Sniper Team 4 said:
Thanks for breaking this down and summing it up for me, Shamus. I don't have Steam and played Skyrim on the PS3, so I didn't really understand what was going on. All I heard was that Valve was going to start charging for mods. After reading this though, I understand why this backfired so horribly, and honestly, I'm more than a little disappointed in Valve. They're supposed to be the good guys of the gaming world, but this? This is on the level of EA and Activision in regards to some areas. That's pretty low.
Don't be swayed by this shoddy article. Speaking as an actual modder turned software developer, this article is of shockingly poor quality and Shamus should be ashamed for writing it.
I mean, consider this: One of the big points he brings is that by making mods paid people will have an incentive to steal mod content and pass it off as their own. Well of course! The only reason this didn't happen before was because the content was inherently valueless. His solution to this problem is
for the content to remain valueless. That is like saying that selling comic books is bad because someone might photocopy the art and sell it as their own. It is a pathetically bad anti-creator argument and I am shocked he would repeat it. We can't let creative content be sold! If it has value then people might try to steal it and sell it, so the creator wont get compensated! Far better to just prevent creators being compensated in the first place!
And then, get this, he goes on to talk about how a donation button would be a more appropriate method. But donation buttons already exist, he even gives himself as an example of how it can support people. But his entire stolen content point rests on the assumption that mod content is valueless!
Either donation systems are so ineffective that content that relies on them is typically valueless or the theft problem is not nearly as bad as he is assuming it would be (because, if they work, content is already valuable enough to steal.) Either way he is dead wrong about something. And I am pretty sure what he is dead wrong about is the effectiveness of donation systems. They can work, but it is rare.
And he didn't even properly fact check the article. You know the 1600 sales/$400 dollar figure he gives? The actual figure would be 400 sales/$100 dollars. But because Shamus didn't bother to do a 5 minute fact check and instead relied on rumors from his besty he inflated the figure by
4 times. Can you really trust that Shamus was thinking critically about this subject when he wasn't even willing to source a publicly available fact?
And that isn't even getting into his questionable assessment of the 75%/25% split or his incredibly anti-creator views on the dependency chain issue. "Modders should just work for free and then beg for donations (which by my own logic is damn near worthless.) That solves all the problems!"
Edit:
"if I was a mod author, I'd rather have 90% of optional donations than 25% of mandatory fees."
[sarcasm]Thanks so much for deciding how I should want to be paid.[/sarcasm]