Money for Mods: Valve Announces Paid Skyrim Mods

[MonsterCrit]

Over the horizon, and old man on his porch stares listlessly into the sky. His faithful dog next to him lets out a sorrowful howl. He recognizes the signs. A shitstorm approaches.

As pointed out by TotalBiscuit, this has already lead to mass corruption and horse armory like none have seen before. This is going on Valve's oops pile.

All i've heard about it is the proof when people call gamers entitled little WASPS.

Oh Wah , it's not free any more. Shame on valve for allowing hardworking content creators to see financial gain from their many hours of labour. Shame on them !

Shame on publishers for allowing the productive members of their community to share in the financial gains!

Shame on content creators for wanting some sort of compensation for their hard work and toil.

Seriously. The content creators have a choice of charging, they have a choice of a 'donate (pay what you want, and they have the choice of doing it for free... You can't argue against something like that without sounding like an overly entitled spoiled kid. I'm sorry.

It's like how it's hard to argue yyour right to see exposed nipples in a video game and sound like a mature adult.

 

[MCerberus]

Over the horizon, and old man on his porch stares listlessly into the sky. His faithful dog next to him lets out a sorrowful howl. He recognizes the signs. A shitstorm approaches.

As pointed out by TotalBiscuit, this has already lead to mass corruption and horse armory like none have seen before. This is going on Valve's oops pile.

All i've heard about it is the proof when people call gamers entitled little WASPS.

Oh Wah , it's not free any more. Shame on valve for allowing hardworking content creators to see financial gain from their many hours of labour. Shame on them !

Shame on publishers for allowing the productive members of their community to share in the financial gains!

Seriously. The conetent creators have a choice of charging, they have a choice of a 'donate (pay what you want, and they have the choice of doing it for free... You can't argue against something like that without sounding like an overly entitled spoiled kid. I'm sorry.

It's like how it's hard to argue yyour right to see exposed nipples in a video game and sound like a mature adult.

So we should be okay with people stealing already existing mods, uploading them to steam, and making money off of them? And that we shouldn't have an opinion of $5 weapon mods?

 

[MonsterCrit]

Over the horizon, and old man on his porch stares listlessly into the sky. His faithful dog next to him lets out a sorrowful howl. He recognizes the signs. A shitstorm approaches.

As pointed out by TotalBiscuit, this has already lead to mass corruption and horse armory like none have seen before. This is going on Valve's oops pile.

All i've heard about it is the proof when people call gamers entitled little WASPS.

Oh Wah , it's not free any more. Shame on valve for allowing hardworking content creators to see financial gain from their many hours of labour. Shame on them !

Shame on publishers for allowing the productive members of their community to share in the financial gains!

Seriously. The conetent creators have a choice of charging, they have a choice of a 'donate (pay what you want, and they have the choice of doing it for free... You can't argue against something like that without sounding like an overly entitled spoiled kid. I'm sorry.

It's like how it's hard to argue yyour right to see exposed nipples in a video game and sound like a mature adult.

So we should be okay with people stealing already existing mods, uploading them to steam, and making money off of them? And that we shouldn't have an opinion of $5 weapon mods?

If you think the weapon mods are worth $5 then you pay $5 if you don't then you don't.. If you want it pay for it, if you don't don't. As for republishing mods. Well Valve is offering fraud and dispute settlement mediation.

 

[shirkbot]

All i've heard about it is the proof when people call gamers entitled little WASPS.

Oh Wah , it's not free any more. Shame on valve for allowing hardworking content creators to see financial gain from their many hours of labour. Shame on them !

Shame on publishers for allowing the productive members of their community to share in the financial gains!

Shame on content creators for wanting some sort of compensation for their hard work and toil.

Seriously. The content creators have a choice of charging, they have a choice of a 'donate (pay what you want, and they have the choice of doing it for free... You can't argue against something like that without sounding like an overly entitled spoiled kid. I'm sorry.

It's like how it's hard to argue yyour right to see exposed nipples in a video game and sound like a mature adult.

The pay what you want option does still have a mandatory minimum. You can't have a pay what you want game with a minimum of $0, and people are mostly angry that Valve is taking a 75% cut while doing 0% of the work. The workshop is rad, it's a one-click system that auto-updates, but Valve doesn't deserve 75% of all sales income for it. One of the things that makes modding work is that people can download and play, no charge, but the more savvy modders have Patreons and tip jars so people can support them, which is kind of the ideal. That's the free market in action: people supporting exactly who and what they want with whatever funds they feel the creator deserves or that they can personally spare. I want modding to be a job, I want it to be something people can make a living doing, but this is a bad way to go about it.

