Gabe Newell Speaks on The Whole Paid Skyrim Mods Debacle

[onard]

Wow, paying money for mods, who could've predicted that?

It's almost as crazy as paying money to see videos in youtube, but that would never happen, right?

Oh, wait, google corp is already working on making the viewers pay for what they see in youtube [http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/8/8371131/youtube-paid-subscription-offline-video]. I'm not surprised Steam is also taking a shot at that.

Enjoy what free content that is still available while you still can. Everything is being monetarized. EVERYTHING! MORE MONEY! PROFIT! CAPITALISM HO!

 

[shirkbot]

Also Steam has pissed their customers off before and very few of them ever leave, I doubt this will be any different. I will believe that this is bad for Value when I see people actually refusing to use Steam.

Steam has never pissed them on such a scale. even people who never used a mod is pissed at this. This is the "burn this shit down" situation going on. Valves reputtation went from one of the best companies to a company that killed modding. People are shouting that EA is better than Valve. EA.

Beautiful summation of the PR-speak. That aside I to confirm, as a non-modder and non-mod-user, that I am still objected to this because of the income skew. Bethesda doesn't deserve any money for work they're not doing and Valve has enough negotiating power to have gotten a better deal for modders. They just didn't because they get their cut, which is still more than the people making the mods. It's asinine, and I hope that both Valve and Bethesda take a PR and financial beating for it.

 

[DrOswald]

Snip

Branching off of what @Karadalis said(Thank you, by the way, saved me a lot of time trying to compose this), there's another issue. These guys aren't professional, in terms of quality. The best you're going to get is a 'pretty good' specialist. Familiar with Jack of All trades, master of known? You could be the best programmer, but if you don't have anything to actually put it into, models, animations, all you have is a bunch of scripts. Sure you could use premade assets in the game, but eventually you run out creative ability to use them. You *need* a team to do this. A team of four or five ametuers, of different skill areas. Not one specialist programmer. Maybe you can get away with a specialist modeler, or texturer, but you can only go so far with model or texture overhauls.

And I stand by my lonewolf statement. Who wants to split earnings? Especially at the probably applicable audience. These guys aren't exactly professional, one term or another. If they were, they already have a job. Its' called game development. These guys are a bunch of people who started a project, some of which just put open recruitment on some subreddit, and got to work with some stranger. It just doesn't make since to actually try to work with anyone. You end up having to get into legal areas, which cost further money or you risk screwing yourself over.

And yes, we see a bunch of shitty mods. But you know what they cost us? Absolutely nothing. We don't have to risk dropping money on them. But once you add money, not only do you attract more shovelware in the name of profit, SOMEONE has to buy it to try it. SOMEONE has to lose money on it. That's not cool
Like I said. We're already seeing almost all this in action.

Also no caption, I do not speak spanish. You can stop asking me now. Shoot, I even speak and write English pretty poorly, let alone a second language.

The current pack of modders are not professionals, but bringing money into the equation will attract professionals. I know this because I am a professional and I am really interested in what is happening. Specifically, I am a professional programmer, and if this were a game I was interested in modding (say X-Com:EU) then I would almost certainly give this a shot. I even know who my first pick would be for my writer, my concept artist, my animator, or my 3d modeler (depending on what skills my project would need). These are all professionals in their respective fields. I have worked with all of them before on freelance and other small scale projects. And if some of them are unwilling or unable to work on it, I have other people I know I could turn to. Because I am a professional and I have been doing what professionals do, networking.

The reason you do not work alone is because together you can make more money. If you split 3 times the money 2 ways then you came out ahead. The lone wolf attitude of not wanting to share profits is the foolishness of amateurs who don't actually know how to make a quality product and how to make money.

And for the crappy mod problem, that is true. But we have been dealing with this same problem since indie gaming was viable, and the same principles work in this case. Look for actual gameplay footage, buy from trusted sources when possible, look at reviews if the content and the previous efforts of the content creator. Basically, be an aware consumer. The potential for abuse has never been a good enough reason to not pay for any type of creative product.

In addition, Valves policy of only paying out after the developer has earned $100 goes an extremely long way to mitigate this. Because of the low cost of a mod, the typical scam mod will not make enough money to hit this minimum, and then from the few people that did buy it to check it out their reputation is ruined. Right now most people, scammers included, didn't actually bother to understand how Valves payout system works. Eventually scammers will realize this scam almost never pays out and they will move on. There will be scammers always but they will become more rare.

