Valve Hasn't Given up on Paid Mods

[sonicneedslovetoo]

I can see two sides to this argument, one I agree with, that mods while requiring a lot of work aren't usually on the same level as DLC for a game. And the argument that people should get paid for their work. Now obviously I'm biased against one side of this argument(and its the one for paid modding I'm just gonna lay that out right now) and I'm gonna put down a few reasons as to why.

(keep in mind when I say Skyrim here the criticisms can be applied to any of Bethesda's games and actually gets worse for modding the farther back you go)

1. Installing mods is a pain in the ass and if done wrong, or even in the wrong order they don't work, at all. You might ask me why that's relevant to this discussion, well its very important. Steam Workshop has no capacity to do this, if you go to the nexus it asks you which files to overwrite but the Steam Workshop will just blatantly overwrite the mods you already have installed.
Basically the steam workshop is a VERY shitty place to install complicated(that is mods you would actually want to pay for) mods.

2. Skyrim doesn't have the capacity without the use of other tools to have two mods modify the same thing. That's blatantly obvious, but you might not be aware of what "one thing" refers to when modding Skyrim, for example "More loot from chests" is completely incompatible with any mod that modifies drops in chests, because the lists for loot chests(each individual list) are considered one item. So if you have a mod that adds Meridia's beacon to a chest in some random bandit cave, then that chest will only have whats in the list from your mod irregardless of what other mods you install outside of a Bashed patch. If you have a mod that adds a single apple to the lucky 38 in New Vegas then its completely incompatible with any mod that modifies that cell in the Lucky 38 because that entire cell is considered one item for the game.

3. Mods can break your save files and destroy hours and hours of progress. Ever hear about a mod called "Civil War Overhaul"? Well you see its made by a real asshole who unfortunately was given a talent for modding, but absolutely no talent for anything else. He can't balance a mod, he can't write an informative description(he just fills it with memes and deliberately leaves out important stuff), he can't even gracefully accept criticism of his complete lack of understanding how to balance a mod(I half expect him to come into this thread after I invoked his name). All that is important because uninstalling the Civil War Overhaul will completely and utterly destroy your save file and there is no fix, this wouldn't normally be a problem but the modder deliberately hides things that you might not want in your Skyrim install in his mods. So you pretty much have to go in blind and when you find out inevitably what sucks about his mod tough luck that save file is garbage.
Imagine if 15 days after you installed a paid mod that has lots of shitty hidden features you find out that you can't even get a refund for it and your entire save file is strapped to that one mod.

4. Mods can break other mods and mods can break Skyrim. I don't even need to explain this one but installing even so much as a clothing replacer mod can crash Skyrim, no seriously there is a fix specifically for people who installed skins into Skyrim so that doesn't crash the game on a certain quest, the bug is still here to this day and you're basically arguing that Bethesda should get a cut from a game they left in a state where it could crash when skins were installed.

5. You think steam greenlight is bad, wait til you see this. The only barrier to entry for paid modding was 5$ to buy Skyrim when it was on sale. Keep that in mind, the barrier for greenlight is 100$ and not only that anybody can make a mod for Skyrim if they have Skyrim and access to youtube tutorials, Bethesda deliberately made modding Skyrim to be as easy as possible. What you're going to get is every teenager who thinks they can make any money at all off of this flooding the market with anything they can make or port over from one of those asset stores.
Some people think this will be a golden age where you can make money off of modding, the more realistic outlook and what steam greenlight has taught us is that people want money for nothing or at least very little and the only mods likely to make anything are the mods that are already popular and a few outliers that randomly get a lot of attention. Everything else, including the free mods that are worthwhile will be buried in a tidal wave of low effort 9999 damage "cheat swords".

6. Nobody cares enough, and there isn't enough manpower to police paid mods. Its not only that people could steal assets from other games and sell them, its that people could steal mods from other people and sell them. They don't even have to be people who live in the US and speak English, I know Japan has a modding community and once your mods are an entire country and language barrier away what options are given to these people to prevent their work from being exploited? Nothing Valve doesn't give a shit about people not making money off of their work and will happily send out checks like they were robots to anybody who got that mod onto steam first.
Again I see the argument that "modders should be paid for their work" come up a lot but nobody seems to consider how little Valve cares about the right people being paid for their work.

