You kidding me? Most of the paid supporters are calling mod-users "Entitled" "Childish" "can't empathize with modders" and numerous other things. The losing side is far from being anything of the sort. Hell, just read this thread and you'll see most of the hostility and insulting comes from the paid supporters.

Why shouldn't Bethesda become a publisher of mods like HarperCollins is for books. Mod authors submit proposals or finished mods and according to it's merits get an advance on the proposal or outright purchase of the completed mod. Bethesda wouldn't be your employer, not even on a contract basis, so they wouldn't have all the employment legalities to worry about. If you want to get paid, treat it like a real job like serious authors do.

Unfortunately I'm not often wrong. Drives people up the wall. Community/Game Civil wars are never a good thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFQhzuhaMfg

Out of curiosity ... which one made it through? And do you remember how?

That is completely illogical and false. Perhaps if you approached this from a buisness perspective, but the community wasn't a business before they tried to make it one. Which is where I feel a lot of people are not getting it. What the people making mods do affects them and everyone. Steam didn't see fit to ask anyone and look how that turned out. In such a small community not sharing community changing plans can result in... well you seen. You can't treat a community like a business because it doesn't work quite the same. See what I'm trying to say?

My real life community. I did something stupid. Very stupid. I feel much like Valve in this regard except I know I felt almost instant remorse. If it hadn't been that we were all good friends I can't say if it would have ever mended. It also helped I proposed this dumb idea instead of just swooshing out of nowhere and implementing it. It was a very small close knit community as well. Which is what I think let it pass over. I'm not sure such civility exists in large enough quantities on the internet to heal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH4GJrcJPlk

With 20 million copies sold - if Beth's numbers are correct, we have 200,000 mod makers and 19.8 million users. Why is it illogical to conclude that anybody bothering to comment one way or another are minorities?

Sorry for the nitpicking, but what they actually wrote was

And we still don't know how they got those numbers, nor what it represents. Did they count how many people downloaded the Construction Kit, how many started it, how many saved a file or how many uploaded a mod somewhere?

But, yeah, the point stands: A lot of modders did not comment on it, and we should all be very careful at guessing why not. It could be everything from not having heard about it (it was pure coincidence that I heard about it), over not caring, or simply lurking like so many others.

I find those numbers highly questionable. I wonder if those are the numbers taken from Steam only, excluding the Nexus and the various other mod sites out there. Same goes for the 20mil copies sold, as that's an old figure which does not include Steam sales.

I have been reading this thread and the others where people continue to discuss this issue. There's been plenty of hostility and insulting from both sides. Don't confuse the handful of people posting comments here with all of the modders and mod users on either side of the debate.

We are talking about the video, no?

Robin Scott (the owner of the Nexus) and the others talked about those things in the video:

"childish" - They talked about the horde of angry children and advlt children that are the biggest and loudest part of the internet reaction to paid mods.

"Entitlement" - They called this "the E-word" in the video and discussed it.

"Empathy" - As I already stated, Robin brought this up at the end of the video, stating that people (mod makers and mod users) should have more empathy for each other. I brought this up for discussion, and some of you immediately responded as if I (GamerRick) said this to offend you, instead of just bringing it up for discussion.

So, being that Robin brought up these issues in the video, and this topic is to discuss the video, maybe you can address them as such. I don't care what "paid supporters are calling mod-users". I care what the people in the video said.

EDIT: Fix Robin's last name.

If somebody personally doesn't care about getting paid for something in relation to modding, then what's really stopping them from helping out somebody who is, somebody who asks, wants, or could just use the help, even if they don't get any monetary compensation out of it? Helping just to be helpful. Why is that somehow so taboo in these instances?

Given everything that was going on throughout all of this, I don't think the community was ever actually where they thought they were or all that they thought they were.

You might want to try rereading the other threads, it seemed to me most of the hostility was directed at those like Chesko, the SkyUI team and so forth. And those people have been slow to apologise for their vitrioiic behaviour, and it was these people I specifically refered to as the noisy, pathetic few in a certain other thread. I'm still waiting for an apology from the person who told me to take my mods off the Workshop instead of asking nicely.

There has only been 23 million sales total of Skyrim. Where 20 million for PC came from I do not know.

PC sales are estimated around 8 million. Thus only 780,000 have used a mod and under 80,000 have made one.

If we went with with 20 million there would be 200,000 mod makers which would be massively overestimating it.