But it hasn't even been a week since this started. The only people currently in the paid workshop are the opportunist scammers and the amateur modders who instantly switched their old mods to paid. The amount of time we have had so far is not even enough time to put together a team, let alone develop a professional grade mod.

 

[SlumlordThanatos]

Also Steam has pissed their customers off before and very few of them ever leave, I doubt this will be any different. I will believe that this is bad for Value when I see people actually refusing to use Steam.

Steam has never pissed them on such a scale. even people who never used a mod is pissed at this. This is the "burn this shit down" situation going on. Valves reputtation went from one of the best companies to a company that killed modding. People are shouting that EA is better than Valve. EA.

Beautiful summation of the PR-speak. That aside I to confirm, as a non-modder and non-mod-user, that I am still objected to this because of the income skew. Bethesda doesn't deserve any money for work they're not doing and Valve has enough negotiating power to have gotten a better deal for modders. They just didn't because they get their cut, which is still more than the people making the mods. It's asinine, and I hope that both Valve and Bethesda take a PR and financial beating for it.

But part of the problem with this is that there isn't a good alternative to Steam yet. GOG still doesn't have a lot of newer content (they're getting better, though) and Galaxy hasn't been released yet. Origin is still garbage and only has EA's games. And most sites where you can purchase games online just gives you a Steam code.

I imagine that if Steam doesn't backpedal on this decision sometime within the next week, we'll see a mass exodus from Steam as soon as Galaxy is released, if for no other reason than to screw over the people who are irreparably ruining the modding scene.

And to think, all they had to do was not be greedy...

 

[endtherapture]

This is how games become a mature art form. We figure this sort of shit out.

This is pish. Just because you don't get paid for something doesn't mean that it isn't worth it, especially when you throw terms like "mature art form" into the mix. I am an artist, I do a lot of drawing and painting and you can consider things art without charging for them. There's hundreds of museums across the world that are free to enter. To enrich things as art you look at them at art first and a commodity second. Sadly Valve just sees mods as something they can make money out of.

 

[DrOswald]

This is how games become a mature art form. We figure this sort of shit out.

This is pish. Just because you don't get paid for something doesn't mean that it isn't worth it, especially when you throw terms like "mature art form" into the mix. I am an artist, I do a lot of drawing and painting and you can consider things art without charging for them. There's hundreds of museums across the world that are free to enter. To enrich things as art you look at them at art first and a commodity second. Sadly Valve just sees mods as something they can make money out of.

Did you even read my post? You know, the whole thing (95% of my post) about how many modders are forced to abandon their modding because they cannot justify the expenditure of so much effort when they are not being financially compensated, from a purely practical point of view? I never said art for the sake of art isn't worth it ever, I said many potential artists/content creators (myself included) are unable to practice their craft because the practical aspects of life get in the way. Do you deny this is true?

And when I said "This is how games become a mature art form" I was talking about how we have to have discussions that hash out how we can make the practical, business side of games work along side the artistic and creative side of games. This is something that every art form has had to do as it matures. If we never figure out these issues gaming will either become artistically bankrupt or prohibitively impractical.

 

[shirkbot]

But part of the problem with this is that there isn't a good alternative to Steam yet. GOG still doesn't have a lot of newer content (they're getting better, though) and Galaxy hasn't been released yet. Origin is still garbage and only has EA's games. And most sites where you can purchase games online just gives you a Steam code.

I imagine that if Steam doesn't backpedal on this decision sometime within the next week, we'll see a mass exodus from Steam as soon as Galaxy is released, if for no other reason than to screw over the people who are irreparably ruining the modding scene.

And to think, all they had to do was not be greedy...

Short of actually fixing Greenlight and/or their customer support infrastructureValves best move would have been taking 0 action for the foreseeable future. That said, please tell me more about this "Galaxy" of which you speak. I use Steam and always will, but more as a universal launcher than anything else, so I'm always happy to hear about alternatives, with GOG and Humble Bundle being the existing ones. Admittedly Humble Bundle is a bit hit and miss in that department, but they're splitting their funds with charity so they at least have the moral high ground.

 

[DrOswald]

But part of the problem with this is that there isn't a good alternative to Steam yet. GOG still doesn't have a lot of newer content (they're getting better, though) and Galaxy hasn't been released yet. Origin is still garbage and only has EA's games. And most sites where you can purchase games online just gives you a Steam code.