I could go on more, but I think those problems are seriously more than enough reason to deny paid mods, or at least paid mods for Bethesda on Steam. And you could argue any of these points til you're blue in the face and cherry pick that "people should be paid for their work" but that doesn't make these problems go away, or go any distance to making Valve put in any effort to fix these problems in the first place. AND THAT IS THE IMPORTANT THING HERE, if you want paid mods fine, TRY AND FIGURE OUT A WAY TO FIX THE PROBLEMS BEFORE YOU START A CAMPAIGN TO PUSH THIS TRAIN WRECK THROUGH. Because with Valve and Steam the way they are now I can't see people wanting to continue with paid mods at all.
(I'm not capitalizing words here because I'm angry, I'm capitalizing words because I think those are the most important parts of this that needs to be addressed and cherry picking around them is much harder when they stand out like that.)

 

[Magmarock]

Mods are awesome and games are awesome. But if one must mod a game to enjoy a game then said game mustn't be very good.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

Mods are awesome and games are awesome. But if one must mod a game to enjoy a game then said game mustn't be very good.

Vanilla Skyrim is tolerable, even enjoyable as-is, but the community provided it with so many optimizations and refinements that many players will flat-out refuse to play it if it hasn't been modded. SkyUI makes the user interface extremely PC-friendly, Stealth-related mods or vision cone adjustments make the sneaky route more enjoyable than it already is, etc.

It's mostly a case of so many of us having been spoiled by the modding community to the point of looking back to a Vanilla install and scowling in disapproval. Bethesda didn't drop the ball or anything - they produced something that worked and worked very well, but that *still* could be made to work better.

 

[Fdzzaigl]

Makes worry about how they will address mods that rely on other mods and scripts and compatibility in general. That is not even getting into the realm of theft and Copyright. Man, this is just one helluva can'o'worms!

Indeed. It can never work for big complex mods like Skyrim or Fallout have. The very essence of the modding community there is that someone will try to do something cool, succeed partially and then drop it; only to have someone else pick it up again and push the boundaries harder.
You can't have that kind of complex work in a copyrighted environment, at least not with smalltime players.

The only way paid mods could work, is if they did it in the way Everquest 2 / Planetside 2 and the other online games by SOE (now Daybreak) do it. They allow players to upload cosmetic skins for weapons and armor parts to the game and then make a selection and set a price.

Now Steam could open that up a little bit by loosening the selection, only checking the type of content & copyright and setting a strict maximum price per type of content. So basically you would only sell weapons / armor / cosmetics / placable objects / standalone modules and nothing else.

It's also important that neither Valve, the devs or the modders themselves get too greedy. Planetside 2 already sins there by asking ?20 per helmet skin, which is a ridiculous price imo.

In the end though, it still wouldn't be a good thing to happen for modding. The big complex mods that have many interdependant parts simply wouldn't be made anymore over time.

Finally, it frightens me to think Valve might drop another paid mods system onto upcoming launches of mod-friendly games like Fallout 4 and XCOM2 without advance warning. Such a feature should be announced well before the game launches, or it would really ruin a game's launch.

 

[Saulkar]

snipperoonie

Following a 2 hour playlist ( https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWKuyAKXafnKv0fj3-6OlW2yh1XJGAgqx ) on how to mod Fallout 3 to the max galvanised my position when I saw all of the mechanisms that went into play by third parties to ensure inter-compatibility between mods. This would never be possible in the foreseeable direction this environment could develop into.

 

[Loonyyy]

Having read through this thread....

I can only hope to fucking god that Fallout 4 has paid mods.

And I'll watch all of it burn, and us with it.

