Valve Pulls the Plug On Paid Mods For Skyrim 239
westlake writes: Valve has abandoned its attempt to introduce paid mods to Skyrim on Steamworks, following furious and unrelenting complaints by the gaming community that did not spare Gabe Newell. Valve said, "[O]ur main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid." Bethesda had similar goals, saying, "There are certainly other ways of supporting modders, through donations and other options. We are in favor of all of them. One doesn't replace another, and we want the choice to be the community’s. Yet, in just one day, a popular mod developer made more on the Skyrim paid workshop than he made in all the years he asked for donations."
Attempting with existing title was a mistake (Score:2)
Skyrim players are used to clicking and getting the mod for free. They could have offered this feature with a new game, but Skyrim players must have reasonably been worried that content they'd been getting for free would cost them money.
Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake (Score:4, Interesting)
>>[O]ur main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to,
BULLSHIT.
If that was the case you would not have given them 25% and taken 75% for you and the game makers. That is just blatant and exploitative greed on both your parts. You should be ASHAMED that you and your inept marketing department, board or management ever thought this would result in a positive sentiment. I mean how out of touch with your customers do you need to be?!
But then again greed blinds...
Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake (Score:5, Informative)
Way to not pay attention. Valve took 30%. Bethesda decided they deserved 45%, and left 25% for the mod maker. 30% is Valve's cut on nearly everything, so this is not unusual or odd. If Bethesda had taken 20% that would have left mod makers with 50%, and the outcry would have not been there. If Bethesda had decided to forgo a cut in order to sell more copies of the game, everyone would have been cheering the 70% cut that mod makers received.
Should Valve have anticipated that 25% to makers would look bad? Yes. Perhaps they should have refused to roll it out with that initial revenue split. They certainly should have put better moderation tools in place to control graft and mod theft.
But the idea of charging for mods is completely fine; we've been doing it for years already with games like Dota and TF2. What's a community created hat? It's a mod that you pay money for.
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Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
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Fuck all, that's how much. Valve only pay for the bandwidth and storage, which they pay even for free stuff, so if that is what it was to cover (as opposed to being added to the cost of the game or just a cost of doing business, like real estate taxes for bricks and mortar shops), this would indicate that their end goal is to make ALL mods for-pay, to cover those costs. Valve therefore are trying to shift the window until everyone accepts that ONLY for-pay mods will be available.
You mean like there are only paid games on their service, and nothing is free to play ? Oh, wait. Paid mods being made mandatory is just FUD, and is also stupid because mods that would otherwise be free would simply not be released instead, or distributed outside Steam. Valve have no policy of setting a mandatory minimum price on all items sold on Steam, and there is no indication that this will change in the forseeable future.
Bethesda did NOTHING, no cost WHATSOEVER. NO EFFORT whatsoever.
That is great news, since then there is no need for their game or tools, and one
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Re:How much of the effort did those two put in? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:How much of the effort did those two put in? (Score:4, Informative)
Most mods I think may come from Nexus, not the not-quite-ready Steam Workshop. For the longest time the Steam Workshop had size limits on mods until recently. So the storage/bandwidth for mods is somewhat irrelevant. Remember that Nexus also supports quote a few other games that aren't Steam related, as well as Skyrim, and it survives on donations and some voluntary subscriptions. The whole idea of the paid mod market was Valve's idea and did not originally come from Bethesda.
Bethesda however did a ton of work. Not last week of course, but it is their IP, the modders are usually reusing assets created by someone else, and Bethesda created the various creation kits and made them public. Bethesda even created their own game engine for their games, it's not some third party product like most modern game companies use. Granted, 45% of the cut is too much, but you can't reasonably say that they've done nothing.
Bethesda has said now and in the past that they are committed to keeping the availability of free mods with their games, rather than the fear some have had of DRMed mods (which some other games have someting like that).
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I don't find your word-processor comparison compelling. The difference is whether it's a derivate work, no?
There's a difference between me using your word-processor to create a book, and me using your word-processor as a basis for my own enhanced word-processor.
If the word-processor's EULA were 'viral' even to documents produced with it, then I'd agree, that's not fair, but that's not what's going on here: a Skyrim mod necessarily directly uses Skyrim, where a .pdf generated by a word-processor doesn't dire
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a Skyrim mod necessarily directly uses Skyrim
You're making a big assumption there.
Even where elements of an API are used, the bulk of the mod may well be original work, or adapted from a previous creation used with a different game.
E.g. I modded one game by adding a picture for use as a decal on a car. That picture was produced by a friend using pencils and paper. It's a derivative work of absolutely fuck all. You're saying that if I added that graphic to Skyrim it's a derivative of Skyrim?
No.
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I really doubt they 'stepped back' because of other parts of the world. This is pretty standard stuff and I can not think of any major market where one can sell derived works without the consent of the author.
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I think one of the problems in discussions like this is people have difficulty differentiating between what they want and what is, then go a step further and define what is as what they want it to be.
Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake (Score:4, Informative)
Game developers don't always have control over the tools. Modding communities have grown up around some games which never provided tools to their customers. Bethesda was somewhat unusual in that they took a proactive step of making some of their internal tools available and they did this before modding was really common. Meanwhile some other companies which had modding in the past have decided to disallow modding altogether so that they can sell their own mods or monetize from curated mods.
Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
>> If that was the case you would not have given them 25% and taken 75% for you and the game makers.
Well, let's see where does the 75% go? Steam takes 30% from all transactions as a fee for keeping servers running, providing unified interface, update rollout, you know, the infrastructure, for all the games, be it an indie for 3$ or a AAA title for 60$. 45% goes to Bethesda. You know, the guys that made the Skyrim. And you know who decides how much goes to original game maker? Original game maker decides. You know why they get to decide? Because the control derivative works from their games, they created the engine, a ton of assets, models, textures, sprites, effects, the whole game. If you don't like it - vote to change the copyright laws (long overdue by the way).
But let's all whine at Gabe, because that bastard let Mod Creators CHOOSE to charge for their mods. How dare he give them the freedom to ask for money?
The whole reaction is a kid's tantrum to "how dare those slaves ask for money for their work" ? What's most bizarre (quite usual actually) is that noone has any clue as to how the pricing is made (noone cares that Bethesda takes 45% and whines at Steam for taking too much money) but still throw a fit over "but mod devs get so little".
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Steam taking a cut is fair enough.
Bethesda already got paid for those textures and so on when I bought Skyrim. I see no reason why they should get 45% of something they didn't have any hand in developing, they don't host, and they don't provide any support for.
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Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake (Score:4, Insightful)
Steam has to handle payments, deal with the mod authors, do some kind of policing and support (minimal as it might be), host the mods on their servers, and somebody had to develop the functionality to support this.
30% might be excessive, but as far as Steam taking a cut at all it does make sense.
Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake (Score:5, Informative)
Steam does no meaningful policing of any kind. One of the major problems with steam today is complete and utter lack of policing. That's one of the main complaints of indies especially, since they want to be visible on steam at least on the day when they release, and instead they get pushed off the "new releases" page's top in a matter of hours because some trash publisher fills the list with their "steam re-releases".
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As much as a lot of /.ers like to whinge and complain about IP rights, Skyrim IS Bethesda's IP. So marketing a mod for sale on the Steam store does put Bethesda in the right to take a cut.
Maybe not *45* percent. HOly shit who's idea was that?
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[...] 45% goes to Bethesda. You know, the guys that made the Skyrim. [...] they created the engine, a ton of assets, models, textures, sprites, effects, the whole game [...]
...and already got paid for it all by everyone who bought a copy of Skyrim. That includes the mod makers and the mod users. Bethesda was not taking their fair share, they were simply being greedy fucks, cashing in on someone else's work that directly translates into more sales for a still hugely popular game that was released in bloody 2011.
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They are under NO legal obligation to permit modding, much less support it. They decided to experiment with something that would encourage both modding and development/maintenance of modding support. They scaled it wrong and got hit with outrage, but the actual experiment could have produced an interesting new marketplace for sanctioned commercial production of 3rd party mods.
There is a reason mod developers tend to either take donations or wor
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They are under NO legal obligation to permit modding, much less support it.
You are correct. On the other hand, they have no legal authority to demand payment provided that the person who wrote the mod does not redistribute Bethesda IP.
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Alright then, I'll put a graphics program on Steam and sell it for 50 USD. Somewhere in the EULA I'll hide the clause that I'll maintain the rights on any derivative work, and if people want to sell anything created with my program, they'll have to give me 45% share and Steam 30%. They can only get 25%.
How about doing the same for word processors, music recording programs, etc.?
Also, how about creating a platform, something like an app store, and wait until nearly everybody is using it and there is no viabl
Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the tool example you can, but people actually do this and it is a pretty healthy market. Lots of software is marketed that way (free for non-commercial use, paid license for commercial derivative works), and movies work that way too (the license for home viewing and commercial display are not the same).
One you move away from consumer goods into industrial (believe it or not, there are customers out there other than end consumers.) these types of contracts are actually pretty common, with it not being unusual for a company to get a cut of the revenue from downstream users of their product. Crow, there were probably libraries IN Skyrim that worked that way. 3rd party tools and libraries used in professional development often have per-seat or per-unit-sold licensing on them.
In all these cases though, you are forgetting that this was not an EULA change, but experimenting with a new system that ran in parallel with the classic 'donation' stuff authors have been doing for quite some time.
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Experiments like this can help set precedent, if they become large enough they help define what is normal and what is not, which affects expectations in other cases. So by embracing or rejecting this model, the community
Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake (Score:5, Funny)
If that was the case you would not have given them 25% and taken 75% for you and the game makers.
You know, I always hate how my grunt work for companies makes them 4 times the money they pay you. It's just greedy theft. We should start a movement where the means of production are owned by the workers rather than investors and management!
Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the problem with your argument. I work for a company, and I get a small fraction of what I make for them. But they also see to it that I'm paid regularly and they also absorb a lot of risk if I fail. In this case, Bethesda isn't doing any of that. Typically a company gets the big profit because they absorb the risk, but in the case of these mods, they aren't absorbing any risk. The absorbed risk when the original development of the game, but not for the mods. If they wanted to take that sort of profit, in normal buisness practices, they'd be expected to front the mod developers money to do what they're doing.
From a buisness ethics standpoint, what they're doing is down right despicable. They fully deserve the backlash they're getting as hopefully it reminds other companies that ethics are actually something they occasionally need to abide by.
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Though it should be noted that it is not quite true that the company took no risk. Besides the risk (and up front investment) o
Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, those were actually their goals.
The 25% cut was already tested with Valve's own games. You can create and sell content for DOTA 2, Counterstrike: GO and Team Fortress 2 right now and you get the same 25% (however, there is no Bethesda in that equation: Valve gets the entire 75% remaining). Instead of people organizing riots, this has been extremely popular and well received so far. A coworker is making 20-30K a year making content for Valve games in his spare time, and the top dogs are easily getting 100-200K. No complaints to be had. Keep in mind like all digital markets, there is no middle ground. Top quality content makes thousands, and the rest makes close to zero. A better cut won't do a thing for any of them. Or, think about it in another way: nobody buys food with a percentage, but with money, and that 25% means a few thousands dollars opportunity at least. Good enough.
Sure, you worked you ass to model your armor or level, it is all your content, and you only get 25% of the sale price. However, what is the real value of your product? If you are really good modelling swords, were is the market where you can model a sword and get thousands of people interested in paying $1 or $2 for it? I'd argue a lot of the value you're providing comes not from your mod, but from the framework that allows it to exist in the first place. And you don't own that.
Here is another argument: Valve is still working and developing things in their games, founding that with third-party content revenue, while Bethesda has mostly forgotten about Skyrim, so it would be unfair for them to get a great cut from others' work. But it is naive to think that this test case would be universal or stay that way for long. If this experiment had succeeded, we would have got not only much better mod tools for their next game, but also continuous support for modders. Skyrim looks extremely mod-friendly to the casual observer, but the creation kit is mostly an unmantained mess released as a gesture of good will. Many, many mods require a DLL injection hack (SKSE) to provide basic functionality, for example.
The Internet wants to think that Skyrim is a broken game that would have failed, until modder heroes came, saved it, and brought it to great success. Even the most reasonable people argue that the game's long shelf life was only possible thanks to mods. But this is not the case. While I'd say mods provide added value, the primary SKUs are still unmodable consoles, and there is no sales spike to be seen when an amazing mod is released. Nobody buys Skyrim just to play a mod, although their existence may be a factor in the purchase.
A lot of people inside Valve are modders. In fact, they have some of the best modders ever, people who made mods which went beyond the original game and actually manage to sell game copies, until eventually becoming great games of their own: DOTA, Counterstrike, Team Fortress. Skyrim has no mod of this level, and Valve actually wants to create a climate were another uber-mod can be born. Skyrim had the community and the tools available, though.
Was the mod market a way to bring that? Could the uber-mod have been born from this opportunity? We will never know. It has been killed by the angry mob. Bad products and bad ideas are best tested in the market. If nobody buys it, it is worthless. If many people buy it, it has value. The mob disagrees. They think that some thinks (things they happen to like, for now) should exist, and others (things they happen to dislike, for now) must die. The angry mob is emotional, and any arguments used by them are pure rationalization. Today the hate was on the mod market, but tomorrow the hate may be on smartphone games, on console games, on jews, or on yourself.
I despise the Internet.
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I mostly agree. But the problem with Skyrim mods compared to DOTA2, CounterStrike, TF, etc, is that Skyrim is a much more complex game and mods are much more intricate and risky as result. With a TF mod you pretty much know what you're getting whereas with a Skyrim mod it's almost impossible to know beforehand if it will work as advertised, or if it will break your game, be incompatible with other mods, corrupt your save file... it's simply a much more experimental and risky way of modding than TF. This is
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Sure, you worked you ass to model your armor or level, it is all your content, and you only get 25% of the sale price. However, what is the real value of your product? If you are really good modelling swords, were is the market where you can model a sword and get thousands of people interested in paying $1 or $2 for it? I'd argue a lot of the value you're providing comes not from your mod, but from the framework that allows it to exist in the first place. And you don't own that.
By that logic, the government
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By that logic, the government should be taxing businesses at 75% because, hey, without their infrastructure, property rights, and policing, where would that business be?
Top marginal tax rate was over 90 percent at one time. So actually, they did. Business tax rates were higher too. Was one of the greatest growth periods of American history, because the government spent that money on infrastructure. a LOT of infrastructure.
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Most important quote. They want to monetize the mods, like they did when they bought DoD, CS, etc. They just made the mistake of trying to monetize the mods of an established game of a different publisher/developer.
