What were they paying for? They just enabled selling and left it at that.

Just like Steam's Greenlight and Early Access system. Nothing but junk, scams, and thieves.
Oh right, i did get Divinity OS and Wasteland 2 on Early Access, so you can find gems if don't mind wading trough the [censored]

The idea may work, but now with that implementation. And i still don't get why Bethesda thought they deserve 45% of the cost, especially considering that only reason anyone still plays Skyrim is because of mods. (Currently 138 BAINs, and the half-assedness still shows trough )

Licensing fees, infrastructure, etc.

Also, Greenlight and Early Access are a bit of an interesting beast.

Thank you for rewording it

Many new indie devs seem to be doing just fine (take FNArehashedF for example... ech blech), either that, or as I said previously, work for a company. That way you will get the pay you deserve... unless the company is utter garbage

Valve was paying for the infrastructure, bandwidth usage, etc. Their 30% cut is fairly standard for that sort of service.

Bethesda was using theirs for removing all of the legal barriers that stood in the way of it all. Most likely in the form of royalties to the licensed parties involved in the CK itself.

So no. It was never a case of "they're grabbing cash for doing nothing". Anyone who thinks that is being naive at best.

And only one of my regular news pushers covered the story. Once. After it was over. I have no idea how large a proportion of Skyrim modders or players heard anything about it, and neither do you. We know that some 135 000 people signed a petition. That's it.

Thank you for sharing that little tidbit It sort of underlines my point above.

Thanks for sharing the link. It is very informative.

Uhmm ... I don't think anyone with a reasonably functional brain would ever suggest that the petition in question was 100% signed by mod authors. But I suspect that many mod authors did sign it. And many mod authors did not.

In my opinion it was not the notion of paid mods that got this shot down. It was an abysmally bad implementation. All the way from planning to execution it was so bad, that it boggles my mind. How could the Valve employees planning this think it would be a good idea to put existing free mods behind paywalls? Or use resources from other mods without asking? Or modify free mods to pop up adverts for the pay version during combat? It almost feel like they planned the worst possible execution to make it fail.

If the planning had been open and the implementation had been good, then we could have had a more fruitful discussion. Now ... it feels a bit like beating a dead horse.

Given the blowback this time, I doubt that they will try again this year. If FO4 comes out in November, I think it is unlikely that they will try with that game. Given that it is a very expensive production, getting a blowback of this magnitude when they are advertising their game would be a serious risk that could cost a lot of money. If they try again on FO4, I suspect they would introduce it sometime after the initial sales. Maybe a half year later? With some fringe benefits for all modders?

Open and proprietary software does indeed co-exist, but not always on amiable terms. Proprietary software publishers have tried a lot of nasty tricks against each other and open software groups, and I would hate to see that kind of strife unleashed on the modding community. These last few weeks have been bad enough.

Same thing here New Vegas and Civilization was just to tempting for me.

People just feel very strongly, and it sometimes makes them blind to the fact that both sides in this discussion have good points, even if the people raising them aren't as eloquent as they could be. It would be nice if the whole https://xkcd.com/386/ could be mellowed a bit. Maybe it is time to show some love and revisit the http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1516839-modding-community-love-train-jump-on-it-you-too/?

Where Valves cut go is fairly obvious, but I have not seen anyone doing much guessing on what costs Bethesda need to cover. Do you have a linky?

I still maintain that all such a system needs to exist and succeed is real input by gamesas, I don't believe they need to be vetting content before it reaches a marketplace or anything like that. In my opinion all they need is a team of community managers dedicated to being involved and engaging the modding community.

Said team would be able to police content if necessary, contacting mod authors/pulling paid content when content is being stolen/misused.

The community already does a pretty decent job of policing itself just by nature of how outspoken most are against such practices and how familiar so many people are with the work of others, this is likely why Beth felt they could take the easier/lazier/cheaper approach and stick with that.

And sure, the waters get infinitely muddier when we're dealing with assets like textures, sounds etc. But no more so than they already are really. This does really boil down to be prepared for people to be sh*tty when you share stuff online.

In my dreams of the future they're supplying official tools for handling nifs, updating and improving the CK as an ongoing tool and continuing to fix the stuff they themselves broke in the base game giving us an even better platform to develop for, but for now I'll settle for some community involvement.

