authors that offered paid content would have taken to such a practice.

I’ve come to the conclusion that the anti-paid mod community just took money out of my pocket. They stole an opportunity for me to make a profit through artwork. That is how I see it and that is exactly what they did. For all my charity, this was the thanks that we artists have received. We had an opportunity to earn money doing something that we love to do but because we were so charitable in the past… the opportunity was ripped from our grasp. Gee, thanks a lot guys and gals... real uncool.

My free mods would have always remained free and I would have continued to throw a few more free mods out there from time to time. Now none of my mods are available, not even my free ones. Such charity caused me to lose an opportunity that would have been a ‘dream come true.’ I have taken everything down and it will remain down until our rights as artists are given back to us.

The issue isn't the % that the mod authors were getting. The issue is that we had that right stripped from us. We had an opportunity stolen away from us. The majority of people opposed to paid modding were not even mod developers. Now metaphorically speaking, this is like fighting slavery in that we had no choice before but to offer all our mods for free but once we were given an option to make money it then became a matter of having the right to sell mods. Now this is a matter of our legal rights being taken away from us. We were legally being allowed to sell our artwork and now it has been made illegal to do so once again.

Nobody fought the matter before because no one suspected that Bethesda would support it. Once Bethesda did show that they supported mod developers selling their work they opened that door. You can't close that door, you just can't. Just like when slavery was made illegal in the north, you couldn't close that door and now everyone has the right to make money for the work they do. Everyone is given the freedom they deserve. People should have the right to get paid for their work. Bethesda supports the mod developers having a right to choose whether or not they want to offer mods for a payment. This is because Bethesda is comprised of artists and artists believe in other artists having the right to sell their work. If they did not support such a standing they would essentially become hypocrites committing career suicide.

That is the bare bones of it. This is a fight for artist’s rights to decide whether or not they want to charge for their work. Art can be free and art can cost money, that's how it should be. That Bethesda and Valve backed off is a shame because they let the fight against artists rights win. They threw artist’s rights under the bus when they didn't stand their ground. That's metaphorically what they did. But freedom of choice wasn't given away overnight. It's a matter of fighting for it and I have chosen my side because I am an artist and I believe in artists having rights. We should have the right to choose whether or not we want to sell a mod that we worked hard on and nobody, I MEAN NOBODY, should be allowed to take that right away from us.

Mod developers, we as artists now need to band together and take a stand. We need to fight to get our rights back. We need to march, we need to voice, we need to petition and we need to strike. We didn't fight as hard because we didn't think we had to, we assumed that Bethesda and Valve would stand their ground in support of artist’s rights. As such Bethesda didn't hear us and only heard the anti-paid mod population. We were wrong to think that Bethesda and Valve would stand their ground and now we need to take action. I am striking by pulling out all free content for good until our rights are given back to us.

Anyone can have any opinion they want about me regarding my stance. I am officially done responding to hate. I am officially done giving away my mods. Until paid modding has returned I will no longer offer free mods. I encourage other mod authors to take the same stance. Until we show that we deserve our freedom to choose we won't be heard. They all had a choice not to buy our mods and we should have a choice to offer them for free or for sale regardless of our percentage of the cut. I will not roll over; I will defend my rights as an artist.

If I become a martyr that is crucified for the right of other artists then I can think of no greater achievement to be proud of. Artists shape our creative world and I am proud to be one.

This is a simple fact. You are either for an artist having the right to sell their work or you are against artists having the right to sell their work. When you strip the matter down to its very core and heart, that my friends, is what all this boils down to.

I support paid modding and in doing so, I support artist’s rights.

Best Regards,

Nightasy

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 5:01 am

Great read. Stand by your views.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 7:09 pm

Their idea wasn't terrible honestly. The prices IMO were outrageous and the cut was laughable for the creator/s. Not too mention Valve's lack of content policing. 5.99 for Midas Magic was a joke. The author could've put up a 50 cent price tag and probably made much more money in the long run.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 12:11 pm

This is no longer a matter of percentages or how much artists were choosing to sell their work for. The percentage division was between artists, Valve and Bethesda. We had the right to make the choice of whether or not we accepted that percentage division. Now we don't have any rights at all. This is a matter of artists having the right taken away from them. We as artists need to stand together and fight for our right to sell our work if we so choose to do so.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 12:25 pm

Nice speech, but you don't actually have any right to sell Skyrim mods, that's up to Bethesda, and yes, they can close that door. It's their sandbox you're playing in.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 3:13 pm