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Re:Attempting with existing title was a mistake (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that Skyrim is still hugely popular and active. It still has a healthy modding community, so people are actually still buying the game. You need a healthy mod community to make it worth it, but that also precludes doing it...
Customer Revolts (Score:2)
We should have now learned our lesson (Score:2)
Support our modders, give a little something each time we download or even just go by the mod webpage - be it a dollar/euro or two - so that modders can keep taking part of their time to further update and develop their mods, and most importantly editors/distributors don't have a leg to stand on when requesting 75% of the money on the premise that they sold the engine, so they should get 3/4 of all newly created content.
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and most importantly editors/distributors don't have a leg to stand on when requesting 75% of the money on the premise that they sold the engine
The claim that without the game itself there would be nothing to mod seems like a rather large leg. Never mind that Valve is allowing the use of their store and payment system which makes it a lot easier to collect money.
That said, there are far too many problems with the current implementation for Valve to allow for paid mods. They already have enough issues with quality control on Greenlight. Mods are an even bigger problem as there's no guarantee of quality, indication that there won't be conflicts wi
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The claim that without the game itself there would be nothing to mod seems like a rather large leg.
Yes and no, on the hand the statement is true. On the other hand Bethesda already got paid. If they had said at the outset we are going to use the Gillette model charge a minimal fee to recover our costs developing the game, and let the community produce a sell additional content for which we will take a cut, things might be different.
That isn't what they did though, the charged as much for the game as any other AAA title, and now seek to profit handsomely for efforts they have little to know hand in. Th
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Yes and no, on the hand the statement is true. On the other hand Bethesda already got paid. If they had said at the outset we are going to use the Gillette model charge a minimal fee to recover our costs developing the game, and let the community produce a sell additional content for which we will take a cut, things might be different.
Beth got paid for the modder to play the game and enjoy the art. That would reasonably cover even the use of the game engine and art assets for the modder's personal projects.
Beth did not get paid for the modder to resell modified art assets to other gamers.
Some companies may decide that they would rather not take a cut to encourage a mod scene ... but it is within their rights to charge paid mods whatever cut they want. Some desired percentages may be counter-productive, profit-wise, but no one has
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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And for that kind of money there should have been (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean if you are going to take a 75% cut, well then you can afford to spend the fucking time curating your shit. If they are going to charge that kind of cut, they can afford to have people review the content. Given that they are taking a much larger cut than the dev, it should stand to reason that goes to paying for some work on their part.
Have it where you submit a form to Valve with what your mod is, what it does, etc. They screen it to make sure it sounds like a reasonable idea, and then send you stuff to sign where you declare that this is your work, you aren't violating copyright, you've paid commercial licenses for software used on it, etc. Once they have that, mod gets submitted and then it goes off to Bethesda for QA. They test it to make sure that it does what it says, doesn't crash the game, and so on. Maybe even help fix bugs possibly. If that's all good Valve does a final check to make sure they don't see any copyright violation (maybe an automated system that flags and then a human checks i there are flags to see if it is legit) and it then gets posted.
If they were doing something like that, then ok maybe there's some justification of the price. Ya there's a big cut getting taken, which means higher prices, but you are getting something more along the lines of paid DLC. QA like that might be worth it.
However they were just letting anything and everything get posted. They were treating it with the same indifference as the rest of Steam, which is just not ok.
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Valve corporate culture simply makes this impossible, they don't hire the gruntwork required for this kind of task, it is the reason that Steam support is so terrible. However I do agree with your ideas, if they did all that then 75% cut is fair.
Re:Uninformative article (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem was that this opens a huge can of worms. It introduces a perverse incentive to companies to hunt down and take offline any free mods because they would be competing with "their" paid mods (their since between steam and publisher they get 75% of all revenue).
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On Steam Workshop, most of those mods didn't require the script extender because you couldn't get it there. For a long time there was a hard size limit for mods on Steam Workshop as well.
I think the biggest failure here though was that Valve/Bethesda kept this all secret and then tossed it out as a surprise with very little explanation of the reasons, with zero customer interaction. Some people did predict something like this, but those who had actual hard info were asked to keep quiet, and others had an
Almost as stupid as those idiots rioting right now (Score:2, Insightful)
The amount of douchebaggery over this was incredible.
First, you had a number of people who've decided modders shouldn't get paid for their work. I know some modders/mappers and while you'd never hear them complain about their hobby, the amount of effort they put in to these things is astounding and it's always pained me to see the amount of entitlement people display towards it.
And finally you had Nexus Mods, who came out as the people's champion despite they themselves actually raking in tones of dough ove
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Altough there where doucebags, the MAJORITY of people agreed that modders deserved payment...
The biggest outcry was about the 25%/75% split, and the fact that it was an paywall. Most people would have agreed with an donation button, so they have the choice IF they want to daonate and how much. Most people would have agreed with an better split for the modders (say 50% modders and 50% to steam/publisher).
Do not forget an lot of gamers are running tired and sick about the increase of "first day" DLC's and mic
Good idea, bad implementation (Score:5, Informative)
Valve and Bethesda made numerous mistakes with this implementation, but I still consider it a good idea. I'm definitely planning to allow paid mods in my own games, if I ever get one ready for retail. But here's where they went wrong.
