Paid mods on Steam

[Incompetent]

The closest that Paradox has come to endorsing paid third-party mods in the past is something like For the Glory. I can imagine Paradox using this model in future (i.e. specific endorsed projects, with Paradox retaining publishing rights, including the ability to pull the plug at any time), but a free-for-all on paid-for mods sounds like too big a gamble for Paradox to take any time soon.

 

[Diamonds]

I work in the video games industry as a programmer. Going on 10 years now. I've never made a mod but always wanted to.

I have a good friend who does art for DOTA2 and makes a living off of that. For a long while I've wanted to go down the same path, but there's no opportunity for me (as a programmer). I've avoided the indie dev scene because of how risky it is. A mod for a game like EU4 would be a small investment, and I wouldn't need to advertise it.

I'm really happy that they've introduced this. I hope that EU4 allows for this because this is the game that I would make mods for. If they don't, then I can't. I just don't have the time for it, I have to pay the bills and take care of my family.

I think it will be successful overall if people are able to build a brand for themselves. It will push out the crap for pay mods. Of course, there will always be shitty free mods.

 

[Epicity]

It is in no way a good thing.

1. How is 25c from a dollar a good thing? This is just money grabbing from Valve and Bethesda.
2. People have mods. Some people have hundreds. That's over $100 just for a game. You might say it's optional but that's kinda the point of mods. FREE and OPTIONAL. Sometime's it's not even optional, sometimes it's a a must to get a good game out of it.
3. What happens if I buy a mod and it doesn't work after an update? I've seen that Steam support's 24hrs refund, but I expect my software to work after a year.
4. Cross compatibility. Mods not working with each other is a huge problem if one decides to add in another feature that breaks the others. We've already seen that with Cities Skylines, but it's no issue cos I remove the one that doesn't work since it's free.
5. Copyright issue. Good luck dealing with copyright, when you use stuff like Star wars or Game of THrones or Lord of the Rings when it's paid.
6. Developer laziness. Why bother fixing the bugs when modders will do it and publishers get paid for it?

Basically, if they wanted to support the mod creators they wouldn't be taking 75% of the cut and disallowing mods that say donate to me. It's just p

 

[Diamonds]

It is in no way a good thing.

1. How is 25c from a dollar a good thing? This is just money grabbing from Valve and Bethesda.

I know someone who makes a living doing art for DOTA2, they don't need a day job. But I do agree that 25% is very little, I'm guessing they have their reasons.

 

[ReginaRC]

I'm trying to get past my initial reaction of "oh the horrors!" when I first read about this today. I hate the precedent this could possibly set for gaming mods, not because I don't believe a modder is worth being paid but because I have always believed in sharing mods freely. Please bear in mind several years ago I modded for a popular video game and ran a free website which I paid for out of my own pocket for several years until AdSense came along so my opinion is a long-held one.

I read an article on the subject at Ars Technica that I think explains things a whole lot better than what is being posted here and on other forums. Good or bad, right or wrong, I think it's difficult to make a judgment without more info.

ETA: Generally speaking if it's going to cost me money to use mods in my game I won't do it because that would nickel and dime me to death.

 

[Johan]

This is not good intentions, this is Valve wanting to get paid for doing zero work.

Zero work?

If someone truly feels its zero work, then why dont you set up your own market and maintain it? I was one of the original owners of Gamersgate, so I actually have a clue or two about what havinga digital marketplace entails..

Steams cut on sales on its market is FAR less than any distributor took before they entered the market. And for those that say 25% to the developer is low is entirely new to how gamedevelopment works. Thats far higher percentage of gross price than we ever saw when we were pure developers, and then we actually owned the brands we developed on.

Where I come from its such a great deal, that if i hadnt been in my current position, i'd have jumped on it immediately if it had bern a game I liked to mod..

OTOH, i'm not adressing other concerns about support, legal aspects, impact on scale of modfing etc, as I dont think ayone knows how it would work out...

 

[Tolstoy]

I know someone who makes a living doing art for DOTA2, they don't need a day job. But I do agree that 25% is very little, I'm guessing they have their reasons.

I'm a self-employed network technician/engineer in real life. I frequently find that I'm only getting paid 25-60% of what the end user I'm working for is paying out, with the rest being eaten up by various middleman companies who set me up with these jobs. While this is very frustrating at times, I must remember that these middlemen (without whom I never would've been hooked up with the company that needed my services) do add some value to the equation. In Steam's case, they're providing a reliable and (presumably) easy to use platform to facilitate the sale of these mods, will manage billing and payments to thousands of modders, will wind up having to work out some kind of mod copyright protection system (and likely resolve disputes, since modders suing IP-stealing modders in other countries just isn't practical), and are taking on a great deal of risk/blowback if the monetizing of mods doesn't work out and has a negative effect on their reputation/profitability. I don't know if the 75% cut of the gross is fair, but I imagine Steam's bean counters and lawyers have spent a lot of time on this and have some justification for it.

