Strazdas said:
And they already got paid for their work on their IP (including the modding tools) when i bought the game. I already paid them for the work they done, fair and square. what right do they have to demand i pay them even more now for work other people did?
Because you're then turning around and using those tools to make money. I mean, you bring up Adobe in in a second, so this can wait for a second.
Strazdas said:
No, 25% is not stupidly good. its stupidly bad in this case. i agree that valve should take its standard 30% cut if valve agrees to take same responsibilities it does for its other content. this includes refunds if the game is broken (in this case mod is broken). Otherwise valves cut should be lower. the rest should go to the publisher of the mod as same is true for games. bethesda gets 70% of a game purchase, mod owner should get 70% of purchase of the mod. bethesda splits it among various departments and same should be true for the company that produced a mod, which admittedly sometimes is only one guy.
I can sort of understand the payment threshold due to transaction fees and other costs, but i wish it could be done away with.
Ironically, I think the threshold probably had more to do with tax reporting than with transaction fees. I don't know for certain, it's one of those elements of the system that hasn't really been explained. But, if it was just a transactions fee issue, I doubt it would have been walked back. We would have gotten a, "well, this couldn't be fixed" explanation, possibly with details about how they'd actually be loosing money at that point.
Being able to walk it back starts to sound like an accounting decision. Which, makes me think it's tax related, but it could have just been set up to avoid a messy balance book filled with mods that only ever made a couple bucks.
Strazdas said:
Moders DID do all the work.
The modder did not make Skyrim.
Strazdas said:
they didn't develop the CS.
Strazdas said:
A graphic artists does not pay royalties to adobe because adobe developed the tools. he purchased the tools and can use them to make his own work. just like the modder purchased the game and can use it to make mods.
He also pays a lot more for those tools for commercial use. The same is true for Microsoft Office, and most other productivity tools. A simple home copy will usually be cheap, but a professional copy for commercial use is usually a lot more expensive. Small site licenses for some software can easily climb into five figures. Hell, I still remember needing a USB dongle for a copy of QuarkXPress I had to work with years ago. As in the software was so expensive, they could eat the cost of a physical authenticator for each copy.
I don't know what the prices are these days, because I don't have to worry about it, but, yes, if you're a graphic designer, and you're making stuff at home on a cheap copy, that probably ran you 100. If you're doing professional work, you're probably paying over a grand for your software.
Here's the question I can't answer. What's Bethesda's cut going towards? I have a suspicion, at least some of that was earmarked to verifying that the mods uploaded were legitimate and non-infringing. If you look back at the image on the article, you've got to know that couldn't have happened. Disney and Microsoft would have sued the living shit out of Valve and Bethesda over their IPs being used commercially without approval. And, because you're talking about literally selling stuff on their IPs, a simple DMCA wouldn't protect them. That means there has to have been some vetting process. Which means that Valve or Bethesda was having to go out of pocket on every mod uploaded. That has to be paid for somehow.
They also couldn't go to a non-vetted system, because some chucklehead would immediately use that to upload infected files and try to get paid for it. That means, you upload your mod. Some derp uploads their spiderman mod, or one they swiped off the Nexus. Bethesda or Valve needs to pay someone to look at the mod, check to see if it's on the level, then post it. More than that, we know there was a two week lead time for vetting, so this was happening at some level.
It's not that Bethesda and Valve are splitting 75% and laughing to the bank with it. There were expenses on their end. We just don't know what those were.
25% is far better than I see in publishing (again, ignoring Amazon's fan fiction self-pub, where there's no editing). It's better than Musicians get. If you want to work as a games designer, you will get abused to hell and back,
and make less than minimum wage, without royalties at all.
Yeah, 25% is something I can honestly look at, in the larger context and say, that's very good. If you've never looked at royalties seriously before, I get where it sounds horrible. But that is a very big chunk of the pie for what content creators usually get. If you think that sucks, you need to understand it comes from a position where you're in competition with a lot of other potential content creators, and anyone that will work for less can screw you out.
If you want to say, "that's the proletariat screwing itself," then, yep, it is. But, when the situation is literally, "play by their rules or go home?" Yeah, 25% is good. If you find a better deal elsewhere, jump on it. You just got supremely lucky.