I imagine that if Steam doesn't backpedal on this decision sometime within the next week, we'll see a mass exodus from Steam as soon as Galaxy is released, if for no other reason than to screw over the people who are irreparably ruining the modding scene.

And to think, all they had to do was not be greedy...

Short of actually fixing Greenlight and/or their customer support infrastructureValves best move would have been taking 0 action for the foreseeable future. That said, please tell me more about this "Galaxy" of which you speak. I use Steam and always will, but more as a universal launcher than anything else, so I'm always happy to hear about alternatives, with GOG and Humble Bundle being the existing ones. Admittedly Humble Bundle is a bit hit and miss in that department, but they're splitting their funds with charity so they at least have the moral high ground.

Agreed, I would like to hear about galaxy, whatever that is. I tried to google it and I can't find anything relevant. I would love to see more practical competition in the digital distribution space.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

snip

snip.

Now I can't remember for sure because it's been a while since I'd seen anything on it, but from what I know it's basically GOG's version of the steam store/community/program. It hasn't been released just yet but I'm PRETTY sure that's what it's going to be, but I'll let slumlord answer you on that one better.

At the end of the day, if this attracts *more professional* modders, or make better quality mods, then that is great! I just don't like the way it's been implemented by valve, and I don't like how bethesda and valve get to take such hefty cuts when they do jack shit compared to what they've done before (they've already hosted the mods on there in the first place, and modding has been happening for over 2 decades..so them taking such big cuts just doesn't sit right with me, which is why I'm against the current system that is now in place).

edit: here you go!

http://www.gog.com/galaxy

not much more on it so far I think.

edit edit:

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/gog_galaxy_client_closed_alpha

okay THAT's as recent as it goes.

 

[Ariolander]

This answer is TEXTBOOK corporate doublespeak.

"I don't think these issues are specific to MODs, and they are all worth solving. For example, two areas where people have legitimate beefs against us are support and Greenlight. We have short term hacks and longer term solutions coming, but the longer term good solutions involve writing a bunch of code. In the interim, it's going to be a sore point. Both these problems boil down to building scalable solutions that are robust in the face of exponential growth."
I'll translate for you,

What he says: "I don't think these issues are specific to MODs, and they are all worth solving."
What it means: "I do not plan to engage with you in conversation so I will placate you by saying that your problem is important"

What he says: "For example, two areas where people have legitimate beefs against us are support and Greenlight."
What it means: "here is a a true statement that you cannot possibly disagree with me on, as to lend credibility and weight to my otherwise empty response"

What he says: "We have short term hacks and longer term solutions coming, but the longer term good solutions involve writing a bunch of code. In the interim, it's going to be a sore point "
What it means: "We have no plans to address this issue so I will intentionally leave out any specific information and instead substitute another empty fact you cannot disagree with: 'Quick solutions are not sustainable, and sustainable solutions require lots of work. For an unspecified amount of time you will just have to deal with it'"

What he says: "Both these problems boil down to building scalable solutions that are robust in the face of exponential growth."
What it means: "Again I will leave you with a true but empty statement, Solutions to problems must be tailored to fix the problem no matter how big the problem gets"

Now that this is out of the way, let's talk about how this reply was engineered for one purpose: Making you feel like you agree with and can trust GabeN.

What you saw: "Hey guys, i know these are problems, just like greenlight and customer support are problems. But trust me i have big plan to fix everything..Soon!"
What you felt: "Yes Gabe I agree, GreenLight and Customer support need to be fixed! Of course Gabe, long term solutions will require more work than quick bandaids, we agree again! Obviously you are right Gabe, these solutions should fit the problem! We agree 100% I didn't disagree with you at all at any point during that response!"



The reality of the situation is that this reply is a copy/paste Corporate PR template and you have probably even seen it before:

"I don't think these issues are specific to young voters, and they are all worth solving. For example, two areas where people have legitimate issues against us are Immigration and Defense Spending. We have short term hacks and longer term solutions coming, but the longer term good solutions involve writing a bunch of legislation. In the interim, it's going to be a sore point. Both these problems boil down to building scalable solutions that are robust in the face of exponential growth."

"I don't think these issues are specific to Stem Fields, and they are all worth solving. For example, two areas where people have legitimate issues against us are the gender gap and workplace diversity. We have short term hacks and longer term solutions coming, but the longer term good solutions involve writing a bunch of history. In the interim, it's going to be a sore point. Both these problems boil down to building scalable solutions that are robust in the face of exponential growth."