What is really needed is some competition to keep Steam honest with regard to their percentage. Which is why (if PDX decided to permit this for their games, which I suspect is unlikely) it kinda sucks now in retrospect that PDX dropped support for Gamersgate.

 

[oak]

Is this the beginning of mod pirates?

 

[Wagonlitz]

OK,

It is that someone is taking someone else mod and changing it a bit and then selling? Not all their own work?

If it is that I get it.

You will get that too. Some MEIOU modder said a while ago that it only took minutes from they updated their mod to somebody else had uploaded the updated version to steam in their own name... I would assume those people also would charge money for it.

Well, at this point, your mod is basically an outsourced DLC/game, minus the initial thought. And the percentage is "freely" fixed by the publisher (we don't know if Valve put some conditions to the publisher for him be able to enable the "option"). It could be less, but still. The problem, IMO, is the mandatory payment. Keep the percentage, but made the system a donation from the user, who will be the own judge of the mod. A good one, with a reactive modder who can update his work when needed? Give him a few cents/bucks. A bad, gamebreaking one? Uninstall, end of the story. It should be the user decision, and nobody else. The publisher will merely have a role if he decide to provide the tools to help modding. In this case, I would assume a good percentage over the donation would be rightfully earned.

You want to destroy several popular mods? Because e.g. the AGOT mod for CKII will be destroyed. As late as yesterday one of its modders stated that the only thing keeping HBO from pulling it that the modders and Paradox makes no money on it.

1) As I said I am unfamiliar with the Steam system. I would hope that they would handle outright stealing of mod content. It is a single point of sale, Steam, system which is a U.S. company so U.S. Laws prevail.

Don't be too sure on that. Given EU customer protection I am not too sure that steam would be able to refer to being American if somebody wants his money back due to having been scammed or having bought a broken mod. If an internet seller refuses to refund you over a sale where you didn't get what you wanted you can ask the bank to give back your money and they have to. Then steam has the banking world of Europe annoyed at it, because unless the banks manage to make steam pay they get a loss.

I work in the video games industry as a programmer. Going on 10 years now. I've never made a mod but always wanted to.

I have a good friend who does art for DOTA2 and makes a living off of that. For a long while I've wanted to go down the same path, but there's no opportunity for me (as a programmer). I've avoided the indie dev scene because of how risky it is. A mod for a game like EU4 would be a small investment, and I wouldn't need to advertise it.

I'm really happy that they've introduced this. I hope that EU4 allows for this because this is the game that I would make mods for. If they don't, then I can't. I just don't have the time for it, I have to pay the bills and take care of my family.

I think it will be successful overall if people are able to build a brand for themselves. It will push out the crap for pay mods. Of course, there will always be shitty free mods.

You would most likely see your mod uploaded by gold diggers and you would have no way of proving you are the creator; if you are unlucky you could even get pulled for 'pirating the mods' yourself.

 

[Bloodmerchant]

I think monthly crowdfunding stuff like Patreon would work for mods but not something like this...

 

[Zan Thrax]

Don't be too sure on that. Given EU customer protection I am not too sure that steam would be able to refer to being American if somebody wants his money back due to having been scammed or having bought a broken mod. If an internet seller refuses to refund you over a sale where you didn't get what you wanted you can ask the bank to give back your money and they have to. Then steam has the banking world of Europe annoyed at it, because unless the banks manage to make steam pay they get a loss.

Given that Steam has already been developing a reputation for locking the entire Steam account of any user that issues a chargeback on anything they've bought through Steam, I doubt very many people, European or not, are going to be willing to potentially throw away their entire Steam library over a mod that gets abandoned and stops working after the 24 hour refund period is up.

I don't necessarily hate the idea of paid mods being an option, but I don't trust Valve to curate them properly (or at all, given the state of Greenlight and Early Access) to protect either the buyers or the authors. And since they've already put in their FAQ on day one that they're not accepting any responsibility for non-functional mods (and neither is Bethesda), I'm going to assume that they're not going to accept any responsibility for mod "authors" who post someone else's work, or work that violates someone else's IP.

Not surprising at all that Bethesda is the first company to get on board with this new easy money scheme of Valve's. Instead of paying some artists to make a shitty horse armour DLC, they just get to collect a cut of some modder's horse armour mod, while avoiding any responsibility for it. On top of that, some of the most widely used Skyrim mods are ones that are little more than bugfixes. And then you've got the mods that are built on other people's work, or require the use of other, larger mods to use at all. Is it fair that the only person getting paid (besides Valve and Bethesda) is the guy who posts the latest reskin of someone else's model and that can't work without a mod manager?

 

[Epicity]

Zero work?

If someone truly feels its zero work, then why dont you set up your own market and maintain it? I was one of the original owners of Gamersgate, so I actually have a clue or two about what havinga digital marketplace entails..