Simple. Bethesda told Valve "no curation". Mod authors asked if they could put existing works up and charge money for them now. Both Bethesda and Valve said that would be a bad idea and make people angry at those authors for doing it, but they'd not stop anyone who chose to go that route.

I'll admit, I thought about doing that with a couple of mine, then realized I'd rather not paint a target on my back over it. So I went with my Castle Volkihar mod instead since it wasn't something that existed yet. I believe this to be why I didn't get much directed at me personally over this whole thing.

So I guess if anyone is to blame for fomenting anger and dissent, it's those authors who used poor judgment in paywalling updates to their existing titles.

The authors who uploaded something that wasn't an update to an existing title seem to have come away more or less unscathed, with the exception of Shezrie (who goes by Meek here). She got a disproportionate share of hate and threats sent her way and for some reason STILL is to this day.

They weren't for me. I had those both gifted to me after I gave in to Skyrim

No, there's no link to cite for this. Just some educated guesses based on things we've been told in general. Those same licensing issues are often cited as the reason we can't have direct importers for .nif files and such, and why animations can't be directly imported into the CK so that things like FNIS are unnecessary. Bethesda deals with these people on a regular basis so it just makes common sense that they'd be the ones to negotiate updated contracts to deal with it all.

This could get lengthy, but thanks for the actual responses.

1. I am not sure what you mean by "actually occured", where? If you are talking about the skyrim paid workshop, there is literally no data to go on, we had a bunch of poorly picked badly mad mods asking too much and a community [censored]storm trying their best to destroy everything as best they could. I will take the examples of the other 2 workshops and all of humanities capitalist history over that any day.

2. Skyrim is not the sims firstly, just like you saying that Skyrim is not dota, however at least dota had almost the same workshop set up pretty much. Secondly Steam is about convenience, I am willing to bet there are users on Steam who would still buy mods even if the exact same mod was free on the nexus or free on some torrent site, just so they are cocooned in their little steam bubble with their updates etc. I think we can all agree the skyrim workshop should be improved to minimise conflicts etc, but that isn't an argument against paid mods, it's an argument that the steam workshop for skyrim is poorly implemented.

3. Again, implementation not an argument against it.

4. This is probably one of the few genuine concerns. Since this hasn't been tried before I can't honestly say how big a problem this might be, I did mention in another thread though that if Beth made it possible to give a small percent to other mods based on resources used it would encourage rather than discourage the creation of such content. 50 paid mods using your free content and all contributing a tiny amount adds up to more than you might make charging for it, and other people can still use it free.

5. Yeah, their effort for this was shockingly bad, no denying that.

6. Reported, banned from the workshop/steam I guess? Bethesda insisting on a non curated workshop was admittedly dumb though.

7. I believe this was largely due to everyone acting like a bunch of panicked sheep, but who knows, we didn't get the time to find out.

8. Agreed, it does need to step up it's game. But how does steam providing a better mod manager equate to mod DRM?

9. You missed the point entirely, yes piracy happens, but as a game company you just get to accept it and attempt to provide a service or content that's worth paying for. If I can't accept the chance the stuff I want to sell gets pirated, then I can always not make it.

10. I can see the bigger picture, it includes content creators around the world being able to earn a living or work less hours by building stuff for your virtual worlds, and it's coming whether you like it or not to be honest. It will no doubt be coming to other games as well. Look at UE4's market, unity's market, steam's market, the world is a changing place. Also frankly I have seen many posts in the TES forums over the years before this happened saying "is modding dying?" etc. No, it's not dying, it just takes a hell of a lot more effort to create AAA quality content for AAA games and not everyone has time to do that unpaid.

The last part isn't correct, I will easily acknowledge that in it's current state it was a pretty bad implementation, and as I wrote above some concerns have some validity. In some ways I am glad this poorly conceived initial attempt failed, because it really was poorly thought out. On the other I am somewhat annoyed that I won't be able to earn a little money creating content for one of my favourite game series any time soon.

Yeah, i'm a physical impossibility, a naive cynic
Valve's cut i get, obviously there are costs maintaining their services, though i'd still expect some sort of administering of their services.
Royalties for the CK? Isn't the distributed CK version all BGS' stuff? Legal stuff, would make sense i suppose, though it would have been fun to see what sort of [censored] it could have stirred up with international laws. European court ordered that Valve must allow selling digital games used, which Valve refused, so there's lots of drama there already Oh well, i'll see that with their next game.