"I don't think these issues are specific to Education, and they are all worth solving. For example, two areas where people have legitimate issues against us are Tenure and Tuition Costs. We have short term hacks and longer term solutions coming, but the longer term good solutions involve writing a bunch of policies. In the interim, it's going to be a sore point. Both these problems boil down to building scalable solutions that are robust in the face of exponential growth."

Don't get suckered by Gabe's corporate shenanigans.

The above is of course taken from Reddit but I thought it would be relevant here.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

The only question that matters is, can they make Half-Life 3 with the money from the mods?

 

[Muspelheim]

Oh, well. It was fun while it lasted.

I wonder how discreetly the non-Workshop sources will be dealt with. Depends on how hard you squeese, I suppose.

 

[JET1971]

If you really want to mod Skyrim, go to the Nexus and use their mod manager.

This raises a good point. I don't use the Nexus manager because I felt I wasn't interested in enough mods to justify to myself the time spent learning the ropes and setting it up. Conversely, I only run SkyUI because I couldn't get more than one mod running through Steamworks. My preference for a first playthrough was to run SkyUI and graphics mods only (ie: an enhanced vanilla experience).

Has Steamworks been fixed, or is it still unusable for multiple or sizeable mods? Last I checked, it couldn't even host the unofficial patch due to arbitrary restrictions, and good luck working with the piecemeal version, because files would load in an inconsistent order.

Steamworks isn't a mod manager, it is an installer. A mod manager helps you set the load order up correctly as well as install. If your load order isn't done correct you will start getting CTD's or mods just wont work correct.

Don't use NMM use Mod Organizer instead. Far superior. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/1334/

 

[Drathnoxis]

The current pack of modders are not professionals, but bringing money into the equation will attract professionals. I know this because I am a professional and I am really interested in what is happening. Specifically, I am a professional programmer, and if this were a game I was interested in modding (say X-Com:EU) then I would almost certainly give this a shot. I even know who my first pick would be for my writer, my concept artist, my animator, or my 3d modeler (depending on what skills my project would need). These are all professionals in their respective fields. I have worked with all of them before on freelance and other small scale projects. And if some of them are unwilling or unable to work on it, I have other people I know I could turn to. Because I am a professional and I have been doing what professionals do, networking.

This is the whole point though. It may attract professional modding teams, but it's going to force out all the small time people who just want to fiddle around with their game as a hobby. As people have been saying, modding used to be a public collaboration where everybody could build their work on the work of everybody else. This is not going to be feasible once mods are a paid commodity, because if there is one thing people hate it's seeing others get paid for their work. Most likely, people will start making resource packs and modding tools that other modders can license for a fee which will be fine for the professionals looking to make a profit, but not so much for the hobbyists.

Essentially Valve is coming into the delicate ecosystem of the modding community and bulldozing it to make room for the professionals. This, I think, is one of the main reasons why so many people are upset, because this will destroy the community that has been building up for the last 10 or so years. There may still be a modding community when the dust settles, but it probably won't be the same one that was there before. It will be a community of professionals rather than a community of hobbyists.

 

[TwiZtah]

His replies were hollow corporate mumbo jumbo speak, there was no information of value to be gained from them as he didn't really say anything.

 

[Vigormortis]

Touche. Still charging money for something that was previously free is definitely going to piss people off.

When money's involved with anything, people get pissed off.

Remember the shitstorm of angry bile that frothed up from the bowls of the internet when Valve had the absolute gall to make Team Fortress 2 free?

People lost their fucking minds with rage when a company made something free. Free.

Welcome to the internet, folks...

 

[shirkbot]

edit: here you go!

http://www.gog.com/galaxy

not much more on it so far I think.

edit edit:

http://www.gog.com/forum/general/gog_galaxy_client_closed_alpha

okay THAT's as recent as it goes.

Thank you for the update. I didn't even realize GOG was making their own client, but it sounds promising. GOG has been really consistent in their commitments, both in selling old, often otherwise unavailable games, and in putting the customer first. If there's a migration to Galaxy I can only see that as a good thing. Thanks again for the info, I'm leaving the links in the quote for others that may be curious.

 

[Olas]

I don't see how introducing a monetary option "breaks" the community. If people want to create mods for free I don't see how this would impede them.

People sell movies, yet that doesn't keep people from making youtube videos with high production value freely available.

