We’re going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we’ll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.
We’ve done this because it’s clear we didn’t understand exactly what we were doing. We’ve been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they’ve been received well. It’s obvious now that this case is different.
It’s refreshing to see a company openly admit this strongly that they made a mistake. Kudos to Valve.
I’d said earlier that the complaints would have basically no real impact on Valve’s business, and that we’d probably see a few tweaks to the service and token PR gesture and things would go on.
Pulling the feature completely is a great move, because it immediately puts an end to the complaints, freeing up people to develop the feature into a viable product. Or dump it if they figure it never will be, which wouldn’t surprise me (charging for community-supported products? sounds to me like a support nightmare)
I never figured the backlash would have had any long-term consequences either way, but I bet it was a rough week for the forum admins.
I was thinking.. This might have worked out better if:
1) Valve hadn’t started experimenting on an established community, but instead started on a new game with fresh community.
2) Provided much better tools for reporting scams and works that use other people’s creations.
3) Clarified very clearly that it is not a-okay to sell or use other people’s creations without explicit consent.
4) Only take a 25% cut for themselves.
5) Withhold all profits for a 60-days time and never pay the profits at all to the creator if his/her work is found to be a scam or infringing on others’ works.
6) Allow for mod authors to specify price ranges, like, say, $0 to $60, where you decide how much you want to pay.
For one, #6 would basically allow you to donate money to people whose work you like, but still allow for the mods to remain free for those who can’t or won’t pay. #5 would be an instant deterrent for scammers and fakers, and while it’d be annoying for legit creators to have to wait 60 days at a time I believe it’d still be better that than having all these scammers and fakers. The rest of my points are more-or-less self-explanatory.
Opinions? Discussion? Disagreements?
I think all of those points are pretty good. #6 was apparently already possible though.
I’d also like some sort of guarantee that paid mods are kept up to date with new game releases, rather than just grabbing my money and run. I’m not sure how that can be achieved though. Perhaps by rating modders (not just mods) through user reviews, similar to game reviews?
No, they could set a fixed price, not a price range.
There was an option to set a fixed minimum price (or that was the plan) and people could pay what they wanted above that minimum. Setting it to 0 would make it act as a donation button. I don’t think there was a maximum price however, so yeah, there was no range.
Edited 2015-04-28 10:45 UTC
You missed the critical #7.
7) Don’t change anything for gamers. In fact, try not to do anything related to gaming. Maybe take up some less controversial occupation related to something like religion or politics.
Really? Religion and politics are less controversial than changing things in the gamer community? Sort of puts the world’s problems into perspective and explains a lot, I suppose.
I think you missed the joke.
OP’s point is that gamers have a tendency to be conservative and fanatical when faced with changes or challenges to the status quo, much like politics and religion.
No, deep sigh, not really. That’s what makes it funny.
Explaining jokes is such fun. If only some one would pay me to do it.
Well to be fair, I can’t really blame him. Given that gamers recently have been compared to racists, misogynists, terrorists and rapists (I’m not joking here), it’s not a far stretch to interpret the joke as a sarcastic “these guys are even worse than politicians and religious folk!” Some people would genuinely believe that.
I admit I wasn’t sure either, but I figured I’d go for the benefit of the doubt as I don’t give enough of a shit about it anyway. This is more of a “for your information” message that may help understand how people interpret it given their context.
Edited 2015-04-28 18:21 UTC
Oh, but its funny either way. And yes, its also a dig at gamers. Most defiantly. But its also exaggeration. Like telling a small child that they’re “so big”. Not taking the joke in good humor, is also kind of proving the point of the joke.
Yep. Or at least, it highlights the complete lack of perspective demonstrated by a lot of gamers… I’m sure some of these people would happily become suicide bombers for the cause, if they could be bothered getting off the couch.
Edited 2015-04-28 21:25 UTC
#8 Modders to specify Support SLA
How often will it be updated? If its broken by a developer’s update, what guarantee level does the modder offer for compatibility?
#1 Most mods are crappy buggy things, but they’re fun crap.
#2 Compatibility. Bethesda never promised to never push out updates to try to not to break mods. So those that buy mods must be aware that at any moment a mod they buy can break.