And like everyone in the history of the internet ever, my mind has not been changed
But i don't really have a horse in this race either, just meant to post my opinion.
I'll just go ahead and enjoy the status quo while it lasts.

I had not heard that Bethesda had been against curation. It sort of surprises me. And while I can understand that even generous individuals can be seduced by the allure of money, one should think that the colder capitalists like Bethesda and Valve would push the people in question to not do something like that on launch.

By the way, did the legal situation of mods uploaded to the curated workshop ever get resolved?

That sounds awful! I hope that she (and the others on the receiving end of this) manage to pull through without scars.

Makes sense. Thanks.

http://www.bethblog.com/2015/04/27/why-were-trying-paid-skyrim-mods-on-steam/:

In our early discussions regarding Workshop with Valve, they presented data showing the effect paid user content has had on their games, their players, and their modders. All of it hugely positive. They showed, quite clearly, that allowing content creators to make money increased the quality and choice that players had. They asked if we would consider doing the same.

This was in 2012 and we had many questions, but only one demand. It had to be open, not curated like the current models. At every step along the way with mods, we have had many opportunities to step in and control things, and decided not to. We wanted to let our players decide what is good, bad, right, and wrong. We will not pass judgment on what they do. We’re even careful about highlighting a modder on this blog for that very reason.

http://store.steampowered.com/eula/eula_202480:

You are only permitted to distribute the New Materials, without charge (i.e., on a strictly non-commercial basis) (except as set forth in Section 5 below), to other authorized users who have purchased the Product, solely for use with such users’ own authorized copies of such Product and in accordance with and subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement and all applicable laws. [...] If You make New Material available to others through Your use of the Steam Workshop as a Workshop Contribution, You may participate in any applicable Steam program for commercial distribution of Your Workshop Contribution, subject to all the terms and conditions of the Steam Workshop.

Their blog post explains it pretty well I think. Though admittedly that should have gone up on launch day. Hindsight, wonderful thing.

It did, though I would think that with both companies obviously behind the initiative the legal status of paid mods shouldn't have been in question at all.

Time will tell. The trolls will tire of their games soon enough.

Also don't forget the authors who showed poor judgement by modding for Dota before.

Must have read the blog post to fast. I totally missed it. fireundubh was nice enough to quote the relevant parts.

Oh, I was referring to a post you made a few days after the shop was closed, where you were less than satisfied with communication from Valve and the legal limbo regarding your mod. But just after I made the other post, I saw that you posted a release thread here, so I suppose it must have been resolved.

Can't tell if you were being serious or not. I have no dog in the Dota hunt since I don't play it

Oh, that. Yeah. That got taken care of which is why it's now out for free. I was debating whether I wanted to or not but in the end couldn't just let it go to waste.

Yes, I even put it up on the Workshop too. I have nothing against the Workshop, just the DRM on the games.

There were many angry people who couldn't separate the practices of content creators from the distribution model.

• "Because some free-to-play games encourage paying to win, no game should adopt the free-to-play model."
• "Because some game developers produce horse armor DLC, no developer should produce DLC."
• "Because some content creators charge for updates, no content creator should sell their content."

That's poor judgment!

I didn't think charging for updates, or rereleasing free content as paid content, were viable long-term strategies though.

I would have preferred, however, to let the market determine which strategies were best through sales, reviews, and word of mouth.

Unfortunately, we lost the market altogether before that could happen.

I am really happy, that I found that and there is a constructive discussion about what happened.

I was contacted by a friend (gamer), he told me what happened (since a year he doesn't play Skyrim anymore and he was done with the game after 100 hours and never used mods,). After that I read on reddit and other sites and recognized ... flaming.

These both and aspecially Robin Scott cover all points I thought of when I read what happened and a lot of comments. I am wether for paying nor not-paying for mods. ... Because with all the pros and the cons it is difficult to come to an opinion.

Definatelly Valve and Bethesda made mistakes about the topic, but all this freaking out was quit to much. I think THE mistake was the lack of communication. I got the impression this story came out of the blue.