 

[Gyrick]

The only thing that concerns me about modders being paid has to do with the potential for copyright issues, or that they are making money by altering someone else's work. I understand the need/want to have people paid for their work, but I worry about the legal ramifications for paying someone to alter someone else's content. Since Valve is a large company, however, I'm going to assume that they've taken into account copyright issues.

There are just a lot of questions that really need to be answered before I commit to either the "yay" or "nay" camps on this subject. For now, I guess I view mods sort of like "programing fan-fiction" (hear me out). As a writer is not allowed to make money off of the pre-existing characters and universes of someone else, much of what they do has to be for free and on their own time; many writers use fan-fiction as practice to hone their craft. Of course, there are people who are hired to write "licensed fiction" where they DO get paid for writing something that is, at least similar, to fan-fiction in nature. My current opinion lies in paid mods either being a "Game by Game" basis (where permission has to be given by each game to have paid alterations to their game) or are companies expected to hire official modders and they get paid that way.

It might be a little simplistic view on the whole subject, but it's all I have at the moment.

 

[Lightknight]

*sigh* read my quote: "This isn't so terrifying as actual slave labor"

The reason I said it has the taint of it is because these people are allowed to contribute to the success of a company without being compensated for it. Sometimes the mods are so popular that they're the only reason to buy the game (Day Z mod of Arma II).

So what we're seeing is studios getting a genuine free lunch and the people doing the work get no compensation for their efforts and cannot even ask for it. Those that have a donation page set up frequently get nothing on even their most popular work.

It does have the taint of free labor but it doesn't go so far as to actually force them to do the work. Hence why I said it isn't so terrifying as that but does carry with it certain similarities when you think of lack of compensation as the second of two major components of slavery. At least bond servants used to get something for the years they sold off and entered into the agreement willfully.

You know, sometimes the reward isn't even money but a really nice job at a reputable company. Working on a highly-popular mod or mods is a really good way to fill out your game designer portfolio, with some companies even going so far as to reach out and hire the person or persons involved.

Furthermore, making mods isn't some terrible job you make it out to be. A lot of modders make mods because they enjoy it and they want that mod to play with in the game. Or if anything else, it may just be good practice for them. There's other benefits to making mods besides money.

Sure, and a good reward for picking cotton can be the satisfaction of seeing people wear the shirts made from it. I'm unsure how the satisfaction of a job well done means we shouldn't pay people for their labor or even allow them to ask for pay.

What about the modder who wants to be financially compensated? Why is their desire being disregarded for the ones that just like making mods?

 

[Lightknight]

*sigh* read my quote: "This isn't so terrifying as actual slave labor"

The reason I said it has the taint of it is because these people are allowed to contribute to the success of a company without being compensated for it. Sometimes the mods are so popular that they're the only reason to buy the game (Day Z mod of Arma II).

So what we're seeing is studios getting a genuine free lunch and the people doing the work get no compensation for their efforts and cannot even ask for it. Those that have a donation page set up frequently get nothing on even their most popular work.

It does have the taint of free labor but it doesn't go so far as to actually force them to do the work. Hence why I said it isn't so terrifying as that but does carry with it certain similarities when you think of lack of compensation as the second of two major components of slavery. At least bond servants used to get something for the years they sold off and entered into the agreement willfully.

You know, sometimes the reward isn't even money but a really nice job at a reputable company. Working on a highly-popular mod or mods is a really good way to fill out your game designer portfolio, with some companies even going so far as to reach out and hire the person or persons involved.

Furthermore, making mods isn't some terrible job you make it out to be. A lot of modders make mods because they enjoy it and they want that mod to play with in the game. Or if anything else, it may just be good practice for them. There's other benefits to making mods besides money.

Sure, and a good reward for picking cotton can be the satisfaction of seeing people wear the shirts made from it. I'm unsure how the satisfaction of a job well done means we shouldn't pay people for their labor or even allow them to ask for pay.

What about the modder who wants to be financially compensated? Why is their desire being disregarded for the ones that just like making mods?

Who cares about their desires to be compensated? Lots of people want to be paid for their hobbies. If you want to make it work, MAKE it work.

