It used to be that the only way to make money from a mod was a) make a standalone sequel or remake b) use it as a portfolio to get hired by a studio or c) back in the pre-broadband days, shovel it onto a dodgy CD-ROM (and even then, it almost certainly wasn’t the devs who profited). As of last night, that changed. Mod-makers can now charge for their work, via Steam.
It’s far too soon to know the long-term outcome of Valve offering the option for mod creators to charge for their work, which went live yesterday using Skyrim as a test case. Everyone has an opinion, and I’ll try to cover the main angles below, but first I simply want to express simple sadness. Not fatalistic sadness – I’m genuinely curious as to how this will play out, and there’s high potential for excitement – but End Of An Era sadness.
The backlash Valve is facing over this whole thing is immense. Every gaming website, and sites like Reddit, are swamped with people lashing out against this new Valve policy. This kind of universal backlash is incredibly rare, and it’s kind of interesting to see it unfold. Whatever goodwill Valve had with PC gamer – they managed to throw it all away in a day. Absolutely amazing.
As for my personal opinion on this matter – I’m used to mods being free, but considering some of the insane amounts of work people have put into incredibly complex, vast, and terrific mods for games like Skyrim, it does seem more than reasonable to give mod makers the possibility to charge for their work. And let’s be absolutely clear here: Valve is forcing nobody to charge for their mods – mod makers choose to make their mods for-pay themselves.
That being said, introducing money into an previously pretty much money-less scene is bound to have a lot of negative results – for instance, free mods from Nexus are being offered for sale on Steam; not by their authors, but by pirates. As a result, mod makers are removing their content from Nexus to prevent others from profiting off their work.
It’s a huge mess right now, and it’ll be hard for Valve to regain all the goodwill they threw away in just a day.
Throw away in a day? Nonsense.
I find “Gamers” to be the most fickle, petty demographic in existence.
I don’t suppose any of you remember when Call of Duty Advanced Warfare was announced, and didn’t allow people to host servers on a LAN? There was a huge uproar. A massive “boycott call of duty” group was formed on steam. Come launch day, the group membership list showed (and several people took screenshots of this) that more than half of the boycotters were actively in game.
“Gamergate” is ur-example. “Gamers” had a complaint that nobody was willing to take seriously. Instead of just going off and starting a community news site, the “gamers” who were complaining just kept visiting the same sites over and over to feed an escalating stream of inconsequential bitching. Plenty of people talked about the complaints, but who actually addressed them? Nobody did, and the price they paid was restricted to the tiresome buzzing of an internet hate machine.
Valve may adjust the site so people stop complainng. Aside from the tweaking of a feature that was brand-new anyway, the “controversy” will be of no consequence. There is no alternative to Steam and gamer complaints are famously inconsequential.
So, consumers aren’t allowed to dislike Valves decision and express their dislike? Because … reasons?
Of course they can. What part of my comment gave you the impression I was suggesting they couldn’t or shouldn’t?
Edited 2015-04-25 20:55 UTC
His point is all they do is express complaints, but they don’t actually put any effort to carrying out any reasonable protest.
No one will listen to a demographic that refuses to actually not buy a product on principle. The consumers literally throw there money any anything that comes out.
It’s hardly universal although it is immense. It’s quite like a recent happening on the ‘net, which shall remain nameless, where two sides have developed in a very polarised manner. One is vehemently opposed to the idea that other people will now have the ability to charge something for their work. The other is more varied in their opinions, mostly stating that it’s ultimately the dev’s choice but acknowledging the issues that need to be sorted out for such a system to work properly. Things like how the mod dev’s only get %25 of the money, how to deal with stolen mod and how to deal with mods that uses other mods as their base. Most of the mod devs themselves seem to be in the second group although more than a few are in the first.
OK. So people lashing out against this are absolute morons, or simply don’t understand the proposal.
The community should see MUCH better mods now that it’s a commercial opportunity for mod-makers.
People who only want to make free AND use free mods can still do that.
Kids.
The concern is that games will contain even less content and that studios will rip you off twice by taking a cut from the mods as well. A bit like moving essential functionality into DLC, except at zero cost for the studio.
Another concern is that it’s going to be difficult to guarantee quality and long term support. A mod is not officially supported by the studio and may no longer be compatible with the newest updates of a game. How can you be sure that a mod for which you already paid will be fixed when the next game update arrives? How long should mod patches be supported? On Steam you can’t really revert to an older version of a game to get a mod working again.
With free mods, you haven’t lost any money at least.