Oh no, whoever said 20mil meant 20mil total for all platforms, but that number is an old one. As for the 23mil, that also does not include Steam sales as they never released their figures, hence why quoting sales figures is a silly thing

20 million sales came from Bethesda. I'm pretty sure Bethesda knows how many copies of their own game they've sold, even if Steam doesn't tell the public.

SteamSpy estimates that Skyrim has sold 13 million copies on Steam. The estimates are pretty accurate for top sellers.

http://steamspy.com/app/72850

So if we assume 13 million is accurate.

8% = just over 1 million who have used a mod.

1% = 130000 who have made a mod.

I think it's pretty safe to assume these percentages were taken from Steam since they would have access to solid tracking numbers.

We clearly did not hear from the majority of those 130000 people who make mods. We don't know if they supported pay mods or rejected pay mods. Since Steam Workshop only has ~24000 mods listed we don't even know what kind of mods they make. So any assessment of the quality of the content going into the paywall section is kind of silly too since we don't know what the majority of mods are like. (this assumes of those 130000 people that they each made only 1 mod apiece)

So why didn't we hear from all these people? Simple. They didn't care enough to comment. Which is why you NEVER EVER go with what the small minority of angry people are demanding. Especially when there's insufficient data to know if it could have succeeded as implemented.

To be fair, the text said 'less than 1%', which could mean anything.

Doesn't change that i agree with everything else you said, though.

I think it's save so assume, based on the amount of mods seen on nexus and workshop, and the fact that the average amount of mods per author should be < 10 from what i've seen, that there are somewhere between 10.000 and 100.000 modders for skyrim, some of which may no longer be active.

The http://www.bethblog.com/2015/04/27/why-were-trying-paid-skyrim-mods-on-steam/ said less than 1% of Skyrim audience, so it could be anything up to 1% of total sales on all platforms or total sales on PC.

Nexus http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/about/stats/? that it has 17 418 "members with files" in the Skyrim section. Given your number that Steam Workshop has ~24 000 mods, and a lot of those also exist on nexus, the two sites are unlikely to have much more than 25 000 mod authors between them. Given that there are other communities out there that do not frequent nexus or SW, e.g. the German and Japanese modding communities, the actual number of mod authors with a publicly published mod could be ... maybe twice that?

Or maybe they did not know? It was pure coincidence that I visited nexus the Saturday after the announcement. The first I heard of it in my usual venue was on the 28th where slashdot ran the story that Valve had pulled the plug. I could easily have missed that story as well.

There are also a lot of lurkers who do not comment for a multitude of reasons. Maybe they feel that someone else expressed their point of view, so they don't see the point in writing a comment, maybe they felt they could not contribute anything, or simply because they were shy.

The point: The people who did not comment, could have done so for all sorts of reasons, and we should not be putting words into their mouths, because we really have no way of knowing how they feel.

I counted around 20 major media outlets which covered the story over the two weeks that paid mods was a hot topic. Let's not forget word of mouth, too. People talk; they don't just consume information from a single source. They use forums, article comments, Twitter, YouTube, and so on. Certainly, some of the Skyrim audience may not have heard about paid mods, but I don't think we can assume that the majority did not.

That's pretty much the definition of not caring enough to comment.

Perhaps saying they didn't care is a bit negative. I think it's even simpler, at the time those authors didn't need to comment. What would they say? Gloat? We didn't think Beth/Valve would reverse the decision once they made it. Just wait for the children to get bored of the tantrums, then see what it's all about.

I tried to throw out an opinion and was met by hostility from users of this forum I've never seen round here before. That thread went so fast I gave up trying to keep up in the end. Then next thing I know paid mods went as abruptly as they came (and so did the forum "members")

- Hyono

http://www.marketresearchworld.net/content/view/1617/74/

If people are apathetic then it is too bad their opinion isn't counted. The same applies to voting in elections. If you don't care enough to vote then you have no right to complain. I think you will also find that it is nearly always the vocal 'minority' as you put it who get their way. In elections a lot of people don't vote. Those that do win are never a true majority of those of voting age. I think it is something like 30% of potential voters don't. One group would need almost the entirety of the rest of the possible voters to get a majority.

There was also a petition to keep the mods on steam. If people wanted to keep them they could have signed that. It's how democracy works.

The against petition got 135,000 signatures.

The for paid mods has 40.