» Sun Apr 26, 2015 7:08 pm After reading more and more about the recent paid mod debate, I have decided to add my two cents and keep the [censored]storm going. Therefore, I will try to put my thoughts on the issue to paper and to be as complete as I can hope to be. So here goes:
Fist up, an intro: I’m not a modder, but I use a lot of them. I do not think this paid-mod thing is a good idea, and I am feeling that given the current cluster[censored], I’d try to give a more detailed account of what I think is going to happen. Have fun reading (or get a headache, whatever). Also, I am not a native speaker, so please do try to be understanding if some things are poorly worded.
1. Facts, because how can you write about something if you do not have those?
As of several days ago, Valve has announced that you now have the possibility to sell mods on the workshop for actual money. Anyone may now choose to either publish a mod for free, with a pay-what-you want system – which fixes a minimum price for the customer to pay - or for a fixed price.
Mod authors that choose to sell their mods will get a 25% cut of their sales, while Valve keeps the other 75% and splits it –in percentages unknown to me- with the publisher.
Mod authors start receiving money once their revenue hits 100$, which means their product must have sold for 400$ before its publisher gets paid at all.
Customers have a 24 hour window in which they can test their purchased mods. If they decide that the mod is not for them during that trial period, they can ask for a refund, no questions asked.
2. The good of it:
Now now, sit down and hear me out. I’m gonna do this essay style. I start with one point of view, I finish with the one I actually support, but I start by playing devil’s advocate.
This could help some talented mod authors make a living out of modding and help them produce more and better quality content. With the revenues made from the mods he sold, he might be able to spend more time making more mods, and invest himself fully in his creations.
It actually is my personal belief that mod authors should get some monetary compensation for their hard work. They actually work a lot on those mods, and like everything else, such hard work should be remunerated. Saying that you shouldn’t expect to get any money, because modding is a passion and not actual work, isn’t a compelling argument, it’s the youtube carrier debate all over again and it shows a certain entitlement from mod-users. Just because something has always been free doesn’t mean that it has to stay that way, and being able to make a living from your passion shouldn’t be stigmatized like we do now for the modding hobby/job. If you work your ass off doing something, you should be able to make a living out of it, but I digress.
Another good thing would be that it would allow mod authors to do their work legally. And that’s a big plus, because support of the modding community by publishers was a very tricky issue, with it being more a “turn-a-blind-eye” kind of thing than actual support. Paid mods, with a cut going to the publisher, might be a clever way to work around that legal barrier.
3. First bad thing: The deal with Valve and Bethesda/Zenimax:
The above would be a possible (albeit unlikely) outcome, if it weren’t for the conditions of the deal with Valve. With only 25% going to the mod author, I do not feel that Valve is being honest by saying they want to support the modding community. Taking 75% is just far too much a share for having to done absolutely nothing except for hosting the content. Taking three quarters for someone else’s work is just ridiculous. And how absurdly good would a mod author have to be to make enough money for a living out of that? It’s just gonna be way harder. And the support that should go to the mod author, the person Valve is claiming to be helping, is actually going to Valve itself, and personally, I don’t want to pay Valve for something they did nothing to contribute to.
4. Second bad thing: The legal issues:
Oh boy, what bloody pain this has already become.
The paid mods have already created a huge amount of legal problems, and it’s not going to stop.
We already have scammers stealing free content from the nexus and asking money for it on the Steam-workshop. We had a paid mod shut down because it was using resources from a free mod without permission (and an informed reader might know that Valve basically told the author of the paid mod that any free content was fair game to use).
People are actually starting to sell unfinished (!) mods. So now, we have early-access paid mods.
And the thing that enables this kind of behavior is the terribly inept Steam customer service, with no quality control what-so-ever. Everyone can put anything for any price on the workshop, and Valve just doesn’t give a damn. Even if they did, the task-force needed to regulate the copyright of an entire community, with who would be allowed to use assets from whom, has this mod already been published elsewhere for free et cetera, would be gargantuan. It would be an unachievable goal!
And the problem of such behavior, with scammers and the like, will have repercussions on the community which I will talk about once I get there.
