Valve monetizes mods (With Bethseda Launcher and Open Beta for Modding Released, Possible Return?)

Yog-Sothoth said:
You know this has all been just a little shady, getting concerned about this.
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I think being very concerned is appropriate. They probably expected this to be a shitstorm and are prepared to hold the line. If they can weather the public outrage for a few months, they stand to make tons of dosh by doing pretty much nothing. The dream of any business.
 
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Yog-Sothoth said:
They now take 80% of the cash. Thats fucking horse shit.
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Not like the chucklefucks who actually expect to get paid for amateur, minimally tested, third party DLC they developed for free before this deserve to get paid at all, but still, I cannot see for the life of my why Valve would take more money from them. That'll just aggravate the problem.
 
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MerriedManJr said:
I think being very concerned is appropriate. They probably expected this to be a shitstorm and are prepared to hold the line. If they can weather the public outrage for a few months, they stand to make tons of dosh by doing pretty much nothing. The dream of any business.
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This is significantly more of a shitstorm than anyone expected. Steam is apparently getting DDos'ed at the moment. People are also talking about how Valve will not remove a mod from the store unless "legally pressed" to. Guarantee if they get a lot of legal action threats they'll be pressed to do something.

This also still has several dozen long term problems. I don't expect the public to let up about this at all. Especially if other developers follow Bethesda's example.
 
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AnOminous said:
As others pointed out, this opens a huge can of worms. A lot of mods contain IP borrowed or stolen from who knows where, possibly GPL stuff, and who knows what?

A lot of companies these days are fairly lax when something is just copyright, at least when it's noncommercial, but this has just made it commercial. Anyone finding their IP being sold for money and Valve making money off it is going to go bugfuck, and it won't be unreasonable. Valve will be basically stealing from them.

The pony mods would be a super obvious example and would probably be infringing both under copyright and trademark.
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That was my first thought. A huge number of mods use content from other IP's and i can see certain companies using this as an excuse to clamp down even further on fan made content. Mods are already somewhat of a grey area in certain jurisdictions and its hard not to imagine some of the more aggressive IP holders using this as an excuse to clamp down widely. the Tolkien Estate, Disney (lucas arts and marvel stuff) and Nintendo all spring to mind.

The second issue is steams past history of quality control plus its refund policy. The nature of amateur mods is that they are less likely to be polished products, this isnt too much of an issue when they're free but when people are paying for them they should really be entitled to refunds for broken/unusable products.

Steam's refund policy in general is extremely wooly and has failed everytime it has been tested before EU courts. Their changes never go far enough and pay only token respect to the judgements which is why they keep loosing. The fact that most people won't bother suing over video games is the only reason steam haven'y been forced to change it. No other industry would get away with this. Broken mods are just going to highlight and exacerbate steam's already terrible system. I realise in the US what valve does is legal but in Europe it is a different ballgame and this nonsense about tightly dictated terms on refunds when steam has an effective monopoly is exactly the kind of thing the Commission targets. Right now they're occupied with google but they took a fair smack at microsoft in the past and valve are risking drawing attention to themselves. Valve may be wealthy but the commision fined microsoft EU561m ($731m) in 2013 and that kind of number even valve should be wary of.
 
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Oglooger said:
These are the kind of mods we'd be funding

I know one of these got a cease and desist because one of them was trying to get payed to make a mod.
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Oh my god!
It's Monty Python and the Holy Grail: The Video Game.
 
SkyUI has confirmed a paid only version

Bare in mind SkyUI is the mod that improves the interface and is basically a necessity to play the game with a Mouse + keyboard.
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BRB, downloading Skyrim mod kit.
 
@Cuddlebug

Personally to me that post looks like he is taking the piss out of one of the devs who was hyping up the 2.0 version of their mod for so long, then followed up by releasing it on the pay-for market.

I personally hoping he is just fucking with people.
 
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Organic Fapcup said:
Not like the chucklefucks who actually expect to get paid for amateur, minimally tested, third party DLC they developed for free before this deserve to get paid at all, but still, I cannot see for the life of my why Valve would take more money from them. That'll just aggravate the problem.
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Commodore B.S. said:
got a picture of that change, or a link?
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I jumped the gun on that sorry. Still 75%.

dungoofed 2.PNG

Cuddlebug said:
SkyUI has confirmed a paid only version

Bare in mind SkyUI is the mod that improves the interface and is basically a necessity to play the game with a Mouse + keyboard.
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Paying for a menu fix, I know Iv joked around saying we would be buying game fixes. Should have kept my mouth shut.
 
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My question is, are they forcing people to pay for mods?
Because no one should pay for a Weeaboo katana mod except for idiots.
I can see a paid mod system working, but selling your mods must be optional and mods with copyrighted content can only be distributed, not sold. Modders would have to get a better profit percentage to encourage people to actually make the kind of mods people would pay for. The idea being that this would encourage teams of modders to release large, large quality mods for sale, while little weapons mods and things done by people who just love the game would be kept free.
 
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I was wrong. Schlangster went and posted this on the Nexus for skyui:

Well... currently, the plan is the following:
- Upload new version for minimum $1 (pay-what-you-want) on SW.
- Keep old version for free as it is on both Nexus and SW.
- Service provider split would go to Nexus to support the site even if I can't host the free version there.
- Any changes to core infrastructure like MCM flows back to the free version as well, so I won't try to force you to upgrade or pull any other stupid stunt like that.

Some more background:
Two years ago after released what was supposed to be the final SkyUI version 4.1, because I no longer had that much time to put into it and I felt it was time to move on. Then, couple of weeks back, I was invited to take part in the test group and prepare something for the launch. That prompted me to start working on a SkyUI update, because the crafting menus were still left to do and I know there's demand for them. It's the kind of task that requires someone with a decent technical background to work on annoying stuff full-time for a couple of weeks - something neither me nor anyone else was willing to do up to this point. But: Doing it for the potential of money was fine, so there we go.

I didn't make the launch date, because I'm also a contributor for SKSE, so I knew that it was going up on Steam and I wanted to wait for that. At this point, I still assumed the major hurdle would've been making everything work with a few clicks. I don't particularly regret missing it, considering the immense shitstorm. Didn't really see that coming. I saw it similar to an app store where nobody freaks out when you upload a paid app. Either people buy it or they don't.

So these are the facts. Currently, I'm still waiting anyway. I'll return the donations from today once I figured out how that works, so no need to feel tricked there. And I suppose now we are at the point where you will explain to me why I should mod and what modding is all about.
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People are not taking it.... well.
 
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