Gabe Newell Speaks on The Whole Paid Skyrim Mods Debacle

crepesack

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Given that all of valve's biggest games have been born from modding, my theory is that this is Gabe's strategy for generating a new IP. By establishing a framework with Bethseda for profiting from modded content and also introducing a method for giving modders financial reward, Valve sets themselves up for the potential generation of another CS or DOTA or TF. Especially considering that Valve hasn't gotten a new IP in a number of years, Valve is probably getting desperate and has implemented this strategy.
 

The Rogue Wolf

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I think there's a lot more "entitlement" being shown by gamers here than by Valve. There is no "paywall"; you do not have to pay a fee to Valve just to mod your game. The choice is being made by mod creators to charge for their work, and if you do not like this, then simply do not buy the mod. Most of the arguments I'm seeing here against the idea can be boiled down to "no, I want it all for free, because that's how it's always been"- and then they're criticizing Valve for letting the modmakers choose to charge, rather than the modmakers for charging.

Here, I'll address one in particular:

Elfgore said:
For the most part, these new mods that people are charging for are total shite and don't deserve to ask for money.
There's an easy cure for this: Don't give them money. In a free marketplace, anyone can ask for money for anything; I can crap in half a dozen sandwich bags and demand a thousand dollars for each. And if I can find a buyer, more power to me! But you don't have the right to come tell me "you can't charge money for that".

Now, all that being said:

Denamic said:
One of the primary concerns that I have is that once mods is that mods are currently very collaborative. Many mods use aspects of other mods to improve on one another, or are entirely dependent on something. Like SKSE, the Skyrim script extender. Many, many mods use the extended scripting functionalities that it offers, including some that are on sale now. Someone is using work they made available and gets paid for it. It also prevents other people to make mods that synergise with one another when they're behind a paywall.
Stuff like this is a very legitimate concern. The Mod ecosphere for games like Skyrim is a highly-interdependent thing; I myself made a mod for Doom 3 that has been used in whole or in part in a number of other mods, as I gave express permission for such. If this had been implemented for Doom 3 and I'd decided to charge for my work, how would those other mods be affected?

There's a number of problems with this system, but we as gamers need to focus on those problems, and not adopt this attitude of "you can't ask us to pay for that, it's supposed to be free!".
 

Lucane

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Don't you all see? This is how we get Half Life 3 as a mod someone makes for Episode 2!

Seriously now, yeah the payment ratio is terrible and the notion mentioned that a game developer would intentionally make an incomplete or buggy game that's moderately above bad or decent so someone will mod it for them and then get a percentage of the money when someone else fixes it is appalling(Of course that's only if the modder puts a price on it but that's a double edge sword fix it for free the GD don't make money but neither do you/they.)

Best way forward if this isn't going away(Not that I'm saying it should be removed or not.) is any fixes to stabilize the game might want to be free as a base line to future mods to work from in order to sprout from the same well to have mods that won't clash with each other as easily or become flawed. Of course that means some work will have to go unpaid or cheaply if other mods would need a spring board to start from.
 

Lucane

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Josh123914 said:
Can someone explain to me how this is even legal?

I mean I thought mods were only allowed to be done in the first place because the modder is doing it for free, and to sell the work would be to profit off of a studio's work, since the mod will no doubt be built off of the assets of that studio.

With this in mind, I'm surprised there isn't a lawsuit brewing.
The Money earned from the Mods is split 3 ways (Unevenly) between the Modder who posts it, Steam and the Game Developer so Steam must of worked out a deal prior to permitting these games to have Paid mods sell-able.
 

SadisticFire

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VoidWanderer said:
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't there more to this. Isn't this giving modders the option of charging for their hard work in changing the game? And isn't it your choice in buying these mods?
Yes, it is 'my choice' but it's not very hard to predict human behavior once hard cash starts getting involved, or what Valve was planning on doing. A Fallout 4 announcement is just around the corner at E3(Most likely). They were testing the waters to see how far they can get away with charging for mods. I for one am expecting if this trend continues we may see Mod-DRM. Where it means you cannnot download mods from other sources, only steam workshop. So see ya, Nexus!