That argument doesn't work anymore. They gave us the right to sell mods and then they backed off of that decision because too many people want everything for free. They closed that door but so did slave owners when slavery was a matter of debate. That door got reopened because it was the right thing to do. Just like this door needs to be reopened because artists should have the right to sell their work or choose to give it away for free. Bethesda has already showed us that they support paid modding.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 3:55 pm

True, but you're also using other the tools of other artists, namely Bethesda. You have to sell your work under their IP by their instructions. If you want to sell your artwork on your own terms, you need to make your own IP.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 3:23 pm

Don't get my posts wrong tho. I'm all for paying mod creators money, but please, a reasonable amount?

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 6:16 am

Uh, are you really comparing not being allowed to sell mods to slavery? Couldn't you think of anything more appropriate and, I dunno, less extreme?

If this is a game of example top trumps, I play my Hitler card, lose the game, and the game ends.

/thread

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 10:30 am

OP is basically saying the deal isn't what mattered. It was the fact there was a deal to be made in the first place.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 5:25 pm

I'm not asking to sell my artwork on my own terms. I'm fighting to sell my artwork under the terms that Bethesda presented to us. I want them to bring back the opportunity to for me to sell my artwork. It was just fine and it was the right thing to do. Please read the entire OP.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 7:19 pm

I'll fully admit, I didn't read the post fully. I did read some of it and came to the conclusion that the OP was making a counter argument. Walls of text are hard to read at this current time due to consistent bickering on these forums. Please disregard my comments then.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 3:42 pm

As I said in the OP, it's metaphorically speaking. As in artists should have rights just like everyone else. You have the right to charge for your services just like artists should have the right to charge for theirs. Extreme matters call for extreme comparisons. This is a matter of artists having rights given to them and then taken away from them for all the wrong reasons.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 10:09 am

Nvm. This isn't an argument I want to be a part of. Disregard.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 5:19 pm

Apologies. I do feel you have the right to sell your own work, but they do have the right to change those terms at any given time. Hopefully, in the future, they do allow you to sell your work again.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 10:30 am

And I'm saying it's a terrible metaphor that stops me from taking you seriously. We've had so many arguments in favour of paid mods over the past week, and there were plenty of better metaphors used.

Bethesda offered us a deal, then decided to withdraw that offer. I don't see any problem with that.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 10:16 am

The pricing was shameful imo but it's the devs right if they want to work for a crummy offer or not. The fact is TES/FO mods are very much team efforts and 25% of the cheese isn't going to leave a whole lot if you are paying modlers, actors, programmers etc. Sure you could do it all yourself but people usually excel at 1 area and if you just say "well I came up w/ the idea and it was my project" then you'll fast run out of folks willing to help.

The real problem imo was the fact that you were taking something free and slapping a price on it w/ nothing different. That's just nuts. As soon as you slap a $ on something you need to QA it and damn sure make sure it works and is of decent quality. Nobody in the model was willing to do that and that is where it became a FU to everyone.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 5:43 am

Lol and I was just about to quote you - go on put it back up

Surely this thread will get a lock as there are others on the same topic - but hey woohoo let's do this again

Don't worry OP Bethesda will return to this issue - it is a huge revenue pool for them - as if the Billion revenue from the game isn't enough - you will be able to money share with Bethesda in the future and if not them then hey lots of other games will come out and use this method of microtransactions

I'm all for your rights as long as you don't infringe on the rights of others

Were mods charity? - I don't think modders are that altruistic otherwise we wouldn't use mod hosting sites and enjoy all the ~~endomporhines~~ endorsemants - I never viewed my mods as charity and certainly received many uncharitable comments - I created mods to give back to those who had made my gaming world more fun and to become part of a community - be careful about making generalizations of modders we are all different

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 11:12 am

They didn't give you the right to do anything, they experimented with offering you the privilege to do so on their terms. Rights and privileges are not the same thing. You have no rights to sell derivative works of the Elder Scrolls IP.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 4:25 am

You are assuming that you have some right to sell mods that trumps the rights of those who want modding to remain a gift economy of openness and sharing as it has been for more than a decade. You are not giving any consideration to the reasons expressed by many modders for why introducing a profit motive would forever change the community.

I don't see why your asserted right to be paid trumps everyone else's right to have a free and open community.