 

[Pr0]

Over the horizon, and old man on his porch stares listlessly into the sky. His faithful dog next to him lets out a sorrowful howl. He recognizes the signs. A shitstorm approaches.

As pointed out by TotalBiscuit, this has already lead to mass corruption and horse armory like none have seen before. This is going on Valve's oops pile.

All i've heard about it is the proof when people call gamers entitled little WASPS.

Oh Wah , it's not free any more. Shame on valve for allowing hardworking content creators to see financial gain from their many hours of labour. Shame on them !

Shame on publishers for allowing the productive members of their community to share in the financial gains!

Shame on content creators for wanting some sort of compensation for their hard work and toil.

Seriously. The content creators have a choice of charging, they have a choice of a 'donate (pay what you want, and they have the choice of doing it for free... You can't argue against something like that without sounding like an overly entitled spoiled kid. I'm sorry.

It's like how it's hard to argue yyour right to see exposed nipples in a video game and sound like a mature adult.

My mod has to make 5 dollars 80 times for me to make anything from it at all. And of that 5 dollars, I get a $1.25 for each download and the other $300.00 gets paid to Bethesda and Zenimax and Valve even takes a cut.

I am a modder. I've been part of the modding community since Morrowind.....I find this monetization schema to not only be insulting, but a definitive cash grab by Zenimax and Bethesda.

I'd have less issues with this if I felt like modders that chose to do it were being fairly compensated, but they're not, chinese art house slaves are paid better than this.

I personally will never, ever charge for a mod that I've made, and yanno what, if someone wants to do so thats fine, really, most modders are, in every sense of the word, starving artists so I don't mind if they get a little something for their work.

But when Bethesda and Zenimax are getting the lion's share? Thats not giving modders and opportunity, thats offering to be their pimp.

 

[Karadalis]

About the 100 dollars guys...

The modder only gets paid when HIS share reaches 100 dollars...

That means he only gets paid when the amount of money crosses the 400 dollar mark total..

This is all according to the fineprint as i understand it. Essentially Valve will not bother with a transaction untill its atleast 100 dollars worth.

So yeah... have fun with that modders... cant believe anyone would take valve up on such a shitty deal

Captcha:

Three Strikes...

Greenlight, early access... paid for mods?

 

[shirkbot]

About the 100 dollars guys...

The modder only gets paid when HIS share reaches 100 dollars...

That means he only gets paid when the amount of money crosses the 400 dollar mark total..

This is all according to the fineprint. Essentially Valve will not bother with a transaction untill its 100 dollars worth.

So yeah... have fun with thatm odders... cant believe anyone would take valve up on such a shitty deal

Captcha:

Three Strikes...

Greenlight, early access... paid for mods?

Ouch, I missed that part of the fine print. Thanks for the clarification. So what you're saying is that if a mod makes $399.99 a month, Valve just keeps it all... Super...

 

[WarpedMind]

As for republishing mods. Well Valve is offering fraud and dispute settlement mediation.

Except not really.

Valve doesn't give a shit, they're directly telling people that they can take other people's work, modify it and upload it for their own profit.

Valve performs NO curation of the workshop, there will be no standards for what does and doesn't qualify as modifying an existing mod.

Content theft is already rife on the Workshop, especially since it is barely possible for modders to prove their identities. Do we have any reason to believe that will change? Is Valve going to check if someone is selling someone else's work if the creator doesn't notice? If Valve wants a fucking 75% cut then it is not even remotely good enough for them simply to lean back and hope that all legitimate complaints will be brought to their attention by someone else.

Modding has always been, for the most part, Laissez-faire, collaborative and community oriented, and that was fine since all you really needed was provide attribution where applicable.

Valve has officially ended that.

Modding is broken, it can never go back to the way it was.

 

[Karadalis]

About the 100 dollars guys...

The modder only gets paid when HIS share reaches 100 dollars...

That means he only gets paid when the amount of money crosses the 400 dollar mark total..

This is all according to the fineprint. Essentially Valve will not bother with a transaction untill its 100 dollars worth.

So yeah... have fun with thatm odders... cant believe anyone would take valve up on such a shitty deal

Captcha:

Three Strikes...

Greenlight, early access... paid for mods?

Ouch, I missed that part of the fine print. Thanks for the clarification. So what you're saying is that if a mod makes $399.99 a month, Valve just keeps it all... Super...

Exactly... you must "earn" atleast 100 dollars... and since your earnings are 25%... you will have to sell atleast 400 dollars worth if you want to see those 100 dollars.

