CritialGaming said:
Valve wants money. Not only that, but they want more money for doing nothing. They are going to be the first company to make a trillion dollars without actually having to do anything.
Valve is good.
Be like Valve.
Well it's not entirely nothing. They are going to be the handlers for payments as well as inevitable refunds.
It's not an inherently bad idea but you are correct in that they need to work for it. The biggest problem on Steam's end was that they don't validate who owns the content so, to quote from last time, "what's to stop someone ripping a mod off Nexus and posting it to Steam?". They need to have a content control system that actually gets worked through and a way for the original authors to make sure they can validate their work. They also need to make sure that the work is original and not ripped from other games otherwise they're gonna be at the wrong end of a Cease-and-Desist.
Biggest problem for Bethesda (since it was Skyrim that started it) was that they were taking a massive cut for, like Valve, little to no work. Maybe they provide the tools and the engine but do they really deserve that much when the game engine's cost was recouped by people purchasing the full game to start with? Will they be maintaining the game with updates with this new funding strategy or will it be funding the next installment? A little transparency explaining why they wanted a cut would help.
And why after all this did the mod author end up with less? They got a 25% cut so Valve and Bethesda split 75% of the money between them? That's really supportive of them, isn't it?
I mean what needs to happen is either they give a fairer cut to the authors (either 33% each or 50% to the mod author and 25% each for Valve and publisher) and reveal how much work is on their ends (Valve/Steam and respective publisher) OR better; have the mods be free for everyone to use and use a donation system much like Valve already did with their stamp system in TF2 for community maps that made it into the game.