You certainly have the right not to make mods and not to distribute any mods you make. I fully support your right to not make mods. But I strongly disagree that your asserted right to be paid trumps everyone else's rights to have a free and open community of sharing. Ultimately it's Bethesda's choice, and their very brief experiment in paid mods does not give you any perpetual right to be paid.

Your overly melodramatic arguments comparing those who argue against paid mods to slavery advocates is not making your position very credible.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 5:57 pm

I wish game developers behaved that way or many other products I've purchased

Plenty of games developed on Unreal have been buggy and expensive - yet anyone can get that engine and build a game on it - they have a good pricing model

Bethesda said we are paying the third parties - here is our engine - go forth and multiply our collective wallets - oh and by the way we view you as developers not modders - they were creating a new game development system - and you can see that Gstaff hasn't unstickied or editied the notice at the top of the forum re paid mods

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 2:37 pm

I disagree, because the way I see it is quite simple for one important reason.

Bethesda released Morrowind in 2002 and that was the first moddable TES game with the current EULA for Morrowind, which probably are the same EULA for both Oblivion and Skyrim with a few changes of course.

EULA for Morrowind

Spoiler

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So the text I marked is clear, paid mods wasn't meant to exist in our community due to the EULA.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 12:09 pm

But that's all changed Leonardo

It doesn't matter that the use of mods was originally for non profit - Bethesda have changed the rules just as they change the lore - they are not rewriting the EULA to take that bit out again

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 7:47 am

While I support the principle of modders being allowed to sell their mods, I think it can't be denied that the system put in place by Valve and Bethesda, as it stood, was unworkable for Skyrim mods.

Not because of percentages. Because of legalities.

It was entirely unclear who the retailer was in this case. Was it Valve, or the modder? Whoever it was, under UK law it is the retailer who is responsible for the quality of goods they are selling, because the purchaser's contract is with the retailer. Not with the manufacturer/developer/producer. I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't true for a lot of other territories in which Valve sells.

And yet, Valve and Bethesda washed their hands entirely of any responsibility for the quality of what they were selling.

If the buyer's contract was with the modder, then was it in the modder's power to offer a full refund if it turned out the product sold was of poor quality? Not from what I understood.

Perhaps Valve could simply have withheld paid-for mods from any territory where anybody is held responsible for the quality of the goods they're selling. Would that have worked? I doubt it.

The return/refund period offered by Valve was probably legally unenforceable in many territories. Was Valve going to just assume no-one would challenge them on that? Was it going to leave the whole business of mods not being as advertised or having misleading advertisments up to the modder? Could the modder be held responsible when they weren't the retailer?

Then there's the whole business of intellectual property rights and copyright. If a modder's (or artist's) work is stolen and sold on Steam Workshop, is it entirely the modder's business to defend their work? To constantly patrol the Workshop for possible theft of their work? To issue DMCA (right acronym?) notices and then have evidence of ownership available and take the time to fight any challenge?

What about a paid mod having a dependency on another mod or modder's resource, and therefore the modder making money off someone else's work. What recompense or remuneration should be offered to the modder whose work was made use of like that? What if a mod incorporated artwork or models or audio which had been released under an open license? Would it be the retailer (Valve?) who'd be legally responsible for any fines that might be levied for breach of contract, or would it be the modder?

Given that the various FAQs linked to by Valve in some places flatly contradicted each other, could they be held to have got modders to sign contract by misrepresentation? How many modders would have a lawyer look over their contract before signing, or could even afford to do so? Could Valve have been reasonably (and legally) held to have lured amateurs into signing unreasonable or unlawful contracts?

The fact that, as far as I know, no-one has offered any clear answers to most of these questions makes me think the whole scheme was, legally, very dubious. And whether or not that had anything to do with why it was taken down, I think that leaving a broken system up would have been utter folly.

Valve and Bethesda were right to take it down. I hope they put up something that has been thought out far more carefully, and can be made to work in a way that is fair to those modders who wish to charge for their mods, and is not too offensive to those modders who see the whole idea as an attack on the free, open and sharing modding community that Bethesda have fostered (encouraged, permitted, whatever) up to now.

» Thu Apr 30, 2015 5:14 am

To tell you the truth, I'm not even sure who shut it down. Bethesda and Valve present a unified front, but Bethesda released a blog post explaining why they were allowing it like two hours before Steam pulled it. It looked to me like it was causing Steam too much trouble and Steam made the call to end it and Bethesda went along because ... well, they didn't exactly have a choice in the matter.