1) They set a minimum price far too high. Relatively few mods are worth a dollar, even the ones that are worth buying at all. Give supply and demand a free hand to set prices, and I think most average-sized mods would have been priced around $0.20. Some might have been able to sell at a much higher rate, but not many.
2) They didn't protect from fraud. As soon as the announcement hit, people started uploading mods they didn't make - there was already a massive corpus of free mods, after all, and basically no protection against this. The least they could have done is give a decent warning period, for mod authors to decide whether to start selling their mods or not, and to search for fake versions being uploaded without their consent. They didn't do that, and they definitely didn't do any sort of technical measures, like comparing uploaded mods' checksums against those already uploaded. All of that is easily foreseeable because I actually foresaw it - I've been planning how to do this in my own games, and all of that was on my list before they even announced their feature.
3) They didn't share the profit well. Valve was taking a 30% cut, which is already more than they do for full games, and then Zenimax was taking another 40%. I can see that, because the base game does a non-trivial amount of work for the mod, that they do deserve some compensation (although I'd say increased sales are the true payment to the publisher). But a cumulative 70% is just ridiculous. I'd argue that no less than 50% should go to the modder. For my own games with paid mods, I'm thinking more in the 75:25 or 90:10 range, or even 100% to the modder (because, after all, a vibrant modding community brings about more sales, so the marginal loss on hosting is more than recovered).
4) They launched it suddenly, with no notice. Nobody had any inkling it was coming, least of all the modders who would be most affected by it. Valve and Zenimax should have given at least the big-name modders some heads-up, so they could think and have time to rationally decide whether to start selling, and for how much, and to work out any licensing issues in multi-person teams. And perhaps if gamers had been able to see it coming, they could have realized it was a good thing, instead of letting the knee-jerk reaction control the debate.
They did, however, do one thing surprisingly right, which deserves recognition: they gave full, automatic refunds within 24 hours of purchase on any mod you didn't like. That's definitely something necessary, and something very surprising to see from Valve.
Hopefully they can sort out these issues with the next game they try this on, instead of giving up on what is an excellent idea.
Rent seeking all the way down. (Score:5, Insightful)
Zenimax was taking another 40%. I can see that, because the base game does a non-trivial amount of work for the mod, that they do deserve some compensation
That is a dangerous assertion. Why shouldn't Microsoft take a 40% cut of Zenimax profits because Skyrim runs on Windows? Why shouldn't Intel take a 40% cut of Microsoft since Windows runs on their processors? Amusingly enough: Why shouldn't PC Gamers take a 40% cut of Intel profits since Intel processors run on the machines they build?
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Why shouldn't Microsoft take a 40% cut of Zenimax profits because Skyrim runs on Windows? Why shouldn't Intel take a 40% cut of Microsoft since Windows runs on their processors?
The difference is that most mods use significant art assets. With Windows programming, the Microsoft assets used are typically minimal. You are also not considering that these costs are passed on through the wholesale agreements these firms reach with one another.
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The Microsoft assets used are minimal? Look at Wine and how much work it took to get to a point where it can be halfway useful. You know why that is? Because the things that Windows provides to the application are far from minimal.
A game might not care much about the Windows UI, but many years of work went into making the Windows kernel and DirectX into what they are today. Those are not simple bits of code.
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Anything using the .net runtime is using significant amounts of windows assets. Just because you can't outright see it doesn't mean you're not using someone else's work. While we're at it, you're also using a compiler and an IDE you probably had nothing to do with the creation of.
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That is a dangerous assertion. Why shouldn't Microsoft take a 40% cut of Zenimax profits because Skyrim runs on Windows?
If Microsoft wants to charge 40% to use DirectX, let them. Like certain GPL proponents like to point out, if you don't like the terms don't use it. Imagine this was something bigger and more formal than a mod, like a partnership. They make and sell the base game, you build DLC content for it. They're not going to give away their content and engine for free so you can make money off it, you won't write the DLC for free so they can make money off it. You'll agree to some commercial terms, a 40% cut is one pos
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1) They set a minimum price far too high. Relatively few mods are worth a dollar, even the ones that are worth buying at all.
I agree to a certain extent. For Skyrim certain mods have just become standard fare to install, like SkyUI which makes the UI at least usable. I'd be happy to pay a dollar for SkyUI (ignoring the whole SKSE thing for a second) if that would rid me of the default UI for Skyrim for the 200+ hours I've put into the game.
2) They didn't protect from fraud.
This was in my opinion the worst problem with the whole ordeal. Not just fraud, just the fact that they barely checked what was going on with the mods in question. Even their rules for mods tha
Re:Good idea, bad implementation (Score:5, Informative)
I guess you missed it but they did exactly that.