Now the human behavior part. We're already starting to see mods change/add licenses that makes them less friendly to modders in a previously collaborative environment. For instance, FNIS is now preventing anyone from using it to make any sort of money what so ever. Sounds fair, yeah. But that means any mod that wants to add new animations have to start from the ground work, they can't use previously established structures, knowledge, scripts, or nothing in that tent. We were (un)blessed that SKSE said it's free use, but other scriptors/modders won't be. This turns a "Let's work together and make Skyrim an awesome game!" into, "Fuck you, you're competition and i want my [meager] amount of money, so I'm not sharing my tricks with you." This happened simply because you added money into the equation.
And before you go on about the amount the modders get, You might want to research how much money developers actually get, once they BREAK EVEN.
They already got our money though. When we bought the game. That's why we infact, bought the game, atleast a lot of us did. We bought it so we have something to mod, a base for it. That's the reason why we gave Besthda and Steam the money they have now. They don't deserve to double dip on content that makes a lacklustre game into a great one. They didn't do that work. Especially since a lot of mods are bug fixes. "Hey, thanks for fixing our horrible horrible horrible UI, can you sell that for us and give us 45% of that money. Oh and our buddy Valve, too. Give them 30%" That just isn't cool. It promotes lazy developers and publishers. We don't want that to happen, ever.
I think this could be a good idea, as it would encourage people with ideas for mods to come out of the woodwork, and maybe collaborate on projects, or come up with new ways to play the game.
Except they were doing that anyways. What this encourages actually, is 13 year old Timmy who wants money for trading cards, and lonewolf Ted, who made be a professional who can make a pretty good, but is no where equal to four amentuar friends working together to make something spectacular, except, we don't know if lonewolf Ted exists at all. We do know that the friends exist, because Falskaar exists.
 

Laughing Man

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I read some of the AMA, but the answers were often so vague as to be useless. Valve is notoriously bad at explaining anything and this is apparently no different
Valve is often touted as the dream company to work for, a company with no real manger structure where workers do as they see fit and my fucking god did this show here.

Gabe Newell didn't come across as the leader of a company the CEO of a multi million dollar organisation he came across as the part time sales assistant being challenged for answers by a difficult customer and the whole thing looked like it was one step away from him going to look for a manager to come and speak to the difficult customer. It was tragic.

You can say what you want about EA and Ubisoft but at least when their guys speak it is usually to the point, deals with the issues (be it positive or negative) and it at least looks like someone made some decisions on what is being done, Valve just seems to be making it up as it goes along... almost like a company that has no structure, no leadership organisation and where workers can do what they want.... oh wait a minute!
 

Elfgore

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The Rogue Wolf said:
Here, I'll address one in particular:

Elfgore said:
For the most part, these new mods that people are charging for are total shite and don't deserve to ask for money.
There's an easy cure for this: Don't give them money. In a free marketplace, anyone can ask for money for anything; I can crap in half a dozen sandwich bags and demand a thousand dollars for each. And if I can find a buyer, more power to me! But you don't have the right to come tell me "you can't charge money for that"..
Everyone knows this, but here is the thing. Valve is letting them sell it, they're profiting off it. It looks really fucking bad on their end. Like you know, they don't care about quality control or something. Though, they do appear to actually be giving a shit for once, as mods seem to have to pass a review for being able to purchase them. Finishing up, A consumer is at fault for buying something that is noticeably shitty, but a business is responsible to make sure that shit doesn't get through.
 

SecondPrize

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The whole bit about free mods being able to be used by others worries me. Digital copyright exists. You don't get to sell someones stuff just because they don't sell it themselves. This can grow to be a giant legal mess for Valve.
 

