http://www.idigitaltimes.com/bethesda-plans-revisit-skyrim-paid-mods-after-fallout-4-459131


Seriously?! Did these guys learn ANYTHING the last time?!

I liked the suggestion that, based on the same logic Bethesda put forward, Bethesda should be paying Microsoft 75% of their profits..After all, Microsoft made the thing that Bethesda is making a thing for, right?

Microsoft is a good anology. The reason we all use Windows rather than IBM's OS/2 is that MS gave away SDK's and IBM charged for them. So nobody wrote applications for OS/2.

Monetized mods is just another way to charge for the toolkit, and not doing that is what makes the Elder Scrolls a success.

They won't bring them back for Skyrim, for TES6, certainly.

So long as the nexus remains free.

I'm pretty sure this never went away - it's just not relevant to the current Skyrim release.

I think both Valve and Bethesda gleaned some important insights into the complexity of asking players to pay for mods and they are trying to work around those issues now. They'll probably roll out their next attempt for some other game and see what happens. These are baby steps, but the path is pretty obvious. They want to monetize the ecosystem of moders and players that they've enabled. Unfortunately, I fear that they'll just kill it.

I started a thread a couple months ago about whether or not players who use mods are donating to the mod authors. The moderators locked it (I don't really understand why since it was a discussion, not a solicitation), but I did see a few responses. There's clearly a sense that mods must stay free because they've been free. That will be hard for Valve and Bethesda to overcome. Even if they resolve the question of who gets credit and how you manage use-privileges for your contribution to the community, the issue of players expecting mods for free will be very, very hard to change.

Lol; imagine how many mods are out there that merely (as in they don't add anything new to the game) fix bugs that Bethesda never bothered to fix. Imagine how many more bugs they'll leave in their games if they know they might be able to earn more money if modders fix them, instead of providing free patches themselves...

Also, since this will be steam-only, it could be seen as a direct attack to nexus, because modders who want money, will start to only use steam. Even though nexus is BY FAR the better site for mods.

And then... Bethesda 45%, Valve 30% and the modder 25%? Are you kidding me? If anything, then it should be more like modder 60%, Bethesda 25% and Valve 15%. But still, paying for mods is a stupid idea anyway.

So, we're just gonna keep revisiting this every time a random site posts an article with information that came out mere weeks after the paid mods thing?

Yes, they'll probably try it again in the future. Until then forget about it. Hopefully the entire thing is handled better next time, but we really don't need to keep drudging it up every few weeks.

Old news article is old. It's a rehash in July of an interview that's even older than that.

Has gaming journalism learned NOTHING from the last time? (see what I did there?)

IMO, they should bring it back, and I think they will after realizing that relying on a company like Valve who forms opinions by the change of the wind was the REAL foolish decision that was made. Of course, it won't happen until some time well into next year now cause Fallout 4 is taking up all their time, and so will the DLCs we all know are coming

Oh, and no, Microsoft is a terrible anology. Everyone, game developers included, who has copies of Windows has already paid Microsoft their licensing fees for that. Bethesda is not writing customized versions of Windows. They're writing independent games. Whereas modders are very clearly making derived works based on the games they mod for which entitles Bethesda to set their terms however they like.

FotherMucker Bethesda! What the hell is wrong with you. Me, along with a decent chunk of Modders, don't make mods because we want money, we make them for pure enjoyment.

This is gonna hamper my mods for Skyrim and Oblivion, I have a full blown DLC/Overhaul for Oblivion in its finishing stages, and one for Skyrim underway, and if they make me charge for it. Well, I'll pull all games I have out and get rid of them, I refuse to have someone to pay for my mods.

Silly season. (I mean the "journalists", not Bethesda.)

Nobody ever said anything about forcing mods to cost money.

Can we seriously just drop this until we get legitimate news on it? (likely in at least like a year) We've beaten the the dead horse so thoroughly we're starting to dig a pit under it.

Nothing says you have to charge for it. That certainly wasn't the case last time and they couldn't force you to do that if you didn't want to anyway.

Paid for mods as an option is a good idea, in my humble opinion. I don't have a disposable income, so I wouldn't actually be in a position to buy individual mods - let alone so much as a fraction of the mods on my load list, so I understand why many people are deterred by the idea. Yet it could, if done right, result in fewer mods that add more content or considerably greater quality content. Plus, they'd be plenty who would continue to create mods for free - some with the ability to donate available, some without the option.