Steams cut on sales on its market is FAR less than any distributor took before they entered the market. And for those that say 25% to the developer is low is entirely new to how gamedevelopment works. Thats far higher percentage of gross price than we ever saw when we were pure developers, and then we actually owned the brands we developed on.

Where I come from its such a great deal, that if i hadnt been in my current position, i'd have jumped on it immediately if it had bern a game I liked to mod..

It is zero work. How is not? What exactly are they doing that is new? They already have the market and steam workshop so they've already done the work there so to do this is no extra work. What about Bethesda, why in the world should they get money from this? Using assets? That can't be true since they were free in the past. They're literally just cashing in on the work that didn't have in the past. It'll be like if somebody word of mouth shared the game and them getting a cut for using their name.

25% is definitely lower than 100% from donations. And I am quite sure that the guys right now having donations set up are getting more money than the guys on steam because of the outrage and the 25%. All they need to is, "I'm keeping it free, but please donate to keep it free".

 

[in heaven]

Only donations are suitable for mods. Mods should be free for everybody, and it is up to consumers whether they want to donate and help guy who spent his time making that mod.

 

[Wagonlitz]

Given that Steam has already been developing a reputation for locking the entire Steam account of any user that issues a chargeback on anything they've bought through Steam, I doubt very many people, European or not, are going to be willing to potentially throw away their entire Steam library over a mod that gets abandoned and stops working after the 24 hour refund period is up.

Steam closing some European's account over that European wanting a chargeback would be very interesting though. Because much of steam terms and agreements are null and void in the EU and there already is a court case where a customer association is sueing valve over whether or not they can resell games on steam; valve lost the first trial, but I think they appealed. So I wouldn't be too sure that Valve couldn't be forced to pay you the money those games had costed after they closed your account; and the way such things work here is that they would have to pay you what you paid originally, so if they have no records of what price you paid it would probably be the original full price. Just like some electronics store had to give back the original cost of a malfunctioning camera even though that camera was priced much less now.
So if somebody took valve to court over getting their account closed over requesting a chargeback it would be very interesting.

Is it fair that the only person getting paid (besides Valve and Bethesda) is the guy who posts the latest reskin of someone else's model and that can't work without a mod manager?

No.

 

[Swany]

I'm conflicted. People should be able to get paid for their work, but this whole thing goes against the idea of a "community". Many of the best mods have been built using other mods, by other people. As soon as money enters into this it becomes plagiarism.

 

[bwc153]

It's worth noting that the new workshop license agreement gives the developer the right to set the percentage to give modders when a mod is bought (Bethesda chose 25% with skyrim, it was not Steam's choice), and if I'm not mistaken the agreement also gives developers/publishers and steam the right to set the price of your mod. This has nothing to do with supporting modders.

http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/workshoplegalagreement/?appid=72850

 

[Kirkegaard]

Only donations are suitable for mods. Mods should be free for everybody, and it is up to consumers whether they want to donate and help guy who spent his time making that mod.

This is bullshit, the reason MODS historically have always been free is that it was not possible to charge for it, furthermore no one is entitled to always get other peoples work for free.

 

[RadioMan]

OK, please tell me that paradox interactive isn't going to fell for this trap. I am willing to support mod authors, but by giving them real money and in a way I am sure atleast 80% of that money actually goes to the mod developper.
Valve/Steam tries to make us think the mods actually get better, but they can't and won't guarantee the quality of a paid mod, and to me it feels like steam needs the extra money this generates, which is actually more then this 75%, since all profits will be deposited into the steam wallet, so you can only spend it on new games.
I think it's more than fair that the mod dev could get some income from his hard work, but there are lots of other ways to achieve this, so once again, please paradox interactive, don't go along with this evil plan, valve nor steam don't really need this kind of money, and of all the publishers I trust you will find another way to support the mod devs (patreon.com might be a good example or launch the mod as some dlc or a complete new game, if it's too much of an overhaul)
I don't know if I will ever buy a game again that supports this type of crap, even if I am not gonna run any mods within that game at all, so I really hope you won't support this (in my point of view) evil plan, so I can still enjoy your games in a way you originally made them.

 

[Epicity]

This is bullshit, the reason MODS historically have always been free is that it was not possible to charge for it, furthermore no one is entitled to always get other peoples work for free.

So then why did they make it? If you couldnt' get money from it why make it? Why are they suddenly NOW entitled for money when in the past they didn't even bother. Looking at Nexus Mod AND STEAM WORKSHOP that was free.

The ONLY reason why it's paid now is because Steam wants more money. They wouldn't have set up Steam Workshop for years if they thought that it should have cost money.

 

[hyeondrugs]

They are also removing donation link pages from all the mods so that they're forced to receive a profit. They're also banning anyone and everyone who disagrees for a week on steam. On another note I don't see Paradox Interactive trying to enrage their fanbase with such a move. Its too much of a risk and would hurt their branding image. Not to mention it would make the forum chaotic. This is same for all companies.