Braedan

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Software Lifecycle


EDIT: If the picture isn't clear because of all the grey, maintenance is the 67%

As soon as you attach a price tag to anything, it no longer exists as a hobby project, and becomes a product. The vast majority of mods skip the requirements, half ass the design, jump to programming (or development if you want to call it that), ignore integration, and then abandon maintenance after two months.

If you don't think you can handle producing software, and mods are just tool assisted software, then don't charge a price. Lets call this what it really is, Community DLC. Mods will always be free, anything with an explicit price tag is Community DLC. Just be prepared to support your DLC after you create it if you want money for it.

On a side note, I think that Valve giving the option of a donation to workshop pages would be a fantastic idea.
 

Braedan

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ravenshrike said:
RJ 17 said:
Honestly, I'm actually with Total Biscuit on this one: I fully agree with the concept that modders deserve to get paid for all the hard work that they put into making the games we love even more enjoyable in countless ways. This, however, is not the way to go about that. Indeed, adding a tip-jar functionality to the workshop would have been a much better situation. That's the "middle ground" that needs to be reached if Valve is insistent upon doing this. That and in no way should Valve be getting 75% of the cut...that's just insulting. Even then, however, the problem remains that by monetizing mods, you enter Willy Wonka's Wonderful World of Copyright Claims.
Valve isn't getting 75% of the money. That is split between Valve and Bethesda, and I've seen claims that Beth is getting 45%. Which puts Valve's portion at their standard 30%. So you want to get pissed at someone, get pissed at Beth for demanding that 45% instead of splitting the remaining 70% evenly with the mod maker.
Regardless of who takes what portion of the price, Valve set up a system when they take 75% of the total. Maybe you want to blame Bethesda, but that does not let Valve of the hook for fleecing their clients, which is what modders become when they sell products through Steam.
 

runic knight

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Oh boy, lets change something that has been done out of non-monetary gain reason for years and working wonderfully and add a pay system to it that rewards the developer who cause the need for many mods themselves. What could possibly go wrong?

Pay for mods as done here is terrible, hands down.

For the record, I am a modder myself of a few games, I've sank a lot of hours learning and working on mods for a number of games, from Skyrim and Oblivion, to the earlier days of simpler games. I've done work from retextures to full model rendering via 3d programs. I find the idea of charging for mods to be a potentially lethal poison for that entire community.

Do modders deserve money?
Do modders deserve money for their work? No, they actually don't, no one deserves money for work they. That implies that people are inherently entitled to money for any tasks they do upon demand, which has never been the case. Just as artists do not "deserve" money for their art, street musicians do not "deserve" money for playing on the sidewalk and someone picking up garbage in the road does not "deserve" money for helping the community, a modder who previously worked for free to make better art, improve background elements or patch bugs do not deserve money for it after the fact. They are also not workers contracted to perform a job, they are individuals who did the job freely. They certainly don't have to continue to support it or continue to do the task they did for free, but charging for work done free months or years ago...it is sort of underhanded. Imagine if someone painted a mural on a wall that you enjoyed looking at, and then a few months down the line demanded pay for it.

Should they be able to be compensated on a voluntary basis? Damn right they should be, but that isn't the same thing now is it? The first is taking a previously freely done thing and adding a pricetag to it (which is going to cause trouble, no matter how you look at it) and the other is putting out a tip jar for people to reward your efforts after the fact. Like the three analogies above, it doesn't require payment for a previously free thing, but it does offer means to financially reward and encourage it.