Yet how Bethesda went about it was poor, imo. They went for the system used by TF2 and Dota. Selling lots of small 'mods' consisting of individual items (weapons) or armour sets. Not really compatible with Skyrim, I'd say. The game has load order limits, and individual swords eating up slots ain't great. Someone with some dosh in their wallet might find they've bought over 300 sword mods over the months or years. I've got mods that add a similar number of items and weapons into my game when combined, but they only use a small handful of slots.

That, and 'modders' from other games can jump in and sell stuff they're selling elsewhere for double the profit (there were a few Dota items up, iirc). And such people would also likely clog up the main pages, meaning most newer modders, or those who work at slower paces might go unnoticed because they sit on pages 100+. I guess tag systems can be used to get around this issue, but still.

Plus, they didn't offer modders anything new, afaik, beyond actually being able to get money for their hard work. No upgraded tools, no removal of certain restrictions that currently require hacky workarounds (look at the various attempts to add spears, for example. Good progress I think, but it doesn't seem to be simple or easy for those modders).

Sorry that for some of you this is "old news" and you don't want to see a thread on it. It is not old news for me as I've been inactive in this specific game community for a while, so indulge me in my own opinions on the topic.

IMHO, Bethesda should identify the mods/modders they think are worthy of being paid, and contract with each modder. If the modder wants his/her mods to be paid for mods, they strike a deal with Bethesda. If they do not, Bethesda has the option of commandeering that material or leaving it alone.

Technically speaking, modders are allowed to make mods and publish them at Bethesda's discretion. Now whether that also means Bethesda has the right to take the work of modders and (without their consent) make it their property I cannot say. I'm not sure if that legal precedent has been contested or not.

But it appears to me that that is exactly what this "controversy" boils down to. If this is all laid out in the EULA, then Bethesda can specify whatever terms it wants that are not a breach of existing laws on publishing and intellectual property. But to do it retroactively would basically amount to taking possession of modders property and making it their own.

As the most astute have already noted above, the implication of this is that, when it is tried it probably will NOT be tried retroactively. But the underlying principle remains the same. If Bethesda expect to implement this type of system, then they are effectively expecting to state in their EULA that anything anyone makes that accessorizes their game is their property. I have my doubts that a critical mass of "higher-tier" (meaning producers of a significant quantity of high-quality stuff) will ever take interest in that sort of agreement. After all, the option to include "donate" prompts always exists for any modder. The critical part here is: Bethesda/Valve are very likely looking at that, observing/inferring/guessing how much revenue they are "missing out on" and desiring to get in on the action. I seriously doubt they have the social science data to be in a strong position to predict how any efforts on their part to tap in to that "lost" revenue will impact sales. I cannot criticize Bethesda for considering these factors; it is always reasonable for a business to explore new ways to increase revenue, with the caveat that: for any new revenue stream to be sustainable it must be ethical/legal and it must not otherwise deter would be buyers. Still, my guess is that when and if they do "try" it on some new title, it _will_ strangle the very revenue stream it is intended to access.

ADDIT: a few additional thoughts that occur to me . . . I have something like 90 mods in my load order and I deeply appreciate, respect and adore every one of them. Some are more exquisite and brilliant than others, but each and every one of them to me represents a set of human merits that are highly laudable: ingenuity, creativity, generosity. My natural inclination is to want to "reward" every one of the modders whose mods I use. Being a full-time student I am (as I'm sure many are) not exactly in a position to pay a great deal to reward those modders. If I were to donate $1 to every mod I try and use for prolonged period, that would amount to $90 nearly twice what the game itself costs these days, or perhaps 75% of what it would have cost to purchase the game and all its DLCs when they were first released. If I were to judiciously decide that some of these mods are truly exceptional and donate $2 instead of $1 I could easily get up into the $115 total expense for mods.

For me (and I suspect I'm not unrepresentative of the 'typical' mod user) if those costs were doubled or tripled it would probably be beyond my price point.

However, if they were halved or quartered . . . It might be difficult to argue with that.

All this to say, one factor that will be important in determining whether such a Paid Mods scheme will work and not "kill" sales is the price point applied to paid mods.

Relax. Unless gstaff confirms this himself, I wouldn't worry too much about it.