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

[Clown Doll]

In the end, all paid mods encourage, and will ever encourage, is the increase of piracy (to get the mods for free) and the increase of DRM garbage (to protect the paid mods from being pirated).

Not to mention, shitting out countless of low-effort mods and as we've seen already, people chopping up their mods into tiny pieces so they can sell them a bit at the time.

For example, give people 3 day trial or something to test it out if it works etc,

Considering the game this was first tested on is a single-player game with the length of 20-ish hours a mod could break a quest somewhere and you probably wouldn't have the time to test it out even if you powered through the game 5 hours a day just to test if nothing's broken.

I'm not entirely fond of DLC's, but at least with official DLCs there's a promise of quality or the dev is going to lose reputation because of a terrible DLC but with these amateur DLC makers there is no promise of professional quality, yet they'll charge people as if they were.

 

[exball]

Maybe they will actually bug test their games now...

 

[Luna]

Not necessarily.

For a perspective, artist who makes Dota 2 cosmetics managed to buy a house with the earnings from workshop. And it's same percentage in question.

DOTA is one of the most popular F2P MOBAs in the world with thousands of members picking up the game every day. Also cosmetics are very simple changes guaranteed not to impair your ability to play the game, and are easily demonstrable outside of the game so you can look at screen shots and get a general idea about what you're buying. Mods for a four year old single player cRPG are bit different from that.

 

[c-no]

DOTA is one of the most popular F2P MOBAs in the world with thousands of members picking up the game every day. Also cosmetics are very simple changes guaranteed not to impair your ability to play the game, and are easily demonstrable outside of the game so you can look at screen shots and get a general idea about what you're buying. Mods for a four year old single player cRPG are bit different from that.

Especially since a single player cRPG would have mods that go beyond cosmetic. Mods that can end up giving the player an overpowered suit or armor or set of weapons that turns things into an easy mode.

 

[Luna]

Especially since a single player cRPG would have mods that go beyond cosmetic. Mods that can end up giving the player an overpowered suit or armor or set of weapons that turns things into an easy mode.

Well not just that. There was that College of Winterhold improvement that came out a couple of months ago and it seemed very well done and professional... except for that minor issue with it that caused the second quest in the mage questline to be flagged as completed, and any game that ever had it loaded would be unable to advance past that point without console codes. On top of that some statics that weren't supposed to appear until later were marked to appear from the beginning and a couple of characters for what ever reason wound up having their names converted into russian after the questline ends. None of these problems were immediately apparent and the modder didn't even hear about them until a few weeks later, they wound up just taking the mod down because they couldn't figure out how to fix it.

 

[José Mourinho]

Can't believe I'm on like, the 3rd day of this drama.

• The user reviews for Skyrim V are now dropped to 85%. What a fall from grace.
• The aforementioned refunds for paid mods are indeed there, but... you'll be given a week ban from the Steam Market if you do so!
• 
• The petition on Change.org has reached 120k signatures now.
• One of the concerns about this paid mod stuff that people may actually steal mods which are for free to sell them for $$$. Welp, it's happening now. http://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/33xug7/do_you_remember_people_said_they_would_tweakrip/

• Do you remember people said they would tweak/rip off other people's work? I have an example/proof right here. This is my original thread on reddit I posted a day ago. http://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/33uhy9/i_asked_a_modder_for_permission_to_use_a_few/
  
  but wait.. look at what some people found.....http://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/..._a_modder_for_permission_to_use_a_few/cqp4x3y
  
  and....http://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/..._a_modder_for_permission_to_use_a_few/cqouwms
  
  I was going to put links to all of the modders pages at the top of the description and explain which textures came from who. Like I explained to him I would. I said I would give him full credit for his textures. Yet he still said "Nope, what do I win by doing that? Nothing". Now he credits other authors for letting him use their work as a base while CHARGING FOR IT, which I was never going to do.
  
  Yep, he couldn't afford me the same gratuity to let me use some of his work, yet his work is actually based off of the work of others, who were kind enough to let him use theirs.

• EDIT: Here are quotes.
• http://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/33uhy9/i_asked_a_modder_for_permission_to_use_a_few/
• 
  Do you remember people said they would tweak/rip off other people's work? I have an example/proof right here.
  