Should people be able to make new mods and charge for those? Yes. If they don't start as free, the creators can choose to declare them as a paid-for service instead of a freely given community improving asset. Hell, I would honestly think that using a free mods as advertisement to gain support and audience for the larger mod they intended to sell would be fine (and actually a good way to avoid the deluge of shitty cash-grab mods we are already seeing, if it required a certain community positivity on free mods made in order to submit one for pay-for type). Something designed and released as a product has right to exist. It would not be a "mod" per say, it would be "user-made DLC" or something similar since the added fee is a wrinkle that would separate it from the actual modding community, but the actual act of making work and charging for it at inception should be allowed. But given the expectation of quality of a paid for product, and the possible copywrite issues involved, they should be a far rarer thing, and should be vetted by the developers before release. You know, something to justify that 45% cut Bethesda is taking in the first place.

Why is it so bad?
Why is charging for mods so bad? Well, lets ignore the caveats I made before about treating user-made dlc as a separate, quality controlled entity as mods and going with the full, any mod can switch to a pay-for model as the recent stock of mods on this trial run seemed to showcase as the desired norm. What harm is it?

Well for one it defeats the purpose of mods as an extender of a game's longevity. People go to mods to get more then the vanilla experience. Hell, minecraft itself owes a lot of its longevity to them, and Bethesda games damn-near depend on them for both bug fixes and more content beyond the initial launch. Start charging for mods and suddenly people have to choose between new content that may suck/fail/conflict with other mods, or just a new game. I think professional quality will trump user-made, lack-of-quality-controlled quality every time. Thus there would be fewer people sticking around as long looking for new mods. They will move on to new games, thus the community for mods shrinks and has a short lifespan.

Added to this is the issue that plagues the mobile-app market: Shovelware. Money-hungry cash grabs are notorious, and giving the keys to unscrupulous jackasses to pump the market with trash is always a risk. Considering the complete lack of oversite by valve and developers, and the ease to steal work and sell it as your own... This is going to be a nightmare even worse then the mobile market. A flooded market makes it hard to find quality and as a result, people will stop trying and just move on, the community dies faster.

Finally the realization of a short lifespan of audience interest, and a growing competition to get sales amid a sea of trash will result in concentrated efforts at getting money or advertisement in a hurry. I wouldn't be surprised to see some mods acting like malware in such an environment. "Free" mods that demand some sort of extra price of time or effort or "compatibility" program to function cluttering up the legitimately freely offered mods and killing the perception of free mods with an idea that every mod is not to be trusted virus-ware in disguise. But even without such extreme shifts to desperate money-clutching, you will see many quick bursts of activity with no follow-through. Promises for greatness with only a meager working example to get money that get deserted. Kickstarter's worse habits run wild.

Those factors together will turn the modding community from a stable growing one to a bubble that will burst quickly. A few make out with money, the rest drown in a sea of trashware, legal claims and inflated sales prices. The community who made it great driven out and nothing but a hollowed shell remaining.

And that isn't even going into potential issues such as modder community shrinking because of lack of interest/passion in the game, or the removal of tutorials and aids that the community has shared freely before to teach new modders now not being released because other moddders are looked at as competition instead of fellow community members.

How to make it work?

As I said before, people who put time in a mod should be able to be rewarded. A tipjar is the most obvious start, without the valve and developer pocket picking or at worst with a very small percentage. Actually rewarding the modders first and foremost, not the companies that try to profit off allowing them to exist.

Beyond that, put some sort of restriction on who can sell mods to only those with a established credibility, such as highly successful mods. This prevents an influx of shovelware from greedy Zenga-esc companies, it forces modders to attempt to be credible and punishes them when they don't by cutting off their rights to charge, and it gives the community the final call on if someone is quality enough to tack a pricetag to an entirely untested, possibly copywriter-violating work. It also makes such works a lot less common, which helps improve their chances of being good. We don't want horse-armor from the developer themselves, why the hell would we accept it from modders?
 

snekadid

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Steven Bogos said:
He went on to say that he believes Valve and the community's moderation would be effective enough in stopping unscrupulous modders from stealing mods and re-uploading them as paid mods
This is COMPLETE, and utter BULLSHIT. The launch promo for this supported taking and selling mods that didn't belong to you as long as they
A.Weren't on steam
and
B.Were free mods
and every time a modder who had his work stolen and thrown on steam with a price tag complains and requests a take down, all they get back is "Then sue us if you want it taken down". If Gabe wasn't involved AT ALL in this debacle, then I want to see some heads rolling for this atrocity.
 