They should be able to ask for a price for the service they are providing. A person with a shitty hobby may not have any buyers, and that's perfectly fine, but they still have the right to ask to be compensated for what they produce.

The only barrier with these hobbyists is that they're using someone else's IP to make money off of. So in scenarios where the IP owner isn't cool with it then I could see an IP infringement issue. But when all parties involved are cool it's pretty nefarious of us to demand they keep on giving us their hard work for free just because we're cheap. At least Atmos Duality has concerns about the impact of profits on the community. But their right to be able to charge for their work is downright fundamental.

 

[BadNewDingus]

I blame the people that always agree with squeezing the last cent out of customers.

"Duh... they need money too."

Yeah, ok. That's all dandy. However, the more things they can charge us for, the lazier they are gonna get. And it's not like Valve has the man power to even moderate these mods. They don't even have enough people for customer support! What are they gonna do? Hire regular customers to oversee all of their business? They basically do that with the terrible moderation on their forums.
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[Lightknight]

I blame the people that always agree with squeezing the last cent out of customers.

"Duh... they need money too."

Yeah, ok. That's all dandy. However, the more things they can charge us for, the lazier they are gonna get. And it's not like Valve has the man power to even moderate these mods. They don't even have enough people for customer support! What are they gonna do? Hire regular customers to oversee all of their business? They basically do that with the terrible moderation on their forums.
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Here are a responses to your post here:

1. It doesn't matter how well Bethesda can moderate. That's a problem they have to deal with and is irrelevant to the ethics of these workers being able to get paid for their work. Even if Bethesda does a shitty job then people are still making more than $0 like they are presently. If they fail to moderate this then that is a risk they are incurring by allowing third party mods on their site. As such, if they fail to keep pirates out then the modders will have legal recourse against Bethesda.

2. If they can charge for things they'll get lazy? Are you advocating the destruction of trade for all products and services? Your logic would prevent all companies everywhere from being able to charge for their work so they don't get "lazy".

3. Supply and demand. If they produce shitty work there will not be any demand. The financial incentive of making something great should motivate them to work harder. You forget that the large AAA companies have already made their money once you have the game and them charging you for DLC is just them getting extra monies. For modders, this "DLC" is their entire revenue stream and it does not benefit them to do shoddy or lazy work. It is ridiculous to claim that making money means you stop trying to make money.

 

[Starke]

Mods are awesome and games are awesome. But if one must mod a game to enjoy a game then said game mustn't be very good.

Not quite. A terrible game game can't really be improved by modding (most of the time). If it's bad, you're not going to be able to fix that by tweaking minor values.

An excellent game can be improved, but it sets the bar very high for modders. It doesn't mean they can't improve a title, but most of the time the kinds of mods you're looking at are ones that skew for specific demographics.

Far Cry modding is a good example of this. The basic games play pretty well. The popular mods tend to push the game towards much more brutal game. On the whole, this is not something most fans want from the franchise (as evidenced by the hatred for Far Cry 2). They make the game better for people who want that experience, but they're in a minority.

This is a "not for everybody" argument, but it's also a major part of where modding can really improve a game for people. It's not about making the game "better" but fine tailoring it to your tastes.

Skyrim... is not an excellent game. It's okay. Modding allows players to custom tailor the game to their tastes. You'll see people say, "oh, yeah, Skyrim absolutely needs mods to be playable." You'll see people who will say Frostfall is an absolutely vital mod, while I look at that and say, "fuck that; I'm playing a fantasy superhero with the ability to breathe fire, who heals off injuries like Wolverine. Why would I want to freeze to death?"

The universal must have mods are trimming up the egregious problems with the game, like SkyUI. But, after that, the things you "need" depend on your preferences.