Ya, sure it's a different product, but you have to convince me that allowing mod creators to charge for mods will somehow dismantle the market, which nobody has yet done. In my experience, allowing producers to make money universally increases both the quantity and quality of the products they supply.

I'll touch on some of the ways this harms the overall community.

first and foremost, it isn't moderated. People can and already have been caught stealing assets and putting them up for cash. This has resulted in people pulling mods down so it doesn't happen to them. That in turn decreases the total mods out there, weakens the community, breeds distrust and kills the very atmosphere that made it a community in the first place.

As seems to be a pattern I've noticed, the real underlying issue appears to be Steams lack of responsible moderation. To reach out an olive branch, I agree that Steam does need to regulate their store more and better. If they did, would you agree that allowing modders to profit from their work is a good idea?

Added to that, the use of paid mods creates incentive to be selfish, hoard knowledge or resources, falsely DMCA other creators and try to game the system via connections. Pretty much exactly the sort of behavior youtube has been infested with.

Youtube has the same underlying problem as Steam: no actual oversight. They want to be able to fix every problem with an algorithm so that they don't have to pay actual humans to properly manage their market.

However, the relevant comparison here isn't between Youtube right now and some perfect version of Youtube. It's between Youtube right now and Youtube if nobody was able to make any money from the videos they create. How many big Youtube channels do you think would remain if suddenly nobody on Youtube could make any money off their videos? Allowing people to profit from their work has expanded the quantity and quality of content by an order of magnitude.

yeah, it doesn't "stop" them, but that is because you look at the general idea of "well, people still do this". The problem is that on individual levels, it has stopped many youtubers who had enough and just quit. And youtube is a very very low-skill entry thing, modding can take a bit of effort and time, and are considerably fewer people out there willing to do it then there are people with a webcam and an opinion. Making the community a pain in the ass to deal with and then getting hands off about moderating it will effectively kill any community that would rise around modding a game with a paid-mod section, even across other sites as people will loot from one site to host on another. And the only ones making money would be steam and developers, not actual content makers.

Steam won't make any money if they wreck the modding scene and prevent creators from developing new content as you're suggesting. They have as much incentive to make this work as anyone. I don't see any logically consistent scenario where only Valve comes out ahead.

I also just don't understand how this is such a deterrent for modders. Nobody's being forced to participate, so if you don't like Steam you can ignore it. If someone steals your work and tries to monetize it they'll only be spreading your work farther with no cost to you, and nobody will pay for it anyway if they realize you're giving it away for free somewhere else.

I could go on, but that seems to cover the basic issues. The chain effects of flooded mod market with garbage,

Garbage which will in no way affect good mods.

the reduction of game longevity decreasing audience amount(usually increased by mods now having to compete between each other decreasing that effect substantially)

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Don't mods generally increase game longevity?

and the effects an inevitable market boom and burst would have are also worth going over.

An inevitable market burst? You can't just throw that out there without explaining it. Why would a market burst be "inevitable"?

Also increased legal scrutiny by companies because money is related (as happened with youtube and companies growing increasingly more DMCA happy),

Only when Valve fails to do their job properly. Sure some legal scrutiny is inevitable, but it's just a side effect of a marketplace going legit. You want something to be more than a side hobby for a bunch of enthusiasts? You're going to have to put up with some legal issues.

rise of cliques similar to the youtube company-channels like Polaris,

I'm not sure what you're referring to here. It seems like these little social circles are just a result of the internet in general. I'm not sure how it relates to monetization.

and increased conflict between modders and audience as people treat all modders as companies selling products, making the atmosphere more hostile and decreasing the desire to mod for free.

Treating an independent modder like a large company delusional stupidity on the part of any consumers. Any modder selling their content should be free to clarify who they are and what they do so that there's no confusion. Some tension between supply and demand is going to occur, but that's for the best since it drives prices to a reasonable equilibrium that works best for everyone.

Considering the quality, respectability and community of the mobile market, to say nothing of the lack of trust in the very nature of that, and the frequently reported abuses, I certainly don't blame people pissed that steam is trying to reduce modding to that.

First of all, what specific problems do you have with the mobile market that you think will occur to the MODS market if it allows revenue?

I use the android market and I don't really have any issues with it, but I can't respond properly if I don't know what we're talking about here.

Second, why do you assume the MODS market will resemble the mobile market specifically?