ThunderCavalier

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Honestly, I don't see the whole "paid mods" system working unless Valve is the only one distributing mods, for the sheer fact that I can't imagine there being any mods that are actually worth paying for if there are alternate mods available on another site, free of charge.

I mean, there are already mods that add new quests, revamp entire systems, implement entirely new user interfaces, and completely touch up the graphics of Skyrim, free of charge. If there was anything that I'd actually shell out money for, it'd probably be those features, and those are already free and available outside of Steam.
 

Nikolaz72

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A big problem here is that many of the better mods which are championed as examples of which mods are worthy of cash..

Are collaboration efforts which use assets created by many other modders, because mods were free and generally were this big shared effort. A startup modder would change a bit on an existing mod and once veteran modders went away they handed their legacy to new modders which was how large mods kept on going and getting updated even after the original creators disappears.

Some of these larger efforts can have greater teams involved which.. Well.. Say one modder has shit from 9 different mods which he got permission to include when you weren't allowed to sell mods.. And then he starts selling it, and it sells really well. And he doesn't share the cash he gets with the 9 other modders.

The other modders can contact steam but Steams FAQ on the matter basically says "ask the guy who put it up for sale nicely and hope he takes it down"

Essentially...

Steam and Valve is fucking over the modding community.
 

Ytmh

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I'm AMAZED by the fact I have not yet seen anyone actually look at the most obvious already existing example of paid mods: Simulator mods!

Here:

https://www.simshack.net/

Specifically, flight simulators have had paid mods for a while now and it's just fine. Some of them are very impressive and justify the price, others are junk and don't. Either way, it didn't stop anyone from making free mods, or even people who put out paid mods making only the latest versions buy-only.

Seriously, look at something like this:
https://www.simshack.net/products/airbus-a330-trent-700-hd-pilot-edition-sound-pack-1007

This is a person who went out and recorded a real A330 and is asking 10$ for his effort.

Of course, something like that is easily understandable, where as something like skyrim modding is a mess. It's much more complicated to know if something will work or not and there's no (real) refund policies in place, etc, etc. I'm pretty much against what Valve is trying to do, but in principle it wouldn't really hurt anyone since it already exists (as shown in the example above) and nobody has died from it.
 

Darknacht

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Caramel Frappe said:
Gabe really screwed up, or Valve did at least.
Are people going to stop using Steam? No. Will this impact sales of Skyrim in a noticeable way? No. Will this make Valve more money while encouraging developers to make their games steam exclusive so that they can monetize their modding community? Yes.
So how did Value screw up? They loose nothing and gain even larger piles of money.
 
Jun 11, 2008
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There is 0 protection for modders. There is nothing to stop Bethesda from dropping the paid price down form a 25% cut to 20% and so on. There is also the legality of stuff like SkyUI being made from software that is free as long as you don't charge for the results and no they should/need to pay licensing fees for using this software.

That and people seem to still want to treat these like mods have been treated but cost money. It is not going to work in the vast majority of cases. There is no guarantee that if I pay for something it will work and be maintained and this is essentially turning mods into lite DLC but with no guarantees for future support or that it will work. The little 24 hour refund to steam wallet is really not good enough.

All in all I can't see how this is good as it gives little to no protection to the consumer or the modders. I honestly cannot see anything remotely good about this the way it is currently set up. Especially, if as already a modders needs to use anything along with the given mod tools from the Bethesda.

Bethesda and Valve really fucked this one up as far as I'm concerned. They've set a dangerous precedent I don't want to see continue as well as DLC started fairly benign too and now it has become quite malignant. I don't want to see this to mods what DLC did to expansions.