Creator of removed paid Skyrim mod gives his side of the story [pcgamer.com]
Basically Valve contacted him and several other high profile mod authors over a month and a half ago to participate in the rollout. In this particular case, the Art of the Catch mod (adds fishing to Skyrim, I think, I haven't tried it) needed some files from another mod to run, or it had a dependency, or both. Valve told him their legal team thought it would be OK but that the author should consult a lawyer on his own. He didn't, and many butts got hurt over the result.
But your assertion, that they did this with no notice to anyone, least of all the high profile modders, is wrong. They did exactly that.
Its too bad... it was a good idea (Score:2)
The idea is good the implementation was terrible.
Valve was taking too big of a cut, pressure needs to be put on the developers to take a reasonable cut... and of course, whether or not anyone actually charges for a mod must remain up to the modder.
I think if valve charges more than 10 percent of the gross they're being greedy.
And as to the devs... they should be able to decide precisely how much they charge as a percentage of the sale. People have to know that the reason why dev X charges Y is because dev X
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The game developers should get no more than 0% share, because anything else would create an obvious conflict of interest.
When I buy a game, I want it to be halfway finished and playable, not a bug-ridden unfinished modding platform.
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I'm happy to leave that up to the devs to decide. What is more there is an argument for giving the devs something just so they keep releasing patches for the game, assist the modders in making the game more moddable, and generally keep the community alive.
If the devs get nothing then they have no interest to spend any further time on the game and will abandon it.
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They already do that with DLC.
So... tell me something that hasn't already happened? :D
It was a good idea that needed some work (Score:2)
Overall the idea was good and sure the first implementation had problems but pretty much all new systems have that. However, it seems that most would rather jump on a hate bandwagon and destroy something instead of actually giving constructive criticism to fix it.
Bethesda put money into making tools for modders. If this has worked then Bethesda would have had justifiable resources to put back into better modding tools, documentation, examples etc.
Modders don't do all the work by themselves. They build on to
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My chief complaint with Bethesda getting a cut in this case is that their support of the game has been crap. They shoved out a few DLC's and basically phoned it in. For years there was a mod for which the sole purpose was fixing bugs in the game. Bethesda, rather than adopting those fixes and releasing a bug fix patch just left it all to rot. Meaning that if I wanted to quickly fix the hundreds of known bugs which the community had already figured out I had to install some 3rd party mod, instead of Bethesda
Paid mods are a bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
I really think paid mods are dumb, they will do little good other than encourage new modders, but, it will do it by giving them false hopes and setting them up for an antagonistic atmosphere. Look at Kerbal modders now for an example. They work together. There are few "competing" mods, most work with eachother, and when you see two modders working on similar or related mods meet in the forums it is always a "Oh you are the guy who does X? Awesome how did you do Y?" and they have a great conversation and work together a bit.
Enter paid mods, and they would have incentive to...not do that. You would have modders who just copy others and release trying to make a buck, you would have people trying to obscure code, and hide their "secret sauce".... all.... for a pittance that will never sustain them.
I run 30 kerbal mods now (and a similar number of skyrim ones). If mods started going paid, theres maybe 2 or 3 on each I would even consider continuing to use if they were even a $1 or 2....in fact, it would massively increase my resistance to even wanting to try a mod.
So the main thing it will do is mean a lot less mods get used.
Entirely disingenuous (Score:3, Insightful)
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I'm sorry, but the mental gymnastics to find a rationale of why this is bad are just a smokescreen to cover up the truth: People don't want to pay for things that they could once get for free. Nobody cares about mod developers, or the mod community, they just want free stuff. If I was a modder I'd remember this as the day that the rightsholders said "hey you deserve to make money off your work", and my alleged fans said "No."
Within 24 hours they had dozens of mods that people (NOT the creators) had scooped up from websites and submitted as their own, and Valve was going to do nothing to rectify that. There was also a mod for new spells that had a "trial version" which had a chance to spawn an in-game "Please upgrade" popup whenever you cast, and it wasn't one of those protest mods. Without even talking about the fairness of the cuts taken by the publisher (which was more like "hey WE deserve to make money off your work") , tha
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The only mental gymnastics here are the ones you use to avoid the real issue at heart and piss and moan about "those bastard commie pirates that want it all free!!!!11!" and Bethesda trying to legitimize the whole thing because "hey, one dev made more money during that than they ever made on donations!!!" as if a single outlier justifies the whole thing. It smacks of greed.
Here's the reality: The mods developers deserve the majority of the cash. The game developers deserve none of it. They get their cut whe
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I take it you're fully in support of modders getting a measly 25% cut?
Ease of use (Score:2)
Yet, in just one day, a popular mod developer made more on the Skyrim paid workshop than he made in all the years he asked for donations.
Because it's EASY to pay through Steam, you already have an account and your credit card info stored. Most people don't want to deal with the hassles of creating yet another goddamn account and dealing with another login. Steam could implement a "donation" system that people would be much more likely to use it since there's no extra effort or time involved.
Curation (Score:4, Interesting)
The mods would need to be fully vetted by an authority to make sure that they are relatively bug free and honest on their description. And to make sure the they are compatible with the existing paid mods and to give potential buyers a list of mods it will interfere with.