Anything below 400 and you wont see a penny.. and valve keeps it all.

And even if your mod manages to sell 400 in the first month but in the second month only 250... you wont get paid for the second month...

How can anyone even start to believe that this is a good deal for modders?

Heck... making youtube videos for nintendo is more profitable at this point.

This deal literally does nothing for the modding community or help in any way or form to improve modding projects...

 

[MonsterCrit]

All i've heard about it is the proof when people call gamers entitled little WASPS.

Oh Wah , it's not free any more. Shame on valve for allowing hardworking content creators to see financial gain from their many hours of labour. Shame on them !

Shame on publishers for allowing the productive members of their community to share in the financial gains!

Shame on content creators for wanting some sort of compensation for their hard work and toil.

Seriously. The content creators have a choice of charging, they have a choice of a 'donate (pay what you want, and they have the choice of doing it for free... You can't argue against something like that without sounding like an overly entitled spoiled kid. I'm sorry.

It's like how it's hard to argue yyour right to see exposed nipples in a video game and sound like a mature adult.

The pay what you want option does still have a mandatory minimum. You can't have a pay what you want game with a minimum of $0,

Well it makes little sense to charge an amount so small that the cost of processing will cost you more than get. Even Humble Bundle has a $1 Minimum.

and people are mostly angry that Valve is taking a 75% cut while doing 0% of the work. The workshop is rad, it's a one-click system that auto-updates, but Valve doesn't deserve 75% of all sales income for it.

No they're not. That 75% is split between Valve and the publisher that owns the rights to the game and 25% is better than the 0 modders are getting currently. Just to put it in perspective. That is way cheaper than the licensing fee they'd have to pay otherwise to be able to sell the game. and to ad further perspective.

J. K. ROwling would piss herself with joy if she could get 25% royalties on the sale of her harry potter books.

MOst authors consider themselves lucky if they get as much as 15%. Others would assume the 15% to be a typo and hop the publishing house doesn't correct it. See what I'm saying? There are musicians, famous and popular ones, that wish they could get 20%. Hell there are people who work in retail and sales that wish they could get 25% commission.

One of the things that makes modding work is that people can download and play, no charge, but the more savvy modders have Patreons and tip jars so people can support them, which is kind of the ideal. That's the free market in action:

And there you go sounding like an entitled WASP. The reason the community worked is because the producers were legally prevented from charging for their work. Yeah when that's the only way a system works.. that system is broken.

Also ask those modders that went by patreon and Donatiotions and find out what theyre contribution to down load ratio is. probably something like $1 per every 200 downloads.

people supporting exactly who and what they want with whatever funds they feel the creator deserves or that they can personally spare. I want modding to be a job, I want it to be something people can make a living doing, but this is a bad way to go about it.

And they can do that now. They are free to do a pay what you want thing, they can charge a fixed price and they can charge nothing. Of course the only difference now is that the decision of this is placed in the hands of the content creators.

 

[MonsterCrit]

Over the horizon, and old man on his porch stares listlessly into the sky. His faithful dog next to him lets out a sorrowful howl. He recognizes the signs. A shitstorm approaches.

As pointed out by TotalBiscuit, this has already lead to mass corruption and horse armory like none have seen before. This is going on Valve's oops pile.

All i've heard about it is the proof when people call gamers entitled little WASPS.

Oh Wah , it's not free any more. Shame on valve for allowing hardworking content creators to see financial gain from their many hours of labour. Shame on them !

Shame on publishers for allowing the productive members of their community to share in the financial gains!

Shame on content creators for wanting some sort of compensation for their hard work and toil.

Seriously. The content creators have a choice of charging, they have a choice of a 'donate (pay what you want, and they have the choice of doing it for free... You can't argue against something like that without sounding like an overly entitled spoiled kid. I'm sorry.

It's like how it's hard to argue yyour right to see exposed nipples in a video game and sound like a mature adult.

My mod has to make 5 dollars 80 times for me to make anything from it at all. And of that 5 dollars, I get a $1.25 for each download and the other $300.00 gets paid to Bethesda and Zenimax and Valve even takes a cut.

I am a modder. I've been part of the modding community since Morrowind.....I find this monetization schema to not only be insulting, but a definitive cash grab by Zenimax and Bethesda.

And how much have you made from your mods to date? What's your download to dollar ratio? Valve is providing the back end , the delivery, transaction processing and fraud protection/ dispute resolution. Bethesda created the game that you are modding, they created the engibe, code, assets that you're modding. You're using their stove to fry your burgers.


I'd have less issues with this if I felt like modders that chose to do it were being fairly compensated, but they're not, chinese art house slaves are paid better than this.