1. Flooding of shoveware,

I just don't get why this is seen as such a drawback. Any popular market is going to become filled with shovelware. So what? When the Wii became a hit it got flooded with shovelware. As a Wii owner, did this bother me at all? No. All it did was give me some amusement to look at the ridiculous crap people were pumping out for it. As long as there's still a way to find the stuff worth purchasing, I don't care what else exists. Besides, who has the right to declare any particular game, app, mod, or video "shovelware". For all you know some people may genuinely enjoy it.

anti-consumer practices

That's not specific.

cash-grabs

Neither is that.

legal pressure by people making money to attack competition.

I'll grant you that copyright and IP laws are super outdated and unequipped to handle markets where the product is software. I don't know what the solution is, but I don't think it's to just remove the markets for said software entirely.

2. Because it is as close to an unmoderated market of technical nature as I can think of in terms of profiteering for profiteering sake via flooding of low quality programs, similar to what adding profits to mods will likely become. I suppose I could have also referenced the facebook flashgame era, though most of those moved to app games so sort of the same thing.

It seems to me that the state of the mobile games market is at least partially the result of apathetic consumers who just want a distraction while riding the bus. If the majority of people who play these games actually devoted large sums of time and money to them, like gamers do for major releases, they would probably demand more from it and seek out genuine quality. That's how I see it. I could be wrong.

In example, Flappybird and the million clones it spawned after the creator wanted it to die.

That doesn't seem like a great example to use. Flappy bird was a huge hit. For some reason, people loved it. And the creator could have made a fortune off it. I don't know why he wanted to kill it (well I sorta do, but his stated reason is ridiculous) however, if he had been successful in destroying it he would have taken away a game a lot of people enjoyed.

Note, this would have been just as true if it weren't monetized.

Modding does not exist because people can make money off it,

Obviously, since they can't.

Also because the motivation for it in the first place was never money based but rather fan/passion based.

That's a tautology. Of course it wasn't money based, how could it have been when there was no money? That doesn't prove that those creators wouldn't have preferred to make money. It doesn't prove that allowing them to mod as a full time job wouldn't have improved the quantity and quality of their work. It doesn't prove that there aren't more people who would have tried modding if they could make money from it.

After all, do you know what the people who wanted to make content for money did instead? They made actual games.

So the options were:

a. Make mods for games you love for free
b. Make a completely different game from scratch and just accept that the game you already love will never be improved in the way you want.

People didn't mod because they wanted to do it for free. They modded because they wanted the games they loved to be better, and the fact that they had to do it for free was out of their control.

but you have people looking upon it and trying to force it to make them money. That's sort of the problem.

I don't see how Valve is trying to force anyone to do anything. It seems pretty clear that this is an optional service people can try. And frankly, I think the fact that people don't want modders to be able to earn money for the work they put into mods is absurd. Not only does it benefit modders, but it benefits the consumer too because the supply of such goods will inevitably increase.

Please don't misrepresent people. No one does not want modders to go unrewarded, what they have a problem with is this implementation.

I don't want to misrepresent people, but it seems a lot of them, you included, are against the IDEA of letting modders charge for their work, in addition to complaints about specific implementation. If this was just about the specific implementation of Steam, then I wouldn't be having this discussion because I mostly agree with you on that.

Add a tipjar function

I think that's a good idea, but it's not a replacement for letting creators charge up front. Fun fact: most people on the internet aren't super charitable. Besides, there's already Patreon.

and a system to allow popular and successful modders to submit ideas to the dev and get them ok'd and sold that way,

Assuming the dev wants to wade through mountains of mods waiting for approval, and assuming modders are willing to wait long periods of time for the possibility that their mod will be approved. I thought the point of modding was that it was independent.

Having modders take previously free mods and tack a pricetag on them and open the floodgates for theft, shovelware or legal shenanigans at the expense of killing the mod community and you will rightfully get reaction.

Call me cycnical, but I suspect at least some of this reaction is coming from people worried they'll have to pay money for mods that they'd otherwise get for free. The issues you've stated aren't entirely without merit, but they're factors that come with any legitimate marketplace.

As for quality of goods improving... it is remarkable how many times I have heard that and yet never seen it.

Then give me some examples. The mobile gaming market isn't a good one. It's thriving and full of good games. The ability to monetize games hasn't killed it.

Passion makes quality, not throwing money at something.

As if passion and monetary compensation are mutually exclusive. If people are passionate now, why would they stop?

I can point to an endless sea of failed kickstarters to demonstrate that.