5. About that refund-period:
I have several problems with this. First of all, a day to test a mod is way too short. With a huge game like Skyrim, mods can break a game after several hours, or only in select locations. To know if a mod works well with the rest of your set-up, you have to do extensive testing, and more often than not, when you find out it doesn’t work, it’s too late and you have to start from a point where you didn’t have said mod. 24 hours is just not long enough.
Second problem I have with this: the responsibility issue. Imagine you find out your mod doesn’t work after that refund period. There has been an update (unlikely for Skyrim, but this will concern other games in the future) which screws it up. Or you discover it clashes with another mod under certain circumstances. What happens then? Well you take it up with the mod author! After the trial period, there is no way for you to get your money back, and you are left to debate it with the mod author to resolve the issue. Valve, after having taken 75% of that money, will have no part of the ramification of the product they sold. And what if the problem takes a very long time to fix? What if it can’t be fixed because the author doesn’t know how? What if the mod author doesn’t work on that mod anymore?
Am I, as a customer, expected to pay for a product that might suddenly not work anymore with no way of getting my money back? With this, we do not have any quality control for the mods published themselves, but moreover we don’t even have a guarantee that an actually good paid-mod will keep working! And who will get blamed? The modders! Who will have caused this and disappeared with your money? Valve!
6. The consequences on the modding community:
You know, at first, I thought I was for mod authors getting money for their mods. I thought that, in principle, it was a good idea for these people to get some money. However, I also started reading mod author’s opinions that were against the paid mods. And they have some good points.
How do you think money will affect the community? Even with a utopian customer support which goes after all the bad guys instantly, what might happen?
Well, cooperation between modders will plummet. Up until now, modders were in many cases sharing their content, asking only to be credited for their work should you use their work. Do you honestly think this will still be the case once money starts getting involved? There will be bickering, there will be jealous safe-gaurding of one’s product, there will be mistrust.
Another thing about cooperation: for every super-talented mod-author that rises and can make a living out of modding, how many big projects do you figure will get cancelled or simply impossible to make? Because let’s face it, if you have the choice between making a complete overhaul or an armor mod, knowing both might sell similarly well, which one will you make? And I know making armor mods take a long time to make too! But consider this: an armor/weapon mod has much less risk of causing legal issues and being taken down. They also sell quite easily because of most of them having little to no chance of breaking your game or of not working anymore after an update. Many overhauls on the other hand, take a lot of time to make, have potential to break your game, require a lot of tweaking and fixing, and sometimes involve using resources from other modders.
By making what I will now call cosmetic mods, you save on a lot of stress and you don’t have to share the wealth. Therefore, the result I predict is a workshop with one or two occasional exceptional mods, but mostly tons and tons of cosmetic mods (which might be of very good quality, mind you) that do not actually enhance the gameplay.
And yet another thing: with the legal issues discussed above, what will happen to truly big projects? What will happen to colossal mods like Skywind, where teams of 70+ people work together on a project? People will be much less likely to work together like that given the host of legal problems, because huge projects like that will probably end up using resources from several different mods.
And even if by some miracle a mod like Skywind sees the light of day, how much will you pay for that? 10-15$? That’s 2.50$ going to the actual team, which you then have to split between 70 people.
In cases like that, unless modding is purely your passion, wouldn’t you rather spend time on a cosmetic mod and make some money without having to share it? And if truly good mods start costing that much, what will we soon have, pirated mods? That sounds a bit weird, doesn’t it?
And with the whole responsibility issue, with users blaming the modders, the resulting tension might heavily damage the relationship between mod authors and the users. How will the climate evolve in the community over time?
So tldr, what do I think will happen to the modding community?
I think that for every truly magnificient mod author that will make quality content and make a living from it, we will have hundreds upon hundreds of cosmetic mods of varying quality, and huge cooperation projects will become a dying breed.
7. What Valve gains by doing this:
Now, this might come across as paranoia or conspiracy theory, so I’m listing this last, but what does Valve hope to gain from this? I mean except from money earned by other people?
Well basically, a monopoly. The Steam-Workshop is currently the only place where you can make mods and sell them legally. If other people want to sell mods, they will have to go to Valve, because if they did it elsewhere without the accord of the publisher, it wouldn’t be legal. And who could then shut-down such sites nearly unhindered? Valve, of course.