I personally will never, ever charge for a mod that I've made, and yanno what, if someone wants to do so thats fine, really, most modders are, in every sense of the word, starving artists so I don't mind if they get a little something for their work.

But when Bethesda and Zenimax are getting the lion's share? Thats not giving modders and opportunity, thats offering to be their pimp.[/quote]

Uhm as pointed out they are getting a pretty generous cut compared to other content producers. Writers and musicians would love to see 25%. and before anyone else mentions that they only get 25%. 25% of $5 is still more than 100% of $0.

 

[VincentX3]

But!...But

Who doesn't want to pay 5$ for a more realistic bear?!

Or some buckets? I mean come on it's clearly under development gais...

Fine! Fine! Buckets and bears aren't your thing? Then how about some healthy apples? Only 30$ Bargain deal.

[HEADING=3]*Fucking Sarcasam*[/HEADING]

Yea, I don't see how this could go wrong.

CAPTCHA: glass ceiling

Yea, modding was a glass ceiling, Till some fatfuck fell it on and boy..did it fall..

Edit: I get that these mods in particular are more of a boycott from the backlash that's been happening, but still, It just goes to show how quickly this can all go wrong and how sloppy and under-designed the whole system is at the moment.

 

[Gameguy20100]

Honestly Valve just when I thought you couldn't get any lazier.

Is this even legal? I highly doubt disney or hasbro is going to be onboard when Valve start charging for mods based on kingdom hearts or MLP.

 

[MonsterCrit]

As for republishing mods. Well Valve is offering fraud and dispute settlement mediation.

Except not really.

Valve doesn't give a shit, they're directly telling people that they can take other people's work, modify it and upload it for their own profit.

Valve performs NO curation of the workshop, there will be no standards for what does and doesn't qualify as modifying an existing mod.

Content theft is already rife on the Workshop, especially since it is barely possible for modders to prove their identities. Do we have any reason to believe that will change? Is Valve going to check if someone is selling someone else's work if the creator doesn't notice? If Valve wants a fucking 75% cut then it is not even remotely good enough for them simply to lean back and hope that all legitimate complaints will be brought to their attention by someone else.

Modding has always been, for the most part, Laissez-faire, collaborative and community oriented, and that was fine since all you really needed was provide attribution where applicable.

Valve has officially ended that.

Modding is broken, it can never go back to the way it was.

You had a situation where the people producing the content were not getting paid at all. That's like ye olde serfdom. Modding is broken? How can you tell? All valve has done is given the content creators more power and benefits. They can choose to charge, give it away for free or a tip jar. as they want.

As for theft and what not, well, that actually will change now . Since those that register can now show their work and can if they choose to go the pay route.. have some legal claim to their work. A modder currently has literally no legal claim on their work as it stood previously and could never have legal claim until they paiid a heft licensing fee.

As for proving you are the creator. There are ways... I mean programmers long ago adopted the practice of including little snippets of do nothing code in their programs and easter eggs to prove ownership.

 

[Coruptin]

Oh man, wish I could mod right about now. I'd make a killing making character swaps: Scythian clones and LGBT characters all the way baby. Maybe shoot up a PM to certain internet personalities and get those progressivebux flowing.

 

[Karadalis]

You had a situation where the people producing the content were not getting paid at all. That's like ye olde serfdom. Modding is broken? How can you tell? All valve has done is given the content creators more power and benefits. They can choose to charge, give it away for free or a tip jar. as they want.

As for theft and what not, well, that actually will change now . Since those that register can now show their work and can if they choose to go the pay route.. have some legal claim to their work. A modder currently has literally no legal claim on their work as it stood previously and could never have legal claim until they paiid a heft licensing fee.

As for proving you are the creator. There are ways... I mean programmers long ago adopted the practice of including little snippets of do nothing code in their programs and easter eggs to prove ownership.

Unless you dont manage to sell 400 $.... then valve keeps all the money your mod made and you go out empty handed anyways.

You really have no idea how the modding community has functioned until now do you? The modding scene survived on cooperation between modders.. wich is now ruined thanks to some people taking the work of others, including it in their mods... and then sell these mods as their own works without any credit or money going to the original creators. Who now have to go through the entire legal process that can take ages thanks to Steams non existant costumer service to get these mods taken down. And god knows what hoops you will have to jump through to proof to Valve that that guy that sells his mod on steam has stolen parts or is basing his mod on yours. That is all work and trouble that to many people will not be worth it, so they will simply make their resources unavailable from the get go for others to use.