  I was planning on making a custom pack, a mashup of my own personal textures and textures from a bunch of different modders. Props to Langley2, who right away said go ahead.
  
  
  Now, They are charging (Unsuccessfully, no one has bought them) for a mod that requires other people's mods because part of his mod is retextures of their work. He said I couldn't add his textures in a pack using many other modders textures, including my own personal textures but now he's charging for a mod that has dependencies on other mods.
  
  I was going to put links to all of the modders pages at the top of the description and explain which textures came from who. Like I explained to him I would. I said I would give him full credit for his textures. Yet he still said "Nope, what do I win by doing that? Nothing". Now he credits other authors for letting him use their work as a base while CHARGING FOR IT, which I was never going to do.
  
  Yep, he couldn't afford me the same gratuity to let me use some of his work, yet his work is actually based off of the work of others, who were kind enough to let him use theirs.
  
  Thanks a lot.
  
• http://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/..._a_modder_for_permission_to_use_a_few/cqp4x3y

• Photos are subject to copyright, and Frozunswaidon is using an ingame photo taken by numeriku (who asked him to remove it) to advertise a mod that is being monetized:
  
  
  
  

  • http://i.imgur.com/xT1GVpe.jpg
  • http://i.imgur.com/fo8hxgW.jpg
  • Nexus comment
  • Steam Workshop Paid Mod

  
  
  This is only in regards to the PHOTO, which is owned by numeriku. The Alduin retexture numeriku used in that photo is also a part of the mod Frozun is trying to sell, and is owned by lightningstreak.
  
  
  
  All of the other dragon textures in that mod are based off work by Bellyache.
  
  
  
  In 2 out 3 cases, Frozun did not have the original author's permission to monetize. Someone told me Bellyache has contacted Frozun about this, but Belly themself has not made it known whether the results of the chat were whether he was ok with it or not.

• http://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/..._a_modder_for_permission_to_use_a_few/cqouwms

• To those curious, it's Frozun
  
  http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/58461/?
  
  Also if you look on the description for the mod on the nexus it says
  
  lightningo, for letting me use his alduin texture.
  
  He directly used lightningo's texture in his mod apparently

 

[Clown Doll]

Food for thought : when Bedshitter updates their games and breaks mods, they'll end up breaking dozens or hundreds of paid mods amateur dlcs that might not be fixed ever.
So, for the hypothetical Fallout 4 you could buy a bunch of mods amateur dlcs and then when Bethesda updates the game the dlcs will be broken and because they're amateurs rolling with zero accountability, they might not ever come back and fix them so that's your money down the well .
The alternative would be that the games wouldn't receive any updates after launch for the fear of breaking hundreds of third-party dlcs at once. But that's no problem, I mean who doesn't enjoy Day 1 Bethesda games? And free bugfixes? Pfffffft, stop being so entitled, you can buy them separately! .

 

[AnOminous]

Food for thought : when Bedshitter updates their games and breaks mods, they'll end up breaking dozens or hundreds of paid mods amateur dlcs that might not be fixed ever.

Getting 25% of the money you make isn't really going to be an incentive to fix things when they break. It will encourage more of the Hat Fortress type shit that mod makers can just shit out in 10 minutes then never touch again. To make any kind of profit at all, in fact, you'll have to just dump the mod and then run away, because supporting it forever will just not be an option.

Then there are the mods that others depend on. When those go pay, there's even more of a cut out of any conceivable money to be made by other modders.

Also, most mods that are actually based on gameplay require a large community to make them worth having. Actually charging for them is going to shrink the number of people using any given mod, and you just won't see communities around them.

Valve is just vampirizing the modding community and apparently doesn't care if it outright kills it.

 

[ZehnBoat]

so.. Bethesda? iirc, they are getting money for this.
did they go to valve for this? this honestly doesn't sound like something valve would come up with on their own.

 

[Clown Doll]

Also, most mods that are actually based on gameplay require a large community to make them worth having. Actually charging for them is going to shrink the number of people using any given mod, and you just won't see communities around them.