This does two things. One you can keep swapping a game around to keep it fresh. Yeah, it's still the same game, but the way you actually play it can change drastically depending on how it's been modified. So you're playing a game years after you would have abandoned if it was a fixed experience. That's not hyperbole, we're coming up on 5 years out from the game's release, and still talking about it. How many 2011 releases can you still find in the PC games isle (or what's left of it anyway)? Second, it creates an incredibly tailored experience that will sync up with your tastes. When people are saying, "you need these mods," what they really mean is, "I need these mods to turn it into my dream game." And, that's honestly pretty impressive.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

Sure, and a good reward for picking cotton can be the satisfaction of seeing people wear the shirts made from it. I'm unsure how the satisfaction of a job well done means we shouldn't pay people for their labor or even allow them to ask for pay.

Making mods does NOT equal picking cotton, or really any physical labor. That's a bad analogy.

 

[Lightknight]

Sure, and a good reward for picking cotton can be the satisfaction of seeing people wear the shirts made from it. I'm unsure how the satisfaction of a job well done means we shouldn't pay people for their labor or even allow them to ask for pay.

Making mods does NOT equal picking cotton, or really any physical labor. That's a bad analogy.

Your argument was that because there is the reward of a job well done then they should be deprived of being paid for said labor. You may not like the analogy but that's a pretty valid reduction absurdum showing the conclusion of your premise. Being able to enjoy one's work does not mean that compensation is optional unless the worker wants it to be.

They can ask for anything they want, anyone should be allowed to beg for money. Trying to insist on being paid is the problem, and what won't be allowed to happen.

If street performers suddenly decided that they wanted a salary from taxes, I'd have the same reaction.

You believe that them being able to charge x dollars for a product they are selling is equivalent to street performers demanding a salary?

Street performer's works are not generally transactional works. Like, you don't pay them $2 to perform smoke on the water in G. They just play music, good or bad, and if someone walks by and likes what they hear then they have the option to put money in the hat. Their work isn't even necessarily consumed. It is just out there in the ether in the desperate hopes that they'll be rewarded for it.

Now, if someone recorded their music and gave it away for free online then they'd have every right to complain about it being done without their consent. They would also be expected to have the right to sell their works online because that IS a transaction-based process.

Modders have produced a good. They have every right to ask whatever amount they want to charge for it. They just aren't guaranteed that anyone will buy it for that or any price. But they should not have to give it away for free for the same reason a street performer should not have to play music for free if they don't want to.

 

[BadNewDingus]

I blame the people that always agree with squeezing the last cent out of customers.

"Duh... they need money too."

Yeah, ok. That's all dandy. However, the more things they can charge us for, the lazier they are gonna get. And it's not like Valve has the man power to even moderate these mods. They don't even have enough people for customer support! What are they gonna do? Hire regular customers to oversee all of their business? They basically do that with the terrible moderation on their forums.
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Here are a responses to your post here:

1. It doesn't matter how well Bethesda can moderate. That's a problem they have to deal with and is irrelevant to the ethics of these workers being able to get paid for their work. Even if Bethesda does a shitty job then people are still making more than $0 like they are presently. If they fail to moderate this then that is a risk they are incurring by allowing third party mods on their site. As such, if they fail to keep pirates out then the modders will have legal recourse against Bethesda.

2. If they can charge for things they'll get lazy? Are you advocating the destruction of trade for all products and services? Your logic would prevent all companies everywhere from being able to charge for their work so they don't get "lazy".

3. Supply and demand. If they produce shitty work there will not be any demand. The financial incentive of making something great should motivate them to work harder. You forget that the large AAA companies have already made their money once you have the game and them charging you for DLC is just them getting extra monies. For modders, this "DLC" is their entire revenue stream and it does not benefit them to do shoddy or lazy work. It is ridiculous to claim that making money means you stop trying to make money.

1. Good luck with legal action against Bethesda. I'm sure if you are allowed to put up your work for sale, you'll have to agree to not taking any legal action against Bethesda.

2. You're taking my comment too literally. I called it lazy because by the way things are going, they are just going to cut out more content from the base game and sell it. Hence, they don't have to work so much on expansion, other DLC, or whatever.