#3 More of a question but follow my idea, do modders retain ownership of their work? Like is it possible to license/copyright a mod? From a quick glance on Nexusmods.com they have a way for the “uploader” to state they don’t want the mod copied or uploaded to another site, but it doesn’t look like there’s any legal recourse beyond the wishes of the person uploading it.
RE #3 how does Valve handle DOTA 2 mods?
Not so sure how to take this in. On the one hand, it’s good that Valve listened to the community after a part of it (regardless of how small) voiced their opinion. On the other hand, I’m disappointed that this could have been a really good initiative that allowed modders to get right into game development and authorship -not as a hobby, but much more committed and ultimately rewarded for it. For all of the people that denounced this initiative, I’m sure there are many that equally or even more, would have supported it. It’s just that those individuals would probably not spend their time refuting points.
Not following this closely, but it looked to me like there was a huge blowup from a) fans of the community side of modding (not dissimilar to open-source folks), and b) people who are unhappy with the very idea of having to pay for mods.
I’ve got a certain sympathy for the first group, because adding money does drastically change a group dynamic, especially when lots of people are contributing but only a few can profit from it. It’s solvable, but difficult.
But the second group, they’re mostly a bunch of blowhards who are upset that their free stuff might not be free in future… not a lot of respect there.
Fixed that for you. It’s way more nuanced than “I don’t want to pay.” Especially because most of “those blowhards” spent a great amount of money on their games collection. Sure there will be freeloaders, but there are many legitimate concerns as well and it’s unfair to dismiss their points by putting them in the same group.
If you’re not following this closely, I suggest you do before making sweeping statements about people’s motives.
Edited 2015-04-28 08:23 UTC
It is a goal of Valve to allow the time people spend on games to be rewarded. So that is why they tried to do this.
What surprises me is how they came up with the 25%/75% split and how this was communicated. It’s the a split between the mod developers (25%). The game developers and Valve end up with 75%. Some people assumed it was Valve only.
The more I think about it, at least part of it is a PR mistake. And an other big part seems to be the choice of choosing an existing years old.
This story is about greed. How much can I take from you?
Exploitation is “the name of the game” in all business, but in big business it’s worse. When you don’t need to look your target in the eye, their life means nothing.
They’re taking 75% of the revenue from someone who did 100% of the work? Seems unfair for me. But wait: they derived their work from someone else’s work which was bought and paid for fair and square? Still unfair.
But I think the cause of this shitstorm is something other than moral outrage over this exploitation. I think this uproar is simply users feeling their own greed. They don’t want to pay for things. I think that’s it.
So unfortunately the modders who do the work will PROBABLY still be screwed out of the value of these creations they rightfully own. A more seamless exploitation of the amoral user base will be deployed, one which does not generate protest, and the path toward Pearl Jam’s Evolution will continue to be tread.
http://giphy.com/gifs/grunge-evolution-online-XWhOWtXgOQxYQ
Rock on, rental organisms!
Yes, I think that’s certainly part of it – users who just don’t like the idea that they have to pay for stuff that used to be free. Even if paying for it meant that the mod developers would get some reward for their work (because good karma doesn’t put food on the table).
That said, there’s a second part of it, in which Valve has jumped straight to a trial run of paid mods, seemingly without having thought this through properly. As other posters have noted, there are a lot of questions… how much is a reasonable cut for Valve vs the modders, how to deal with ownership issues, how to let communities benefit from collaborative efforts, etc.
It’s great that Valve are listening and reacting like that. I would welcome some sort of payment method however, perhaps some sort of central donations system or other. There are some mods that I play (Fistful of Frags comes to mind, and there are others too) that are all but ruined for me because some sort of advertising video ends up playing in the background between matches with no obvious way of stopping it, and often it’s long enough to run into the next match, overrunning the in-game sound. I’d much rather donate a few Euro than have that ruining my experience of what is otherwise an excellent mod.
Seriously; Black Mesa is a giant mod.
If a mod is big/serious enough, it can become its own game and therefore become a paid-for product.
Mods that just enhance an existing game? Charging for those is a grey area and a half for many of the reasons already mentioned.
That is all a DLC is though… quite a few companies release incomplete games with DLC filling the void (Killer Instinct on XBone for example)