I think charging for significant updates/re-releasing free mods as paid content would have been fine, done as either 1) timed exclusives (60 days paid only; then that version gets ported to free sites like Nexus), and/or 2) the "pay what you want" model, with $0 being an option (I believe Gabe mentioned allowing that during his reddit Q&A, but I'm not sure it was actually implemented).

As a mod user, and not a mod author, I would be fine with the idea of paid mods. I wasn't a fan of the way they went about implementing it, for several reasons:

• Forced to use Steam Workshop for paid mods (I don't like the auto-update feature, and prefer to get my mods from Nexus)
• The 75% cut to Bethesda & Valve vs 25% to the modders (I do understand this better now, thanks to Arthmoor's posts regarding licensing and royalties for the CK) - and the fact that they don't pay out until a certain amount is reached.
• The 24 hour window for refunds - it can take longer than that to fully test a mod and make sure it doesn't cause any issues with your load order, depending on the type of mod & set-up you run.

But if they made some changes - allowing you to opt out of auto-updates; perhaps allow you to use a mod for say a week before you pay for it (or alternately if mod authors posted their mods to free sites for people to try out, and then people could 'buy' it via Steam if it suited their game & they thought it worth a contribution); etc., then I'd really have no objections to mod authors charging for their mods if they wanted. It's a shame the system wasn't given more time to iron out some of the issues, the rollout was handled very poorly.

Is Patreon a viable route for mod authors? It would be more stable than donations, I would think, and I know some webcomic artists have had great success with it.

The auto-update feature is not to blame for the evils people claim it promotes. Bad mods are. If a mod author does not know how to properly handle updates between versions of their mods, then it doesn't much matter if Steam hands it to you automatically or if you get it from Nexus. The end result is going to be the same.

The reason they don't pay out until the account has $100+ in it is because banks charge stupid ridiculous fees for changing numbers in a computer for every transaction. The smaller they get, the less worthwhile it becomes. Same is true of Paypal donations too. Valve settled on $100 which was perfectly fine.

It can take just as long, if not longer, to find out if a game you're playing svcks, has bugs, terrible support, is incompatible with your hardware, you name it. Just TRY and get a refund for that through Steam. You won't succeed. So if a mod causing the same exact issues is a concern, either they shouldn't be allowed to be refunded or Steam should be getting pushed to refund for bad games too.

GoG.com excels on that one. 30 days no questions asked. On games with no DRM even.

From what I've seen of it, no, I don't think it would really work. Not for mod authors who aren't releasing a steady stream of new mods anyway. Most of us don't either. It works out well for web comics because they tend to have a lot of ongoing material to draw from. Same with Youtubers who can churn out stuff relatively quickly. Patreon would probably have to come up with something suitable for Indie game development before it could be adapted for mods too.

I just received a refund from Steam for a game I bought three days before. I had a few minutes logged before I realized the game wasn't at all what I expected. Valve refunds purchases now; however, instead of sending real money back to you, they'll just dump store credit into your Steam Wallet. Getting the refund wasn't difficult: I filed a support ticket and, 12 hours later, I had store credit waiting for me.

Small question if you don't mind: Was it your very first refund? Steam does have a one-time "customer service gesture" refund. But once you use it, it's gone forever. I think they usually warn you about it in their reply.

They never said anything like that, but the game was an early access title. I was also referred to Steam Support by the developer.

I'd have preferred actual money, but The Witcher 3 is out in under two weeks, so whatever.

Now here's mod with a quality, quantity and price i probably will pay for: http://store.steampowered.com/app/362890/

If paid mods enable more projects like that, then im all for it

Nah, the result is not the same, unless the auto update feature can check your entire load order to determine whether any patches need to be updated and will delay the update until the patch is available. If you get an update from Nexus, you can make an informed choice about whether to upgrade.

Suppose you have mod A and mod B in your load order and to run them together, it requires the A-B patch. When the author of mod A releases an update that is incompatible with the A - B patch, an informed user is not going to upgrade mod A until someone makes an updated A- B patch. The person who makes the A-B patch is often someone else, not the author of mod A.

If you have mods automatically updating, it can break your game if the A - B patch is not yet available and the auto updater goes ahead and updates mod A. With manual updates, you can time it yourself and wait for the updated patch. Will the automatic update feature automatically handle such issues?