Another important part is that not all mods are equal. If we ever allow a skin mod to be sold (def. adds solely cosmetic and/or stat changes [so you can have different looking swords or swords with different dps/weight/ect]) it should be handled different than a mod that rewrites the entire campaign. There are mods out there where Skyrim is nothing more than an engine to run the 100% new content created by the mod developers. So if Skyrim's developers get a cut it has to take into consideration how much of the original game the mod developers used.
I am of the opinion that it would of been a good idea if they added a few huge mods/mod packs. Don't allow skinning mods to be sold, but vet a few of those large overhaul mods and a few of the really cool add some neat location/thing mods
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This is hopefully a big step against DLC in general.
Not really. There's three official DLCs for Skyrim (not counting the high-res texpack, which is free) and game mods may require any number of them. Many of the most interesting mods require at least the two larger (and more expensive) expansions.
Gamers are dead. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's stuff like that, this attempt at making mods "paid content," and mobile games that make me think gamers are dead. It was a suicide.
You've got bullshit like Amiibos, where Nintendo expects you to buy a little statuette to get content for games. Do gamers boycott this crap? Nope. They sell out and go for big bucks on eBay.
You've got mobile games, where the most popular games are "free to play" bullshit where there's no skill involved, just time, money, and luck. These games are no fun. They're just
Inflation, slow Internet, skill, slow PC (Score:5, Insightful)
Now we're getting "day one DLC." What the fuck?
In the Super NES era, games used to cost $60, which is about $90-something in today's money after inflation. Now in the Xbox 360 and Xbox One era, games still cost $60. Day one expansions make the extra $30 of content optional to buy.
Why the hell would anyone per-order a digital game, where there's no chance it'll sell out and they won't be able to get a copy?
Because they can't afford an Internet connection that'll transfer 30 GB in one hour. So instead, they let Steam download the game over the preorder period and then install it on release day.
Why are people sitting around watching OTHER PEOPLE play games that they themselves could be playing?
Lack of skill, lack of strong enough PC, lack of the correct console, game being out of print, etc. Why do people watch football instead of playing football?
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"In the Super NES era, games used to cost $60, which is about $90-something in today's money after inflation. Now in the Xbox 360 and Xbox One era, games still cost $60. Day one expansions make the extra $30 of content optional to buy."
You're comparison fails to grasp the effect of inflation in an attempt to make it look like selling parts of a game for full price seem sane.
If you'll kindly convert the average salaries of the standard gamer back then into today's cash you'll find that they were much better
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His point was both clearly, and correctly, explaining that game prices haven't increased in line with inflation.
Unless you can make a supported case for why games development costs have fallen considerably in real terms then the default assumption should be that they have in fact increased roughly in line with prices in general. Even if wages were considerably lower
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In the SuperNES era, a game also used to provide several days worth of play-through, not 10-12 hours of content.
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In the Super NES era, you likely had to share a monitor with other members of the family who wanted to watch broadcast or cable television. Because you got only about an hour per day with the TV, those same 10 to 12 hours stretched over several days. Besides, it was common to repeat those 10 to 12 hours for a better overall score. This is how speedrunners got good enough to complete all 101 goals in Donkey Kong Country in 50 minutes (source: YouTube).
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In the Super NES era, you likely had to share a monitor with other members of the family who wanted to watch broadcast or cable television.
Multiple TV households were fairly common by 1991, so sharing was less common than you think it was.
Because you got only about an hour per day with the TV, those same 10 to 12 hours stretched over several days.
Or work, dinner, household chores, etc etc.
Besides, it was common to repeat those 10 to 12 hours for a better overall score.
Indeed. Or better overall time, like with Metroid and Super Metroid. Heck, if you're reasonably good, you can beat Metroid in an hour and a half without any "glitching" or other tricks. It's possible to beat Super Metroid in under 3 hours though I think I only got down to 3 hours and a half.
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In other words, cheat codes. How fast can you make it through the main quest WITHOUT using console commands? It's a hell of a lot longer than 10-12 hours.
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*-But as far as Pre-Orders? I thought Aliens: Colonial Marines and Watch Dogs would have killed that practice, after all now we can't even trust what we see with our own eyes as it might all be mocked up bullshit.
Well I've pre-ordered a few things. most recently Diablo on the PS3 (and later on the PS4). But in that case I didn't pre-order until I had watched one of the PAX 2013 videos showing someone actually playing the game and showing menus and whatnot as he was playing: I was a big fan of Diablo on the PSone too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
With the PS4 version, I had the PS3 version as the "demo".
I'm tempted to pre-order TESO on the PS4. In that case I was able to watch live play of PS4 players playing t
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In the Super NES era, games used to cost $60, which is about $90-something in today's money after inflation. Now in the Xbox 360 and Xbox One era, games still cost $60. Day one expansions make the extra $30 of content optional to buy.
You may be right. There's not really any evidence, but it's a plausible theory.
Here's the thing. The market is much larger now, and the distribution costs have only gone down.