Yep, plus the way modding communities(that make actual gameplay mods and not just texture swaps) benefit from crowdsourcing is that they usually build on top of each others' assets, as in they use some guy's scripts, some guy's models and et cetera, very rarely you'll see a large mod that does all of their assets themselves and not borrowing stuff from others.
So, when people start to monetize the crap, why would people make give permission to use things for free if the others are going to monetize it? The sharing of resources that's key to many mod communities is gone when "modders" dlc sweatshop workers are competing against each other, which is why it's very unlikely that this thing will spawn anything more complex than Horse Armour DLC.

Really, I'm just waiting with glee for the inevitable horde of Russian/chinese Quality Modders to come and flood the workshop with even more garbage than there already is and burn down the whole system .

this honestly doesn't sound like something valve would come up with on their own.

The TF2 and Hat economy acted as some sort of a precursor to this. Either way, Valve should've known about the issues ( along with the fact that Steam game updates will kill paid mods dlc) and judging from the state of Greenlight, they don't give a shit about quality.

 

[ZehnBoat]

The TF2 and Hat economy acted as some sort of a precursor to this. Either way, Valve should've known about the issues ( along with the fact that Steam game updates will kill paid mods dlc) and judging from the state of Greenlight, they don't give a shit.

the difference is you don't need to mod TF2

 

[Pickle Inspector]

The people defending this bullshit is probably the most confusing part of this foolhardy debacle caused by Valve.

I can see how it'd be a good idea in theory, people who make high quality mods (Expansion pack sized mods or a mod that completely revamps the game in some way) get paid for their efforts and it potentially inspires professionals to make mods in the future if they see popular mods making a lot of money.

Although it hasn't turned out that way so far it and it's just a bunch of shovelware mods and it's likely going to ruin things for smaller mods. (A modder sees the weapon they made is getting a lot of downloads so they start charging for it and suddenly the demand drops and they eventually give up on fixing it every update)

It reminds me of a RSA talk about motivation where it talks about how profit doesn't necessarily make a product better:

Spoiler

 

[That Chris Guy]

Stupid idea, in my opinion. The whole nature of mods being free is specifically why the PC has an edge over consoles; beyond mere graphical fidelity and pirating, the communities for PC versions of games can thrive through the plentiful modding options that can convert games into entirely different projects, or enhance and fix problems the developers aren't able or are too lazy to fix.

Putting a price tag on those mods essentially turns them into DLC, amateur or professional, and makes the PC less cost-effective. If something starts off as free but eventually becomes paid because it's swelled beyond the point of being a simple change and has grown through feedback and popularity, I can understand a shift to paid work. However, that's not the vast majority of mods, which are usually shit that Joe Blow has dicked around on their afternoon making.

Say all those skins and load screens and backgrounds that were made for Street Fighter by the PC mod community became paid content: How is that any different from Capcom being shat on for releasing costumes at 2 dollars a pop? Answer: It isn't.

 

[IHeardThatCurtis]

Meanwhile on /r/Pcmasterrace and /r/Skyrim

Okay my opinion on this is that their are pro's and cons so i hopefully that they allow donations that you can give to the modder,This was a suggestion form someone which i think could work but we shall see what Valve does.

 

[Commodore B.S.]

Guys... guys... its gone
The Paid mod section is gone....

VOLVO LISTENED

 

[IHeardThatCurtis]

They got rid of it hold i must check this...

Sweet mary jesus and Joseph Joestar,I guess they listened to our complaints about it.This is good to hear that Valve are correcting their mistakes.

 

[QI 541]

 

[IvanaHumpalot]

They got rid of it hold i must check this...

Sweet mary jesus and Joseph Jostar,I guess they listened to our complaints about it.This is good to hear that Valve are correcting their mistakes.

Ofc they listen. But they are also free to try stuff out, this one obviously had huge backslash.

Also, Bethseda made their own statement here.

But still, putting normal disscusion about paid mods aside, I'm still peeved about initial harassment some workshopers received over this.

 

[Commodore B.S.]

@IvanaHumpalot

Agreed. Certain people need to realize voicing displeasure in a rational way good, mindless threats and stupidity bad.

 

[ZehnBoat]

maybe they should just have a donation system.
honesty, i would donate to someone if they made a good mod