What does Kickstarter have to do with this? The problems with Kickstarter come from the idea of sales preceding the actual creation of the product. The fact that some people on Kickstarter can't properly estimate how much a product will cost and deliver on their promises has nothing to do with a market where people create products first.

No, making it a for-profit thing will do the opposite, it will decrease overall quality. Aside from modders being more distrustful of one another thereby decreasing them helping fix bugs and issues,

I don't care about the overall quality, I care about the quality of the mods I want. If there's a thousand shitty clones of a good mod, it doesn't somehow detract from the original. It does however open up the possibility that one of those clones will actually be an undiscovered gem that has actually improved on the original.

As for bugs and issues? If you want your mod to make money, it seems logical that you would want it to run as well as possible. The only possible downsides come from a lack of information, which there's no excuse for on an online platform.

it creates reason to flood the market with crap, as all it takes is one "FlappyBird" to make someone rich.

Like I said, I'd prefer a wider selection of good and bad games than a smaller selection of good and bad games.

And you know what hasn't been mentioned already? The fact that the free modding communities were already filled with crap. Have you tried searching for Skyrim mods on Nexus? Have you seen how many shitty, borderline pointless, and often buggy mods it has? Stop treating the community like it was already some golden city on the hill.

Yes, you may argue that the 25% someone would get (if they could get up to $400 anyways) might be incentive to try harder, but compare that to the time they would need to put into a mod to make it excel. Thousands of hours into one is not uncommon,

Ya, there's certainly an argument to be made for money incentivizing people to do things. Considering it's how western civilization has operated for millennia.

and a measly $400 is never going to convince anyone to put that much effort into it if they weren't already.

$400 is the minimum amount, not the maximum. Also, I don't know about you, but $400 doesn't sound measly to me, especially if I get it for doing something I love.

But it will get people to steal other's work or pump out shitty projects in an hour or two and slap a price tag on.

And if those projects are shitty people won't buy them and the creator will make nothing.

The first cut of those seeking profit is always quality. Quality of worker, quality of product, quality of customer support... When money is the sole goal, and indeed after the community is gutted and reduced to a shallow husk, that is what it will be,

For reasons that I'm still unclear on.

quality will be forfeit gladly for a little more. I wonder, will they start to make mods into cookie-clickers where you have to buy new packs every so often? It isn't hard to, but until now there was no good reason to.

Cookie-clicker was a free game created as a "passion project" by a French programmer in his down time. It wasn't until after it had exploded in popularity that ads were introduced and they haven't stopped it from being popular. Personally I think it's an ingenious parody of the skinnerbox gaming formula.

 

[f1r2a3n4k5]

My PC broke about 6 months ago and I just finished putting together my new one.

I install Steam and I come back to this? THIS?

That's it. Uninstall Steam. Disassemble the PC. Put the parts into their boxes and send them back.

Just because you *can* monetize something, doesn't mean you should.

They are making EA look good for God's sake. At least with EA, you can expect to get a refund if the game is totally busted.

It would be different if they made these promises of ensuring that no malicious mods or stolen uploads make it to market and they had EVER, even ONCE, instituted a somewhat successful approach to dealing with consumers. But they haven't. Refunds are like pulling teeth. Community voting is a busted mess. Games that someone developed with a budget of a nickel are vomited onto the front page like the Internet has a case of the flu. And Early Access/Greenlight products frequently never reach fruition or are some horrific monstrosity of bugs (Even from well-known developers, with no consequences! the games don't even get pulled from the store.)

Valve wants all the pros of being a distributor (high profit margins) without any of the cons (providing logistical support and customer satisfaction). It's high-time that came around to bite them in the ass. They've been talking out of both sides of their mouth for far too long.

That's it. I'm done. No more Steam games. I'm either getting it from GOG or not at all.

 

[Olas]

I don't see how introducing a monetary option "breaks" the community.

Thats because you dont udnerstand how modding community works.

Oh I don't? Well then please enlighten this ignorant fool, oh great sage of knowledge.

Its a collaboration. People work together, find adresses together, work on mods together. For somone to suddenly go from free to paid breaks half the mods around and forces them from collaborative hobby into legal nightmare labyrinth.

Yes, because things that require collaboration have never been successfully monetized before.

Modding is not the same as regular developement because you dont just buy and engine and create everything from scratch. you cooperate between many people openly and publicly.

There's a difference between open communication and public communication. Don't tell me you think no monetized industry has ever had collaboration between multiple parties.