With what is currently happening, I fear that Steam will be the only contestant in the area of paid mods, and modders will never get a better deal elsewhere, because no-one else will offer them to take less than 75% of their sales. Valve will be the sole power in that area, and I am not okay with that.
I’m also not okay with having 10 bucks in permanent fashion in my steam wallet just so that I can “try out” a mod. That money will be gone, I won’t get it back, even if I spent it on something else.
8. How could it be done better?
Well start off with a better deal for modders. Make the money go to the people actually doing the work and I’d be more inclined to part with my cash. The current conditions are just unacceptable.
Then, get rid of that pay-wall. Putting that thing between the consumer and the modders is just a big mistake. Try taking another path, like patreon-style or the donation system on the nexus. I know these are not perfect and need refinement, maybe pushing people more to donate in exchange for incentives like faster download rates after a donation or something, but implementing a pay-wall is just not gonna work.
Furthermore, improve that customer service. Honestly, all this scamming and people trying to screw each other over is a shameless display of how much Valve just doesn’t give a crap. There has to be guidelines for quality control, a way to make sure people who publish and sell their mods are actually trustworthy and have delivered quality content before.
There are probably tons of ways to improve the paid-mods idea, or make it less horrible to some, even though I do not approve of it. I’d like to see modders getting money for their work, but with how it currently is, this is gonna hurt the community big time in the long run, or at least that’s how I feel.
And this leads us to the next point!
9. What am I gonna do about it in the meantime?
Well I am going to keep shouting and pouting. I will spread the issue to people who don’t know about it. I will try to encourage a civil and healthy discussion on forums, reddit, etc. I will talk to friends, I will post this message here and there on the internet in the hopes of someone reading it somewhere.
I will sign this petition, not because I’m against giving mod authors some money, but because this is just unacceptable in its current form.
And I will boycott Bethesda/Zenimax and Valve.
Yes, haha, I single guy boycotting these two companies, whatever will that achieve? But guess what?
Once a guy like me, the very definition of a meh kinda guy who never gets involved in anything, starts getting so offended at your business practices that he feels that even HE has to do something, anything about it, then how long do you think you can keep going like that before other people leave? And since Valve and Zenimax do not really seem to care whether they help the community or not as long as they make some money, my response is to try to hit them in the only spot that seems to hurt them: their wallet.
10. Throwing Blame around:
So yeah, I need to vent too, in a completely uncivil way.
First, I do not blame any modder who agreed to the paid-mods deal. You want to get some money for your work, and the current donation system just isn’t cutting it, I get it. When you have the choice between 25% and nada, you take the 25%, it’s understandable. So while I think you didn’t make a wise choice, I do not think you should get burned at the stake.
I’d much rather blame Valve and Bethesda/Zenimax.
Valve, for trying to make some cash by opening a poorly implemented free-for-all [censored]fest of a Battle-Royal, where everyone competes to see who can strip the most money from other people while doing [censored]-all. For being so shameless about pocketing someone else’s money, for claiming to support a community when you are actively hurting hit. I am seething with rage and indignation, and I hope you go choke on razor-bladed [censored].
And Bethesda. What the actual [censored]? You have been supporting the modding community for ages, with the creation kit and mod-friendly environment. Your games have thrived on modding, giving them publicity and longevity beyond compare for video-games. And now you do this?! Did you even read Valve’s plans before agreeing to this cluster[censored]? I do not know what would be more shocking, that you care so little you didn’t bother to think of the consequences, or that you did and actually thought it was a good idea.
I am not seething with rage against you Bethesda. I’m just bitterly, heavily disappointed. I have not always agreed with what you did, but I always gave you the benefit of the doubt. But after all you have done for the community, after your games benefited so much from it, you pull this stunt.
Even if somehow, sometime, this paid mod thing is taken down, I will never see you the same way I did after I first played Oblivion all these years ago.
So in the meantime: [censored] you Valve, [censored] you Bethesda. You had this horrible, horrible idea in order to make more cash, and you didn’t hesitate to try to make it work at everyone else’s expense. You did a poor job implementing it, because all you care about is the frigging money. Like you didn’t have enough already. So screw that, I’m not taking it anymore. Peace out [censored]s.