People will and allready HAVE stopped allowing their modding tools and assets be used in other mods because of this divide now.

What Valve did was actively damaging the modding scene, dividing it and making everyone distrust each other. Instead of exchanging ideas, tools and resources everyone now will watch over their own stuff like some fucking alchemist trading secrets in medevil times.

Does that sound like advancing the modding scene to you? I say its a huge step back, destroying a community that had grown over the last two decades for the sake of profit.. and youre applauding the burning building while sitting in it no doubt takes the cake.

Also if you enter the modding scene for the money youre entering it for the wrong reasons alltogether.

 

[Grimh]

I have no real objections to the concept of people getting some kind of compensation for their hard work.
I just don't trust Valve to not fuck it up. A mistrust seemingly already vindicated by this very thread.

 

[Czann]

Everybody think gamers are suckers to be milked like pregnant cows.

If this succeed we'll prove that, yessir, we are!

 

[Karadalis]

Everybody think gamers are suckers to be milked like pregnant cows.

If this succeed we'll prove that, yessir, we are!

There are enough people defending this practice that the companies may very well be right.

Heck we have people right here defending this ripoff scheme and the divide of the modding community as something positive.

And valve isnt even nice enough to buy the lube either... you have to bring your own.

 

[shirkbot]

The pay what you want option does still have a mandatory minimum. You can't have a pay what you want game with a minimum of $0,

Well it makes little sense to charge an amount so small that the cost of processing will cost you more than get. Even Humble Bundle has a $1 Minimum.

Humble Bundle is also donating whatever portion of the money I want to charity, so it's a bit like apples and oranges.

and people are mostly angry that Valve is taking a 75% cut while doing 0% of the work. The workshop is rad, it's a one-click system that auto-updates, but Valve doesn't deserve 75% of all sales income for it.

No they're not. That 75% is split between Valve and the publisher that owns the rights to the game and 25% is better than the 0 modders are getting currently. Just to put it in perspective. That is way cheaper than the licensing fee they'd have to pay otherwise to be able to sell the game. and to ad further perspective.

J. K. ROwling would piss herself with joy if she could get 25% royalties on the sale of her Harry Potter books.

MOst authors consider themselves lucky if they get as much as 15%. Others would assume the 15% to be a typo and hop the publishing house doesn't correct it. See what I'm saying? There are musicians, famous and popular ones, that wish they could get 20%. Hell there are people who work in retail and sales that wish they could get 25% commission.

This is also a bit of a faulty comparison. For one thing, the law actually puts modders pretty much in the clear in terms of licensing. The mod code is often original, so the modders aren't pirating anything and the original developers can't claim the code as their own. Not to mention that any mod can be considered to add value to a product, preventing cases being filed for damages or against the modders for circumventing various systems in the games. There's no reason to be giving money to the developer for work they're not doing, nor to Valve for hosting it. If they want to take some money just to cover operating costs I understand, but it's unreasonable to assert that 25% of the profits is all that the modders should get, even if that is better than a book deal. This is, potentially, the ground floor of something positive and our discussion should push for the most positive outcome for the people doing the actual work, which is not Valve and not Bethesda.

One of the things that makes modding work is that people can download and play, no charge, but the more savvy modders have Patreons and tip jars so people can support them, which is kind of the ideal. That's the free market in action:

And there you go sounding like an entitled WASP. The reason the community worked is because the producers were legally prevented from charging for their work. Yeah when that's the only way a system works.. that system is broken.

Also ask those modders that went by patreon and Donatiotions and find out what theyre contribution to down load ratio is. probably something like $1 per every 200 downloads.

Considering popular opinion at the moment, that would be a winning proposition over $0 and 0 downloads. People can and do make good money with donations. Things like Dwarf Fortress are %100 donation funded, as are many webcomics and other online media productions, so it's hard to argue that the system is completely broken. Especially since, as I pointed out earlier, modders are legally allowed to sell their work as long as it doesn't contain copyrighted materials.

people supporting exactly who and what they want with whatever funds they feel the creator deserves or that they can personally spare. I want modding to be a job, I want it to be something people can make a living doing, but this is a bad way to go about it.

And they can do that now. They are free to do a pay what you want thing, they can charge a fixed price and they can charge nothing. Of course the only difference now is that the decision of this is placed in the hands of the content creators.

The pay-what-you-want option is there, it's the closest to a good solution, but until those percentages are adjusted I'm much happier seeing modders with Patreons where they get the bulk of the money, rather than on Valve's 25% deal. Content creators should be compensated, not Valve, Bethesda, Zenimax or whoever, who have no legal right to that money.