The best selling game in Super NES history? Super Mario World. Copies? 20.5M.
Compare that to GTA5,
The Lord of the Rings; A Song of Ice and Fire (Score:2)
See, the book is only $5, but the ending is another $5
I can think of a couple fantasy authors with R. R. in their name who have followed that model.
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A much better analogy would be watching other people play board games.
In certain circles, chess and poker have become spectator sports.
Also, we're talking "let's plays" here. There's no "skilled play" involved. It's an idiot with a camera playing a game poorly while making dumb jokes. It's dumb, it's pointless, and it's copyright infringement. Just ask Nintendo.
This is why e-sports won't take off, as the publisher has power to shut down any league competing with the publisher's approved league.
Re:Inflation, slow Internet, skill, slow PC (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't copyright infringement. There is no copy of the fixed work being made.
Unfortunately, it isn't so cut and dried. Everything inside the game - models, characters, music, dialogue, art, etc. is © and often the game company. While most people believe that doing a "let's play" or streaming the game is fair use, it falls into a legal gray area - typically only reviews, parodies, and maybe satire allow you free reign to re-use someone's IP without permission, and it's not clear that these uses would be considered such by a court.
Is it right? As I said, it's a rather gray area. Personally, I think this sort of thing falls into that same general category and should be protected, even if it doesn't fit any of them exactly. Most game companies agree; I've rarely heard of legal threats against players for this sort of thing in the past, and the companies often even encouraged it - after all, it was basically an ad for their game that consumers actually sought out on their own, that got made for them for free, and they had plausible deniability about any sketchy content.
This sort of thing reminds me of the early days of modding: Mods were totally unauthorized, and companies were known to try pull the plug on mods, and even put out patches to purposely break mods. Legal threats were rare, but not unheard of. Once it was noticed that the games with mods started outselling the games without - and often garnered new sales of years old games - the industry as a whole suddenly embraced modding, and even started making things easier to mod, and put out official instructions and editors to facilitate it. Technically, modding still falls into the same kind of gray area on any product that doesn't officially support it, but the idea of threatening legal action over it is unthinkable nowadays - the same is likely to happen with streaming/let's plays/whatever as time goes on.
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In northeast Indiana, Super NES games typically went for $60 new, and PlayStation games were $50 because the disc was cheaper to replicate. Those who stuck with Nintendo saw a price cut between the Nintendo 64 ($60-$70) and the GameCube ($50) and then another price hike with the Wii U ($60). If you're looking for reliable sources to add to (say) a Wikipedia article, you can put something like super nes game msrp into a search engine and find things like "Why 1990s SNES Games Were so Damn Expensive" by Luke [kotaku.com]
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I can confirm Tepples statement. Late SNES games cost more than PSone games. 59 vs 49. Nintendo was less quick to discount games, it was common to see a "players choice" labeled title at full price, while Greatest HIts PSone titles were using 19.99.
I'm also old enough to remember full price atari 2600 titles at $40. So when whippersnappers complain about paying $59 for the MASSIVE amount of content in unmodded Skyrim, it gets my dander up. I'd shout the kids off my lawn but my lumbago and rheumatiz
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I agree with all your other points by and large. However I am guilty of watching the entire "let's play" of The Last of Us WITHOUT commentary. Why? I heard the amazing reviews of the story line, but I have never and will never own either a PS3, PS4 or any other console for that matter. Since that game will never be released on PC, I figured that was t
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Not to mention pre-order bonuses. Why the hell would anyone per-order a digital game, where there's no chance it'll sell out and they won't be able to get a copy? Dumb-ass pre-order bonuses, I guess! People buy them! What the hell, gamers?
I did that for Borderlands 2 because I liked the first part so much I was willing to gamble on the second one being good. I was not disappointed. Of course I'm aware it's a gamble, which is why I tend not to do it, but sometimes it just might be worth it. Oh, and because the first game's German release was censored I imported from the UK so pre-ordering cut down on the waiting time.
And, of course, streaming and "let's plays." Why are people sitting around watching OTHER PEOPLE play games that they themselves could be playing? But they do!
As has been pointed out, not owning the console is one thing. I'm not going to buy a 3DS for a single game. Or perhaps you no l
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And, of course, streaming and "let's plays." Why are people sitting around watching OTHER PEOPLE play games that they themselves could be playing? But they do!
I'm too busy playing games to play games. Instead I have twitch.tv on in the background while I play games.
Does this make me less of a gamer, or more of a gamer, than were I just playing games on my own?
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And, of course, streaming and "let's plays." Why are people sitting around watching OTHER PEOPLE play games that they themselves could be playing? But they do!
I didn't understand this around 7-8 years ago when I posted a video of the opening of a game just for the music content.
A person asked me if I'd post videos of me playing the game. I declined thinking no one would ever want to watch that sort of thing. Keep in mind, this is from back before "Lets Play" was even a term.
I look back at popular "Lets Play"ers now and think "that could have been me!"
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Or the scenery/terrain discs for FS II back in '83!