Edited 2015-04-26 00:03 UTC
Come on, as a gamer I should get anything I want for free. Fuck the people who spend countless of hours of their free time making quality mods. How DARE they even think that their time and effort would be worthy of my money.
Some people are redoing the original 1998 Epic’s Unreal with the Unreal 4 engine. Previews are already stunning. Hope they complete it, I would pay for it
The only thing Valve did really wrong here is only give the authors 25%. Something like 50/50 would still be a rip off but sound much more fair.
Note there is another negative side-effect: When money is introduced into an enthusiast scene, people working it for free, even if it is for fun, will get disillusioned, even if nothing have changed for them themselves. You see that everywhere where previously volunteer only groups starts paying some people a little, the volunteers working for free almost always starts to disappear.
This is exactly right. When you introduce an easy way to make money, people will take it – even those that were willing to create for free before. Basically they’re turning this whole thing into another appstore approach, where the only free stuff is ad-ridden crap or “trial versions”.
It’s not necessarily bad – people have the right to make money after all, but it’s still sad to see so many things getting monetized.
I’m going to counter you with Linux. And every other F/OSS – project.
Sure, a lot more people will try to earn some money out of their mods, but there will still always be some people who work on doing great stuff for free for ideological reasons, not financial ones.
I feel obligated to point out that much of the f/oss projects are being worked on by paid professionals working for others. Sure, there are a few who will do it for free in their spare time, but much of the heavy lifting is put in by those who are getting paid by someone whether that be Canonical, Red Hat, Oracle, Google, or others I can’t think of off the top of my head. It’s only because these companies see it as more to their benefit to contribute to f/oss projects and abide by their licenses than it would be to start something from scratch that we’ve seen the amazing growth in big f/oss projects that has characterized recent years. Firefox might be one slight exception, but even they are paid by the Mozilla foundation which is funded by donations.
That percentage is set by the game developer.
There’s a thread on Reddit where Valve’s CEO, Gabe Newell, is answering questions.
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/33uplp/mods_and_steam/
As usual, the people who don’t like something get all the attention. I think this will bring about better mods. People deserve to get payed for their time. This still leaves opportunity for free mods, they aren’t making anyone charge for anything, they are just giving people choice.
I think as long as there is a method to allow for returns in a reasonable time frame this won’t be a bad thing. As long as I know if the mod has issues or straight up doesn’t work I can get my money back I would be willing to pay for a mod. Wish they were giving the authors more but people have the right not to post them to steam if they don’t want to.
Is the publisher and developer of the original game ok with modders making money off their work? Aside from any arguments that the work modders do can extend the life of a game or even make it useable in some cases, this can create legal issues.
Presumably Valve has permission from Bethesda to allow modders to profit.
The market dynamics, on the other hand, will be interesting to see.
At least Steam allows the buyer the option to obtain a full refund within 24 hours of the purchase of a mod.
There is nothing wrong with enabling developers to charge for mods. But as usual Value creates the infrastructure, throws it out into the wild and waits to see what happens. Without any foresight to potential pitfalls because they are unwilling to implement any form of curation or buyer protection. Just look at the shit that turns up in Greenlight. So from day one you end up with a bunch of stolen and scam mods propagating the site and hitting the headlines.
In hindsight it would have been much smarter if Value implemented this with a new release title. Where there was not an existing collection of freeware mods or community. So you didn’t have this situation of some previously free, established mods going behind a paywall. Or worse people stealing others’ freeware mods and claiming them as their own.
The other main issues is the potential legalities when a mod and thus Valve charge money for unoriginal or copyrighted content that gets included in a mod. What recourse does an artist have when their art is ‘borrowed’ by a modder without permission in a product that the modder, Value and the game publisher is profiting from? Would the artist receive any compensation from revenues earned? When a (c) claim is made, does the mod get removed from the buyer’s computers and Steam accounts, with refunds offered?
Edited 2015-04-26 01:25 UTC
That’s the result of human greed taking over conscience, which in turn leads to some people abusing loopholes for their own financial gains.
Another aspect that is being lost here is the inter-dependency of mods. There have already been mods for sale that have used mods of other authors that do not wish that their mod be used for profit purposes.
Mod culture is also remix culture. By segmenting between paid and non-paid then there is less incentive for collaboration and sharing of knowledge. A paid mod might get undercut by a free mod or a free modder might not want his expertise being used in a money making venture.
Goodbye free mods, welcome pirated mods, DRM’ed mods, we could have lived without you.
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