3. It may not benefit them to do shoddy work, but that doesn't stop them from doing it all the time.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

My biggest concern with having paid mods - And I will admit it is a bit of a selfish one, is this:

I have 135 mods on my Skyrim Nexus account, 95 of which are currently active, and I have completely deleted about 100 other mods that I tried out and didn't like/didn't work.

I managed to do that all for free, and have made my version of Skyrim highly optimised to my own personal taste.

If mods were all pay to use I would probably only be prepared to purchase about £15-20 worth of mods, which would probably get me about 5-10 mods to load into my Skyrim game. Not only would this cost me more. It would vastly decrease the flexibility and customization of my game, and I would have probably stopped playing it a year or two ago.

Demanding payment for mods instantly puts a price on the number of mods you can use in the game. It puts a price on the amount that you can manipulate the game, and sadly that means that I'm not going to shell out a pound or two every time I see a minor mod tweak in the Nexus that would make the game better - I would stop modding my game if Skyrim got paid modding because I wouldn't stomach paying again and again and again for minor changes.

3. Mods can break your save files and destroy hours and hours of progress. Ever hear about a mod called "Civil War Overhaul"? Well you see its made by a real asshole who unfortunately was given a talent for modding, but absolutely no talent for anything else. He can't balance a mod, he can't write an informative description(he just fills it with memes and deliberately leaves out important stuff), he can't even gracefully accept criticism of his complete lack of understanding how to balance a mod(I half expect him to come into this thread after I invoked his name). All that is important because uninstalling the Civil War Overhaul will completely and utterly destroy your save file and there is no fix, this wouldn't normally be a problem but the modder deliberately hides things that you might not want in your Skyrim install in his mods. So you pretty much have to go in blind and when you find out inevitably what sucks about his mod tough luck that save file is garbage.
Imagine if 15 days after you installed a paid mod that has lots of shitty hidden features you find out that you can't even get a refund for it and your entire save file is strapped to that one mod.

This is a huge issue, and the Civil War mods are a great example of the issue here;
There are several similar mods out there that add civil war battlezones throughout Skyrim, with varying degrees of severity in the scale and type of battles depending on the mod you choose to install.

Luckily, because modding is free, I have downloaded and trialed ALL OF THEM, choosing the one that I liked best, and was the most stable. I used a mod called "Warzones" for a while, but it was too buggy and kind of broke the game so eventually I changed back to another mod called "Immersive Patrols". However, for all it's promises Immersive Patrols didn't really have the large scale battles of Warzones, and was a little too quiet and lighthanded.

About a month ago I discovered that Warzones had been completely rewritten to remove the bugs and update it, so I decided to download the new improved version of the mod, and have been playing with it for a week now.
My game has gotten really buggy, I've been getting Orcs with pale faces, haven't been able to interact with any furnace/mining point/grindstone/smith etc. it's completely incompatible with my Expanded Towns and Villages mod, and much more. I'm currently reverting the changes and probably going to go back to Immersive Patrols if I can't get anything better and can't iron out the bugs.

The point is that with free mods I have the ability to chop and change these buggy, incompatible mods at the drop of a hat. I can mess about with them, install and uninstall on a whim, dick up my .ini file and have to completely reinstall Skyrim and all my mods (which has happened twice) and it's all fine because the mods are free.

Introduce a charge for all these mods and first of all I will never again have a game with the freedom and customisability of Skyrim. That will be gone - Killed. Never again. I won't be able to try out competing mods, I will just have to pick one and hope for the best, which will turn out badly eventually. Secondly, because I can only pick one, and will be paying for it, I will expect a professional service. I will expect updates to keep the mod bug free. I will expect that the mod has been properly tested and that I will be informed beforehand of compatibility issues.

We are talking about taking an amateur hobby and turning it into a professional marketplace here. This is not a small thing, it will create the need for accountability, customer service, quality control etc. and it will vastly curtail the ability of the end users of these mods to enjoy as many as possible because they will be limited by how much they are prepared to pay for extra content on top of a full price game and it's DLCs etc.