Paid mods on Steam

[Jia Xu]

Ok heres an analogy that has no legality for anybody to nitpick at that will hopefully explain the concept of taking a risk. Your boss offers you an overtime shift for Friday night to make an extra 100 dollars. Thats valve or an official publisher offering you a guaranteed exchange for your money. You know what you're getting from them. Instead you go to a casino to put money on the roulette. Thats giving your money to an unknown content creator and asking him for content instead. Its risky. With your boss, you knew what you were getting. On the mod market, you can't be sure what you'll get or what will happen. Hopefully it'll work out. It doesn't. You lose your money on roulette. Risk didn't work out. It's not all the casinos fault for not offering a fair game, its partially your fault for making a risky decision when you had a much safer decision available (going to the casino for money instead of just working overtime) There. Amen. Nice try though. Whatever other super-snarky immature padding you kids add when you're done with your messages. Really now, discussing the semantics of analogies is really off-topic and since we share similar attitudes towards mod monetization, I think it's fruitless to continue this line of discussion. I'm gonna let Johan's post speak for itself on this topic. What are your credentials? I have no idea what managing a digital marketplace entails so I don't know who to believe but Johan seemed to have good credentials

Except casinos have to answer to things called "gaming commissions" which strictly regulate them and ensure that games are fair, and are as advertised. So, once again, you've burned your own argument alive here. Modders aren't subject to anything resembling quality control before they take your money. They're more like Victorian-era snake oil salesmen, promising to cure your baldness.

 

[Epicity]

Why is double dipping even remotely 'fair'?

If somebody makes a parody of something i.e using the product, the original guys shouldn't get money at all. Modding obviously is a bit different but it's in the same area of making something by using the product.

BTW what about game engines like Unreal? Unreal takes some cuts from free versions if you make money, do they do that as well for mods?

It's a legal disaster from ALL FRONTS waiting to happen.

I'm gonna let Johan's post speak for itself on this topic. What are your credentials? I have no idea what managing a digital marketplace entails so I don't know who to believe but Johan seemed to have good credentials

Credentials being common sense. It'll be like if I opened a store and allowed people to advertising signs for free. I've already paid for the store, my income and everything else needed to open my store. But when I suddenly charge people for putting ad signs on my store, I'm not doing any extra work but just charging them.

Which is what Valve is doing. They already have everything in place, they're not suddenly opening up a new store or suddenly hiring new people to manage the workshop, they've already existed and were still making TONS of money from hats and cuts from game sales. This is just greed.

I mean what if Paradox started to charge for every forum post? You don't' have to make the post but it doesn't make it right. Would you say Paradox would be doing something additional? What about Bethesda, they're literally doing nothing. They're getting paid for somebody making content for them. Since mods can sell games.

 

[Bogus]

My humble opinion is that today gamers or people in general don't seem to like being "forced" to do anything anymore. Im working in (or is it "at"... dunno^^) Sales for many years now and I believe around the last 10 years or so your maybe customers started some counter strategys against being forced to buy your product/stuff. 20 years ago you were able to "guide" your customer to this or that decision, making it possible to sell him the highest product, earning you the most money. But as of today, people found out that they might have been ripped off once too much and started the counter strategies. That means, today you have to try a different approach when trying to sell your product. You have to at least let your customer believe it was his own free decision to buy the product that cost the most. You cant be seen as forcing him to do anything.

Now, why did I write this stuff now? Because I think, this was a bad decision Valve and Bethesda made. They might have told the customers about their plan before starting it. Having some argument with the community, changing some arguments, developing a plan how to do this paid mod stuff. Im pretty sure, the communitys reaction mostly would have been very positive (or at least less negative then its now) and the gamers might actually be more than willing to pay / donate money. The difference is being forced to do something or doing it in your free will.

I really hope, Paradox is not going down this road as well and instead keeping the mods free. But if they decide to offer paid mods for their games too, Id suggest giving the modders the most money for it. That would be a generous move, earning Paradox lots of fame. Something that you can surely measure with your next game sales.

 

[Arakhor]

Laws don't always comply with ethics. To take an exagerated example, would it have been legal for Valve/Bethesda to start charging 5$ for every mod download, and take 100% of the revenue? Yes. Would it have been ethical? No.

Given that the author of derived content shares the ownership with the owner of the overall copyright, unless the author was writing (or modding) to order (e.g. all those D&D books), it would be illegal for the game owner to sell those mods without the modder's permission.

 

[ABookshelf]

Except casinos have to answer to things called "gaming commissions" which strictly regulate them and ensure that games are fair

No casino would ever offer a "fair" game because they wouldn't make money off of a fair game. Your payout from a win is always less than your odds to win making casino games, by definition, unfair. As advertised, yes, but "fair," no. Again, you're bringing the discussion off-topic (in your own topic no less) and I would advise you to return to the topic at hand.

the logic that modders are making better stuff than the developers of the actual game

This is highly subjective to say modder content is "better." In fact, just because a person downloads and plays a mod doesn't even mean they think the mod content is better. Back in EU3, I played a lot of mods simply because I'd spent so much time playing the base game and wanted a different experience. Some people might prefer a different graphical style to what the developer wanted. So I don't think this part holds up.

 

[Jia Xu]

No casino would ever offer a "fair" game because they wouldn't make money off of a fair game. Your payout from a win is always less than your odds to win making casino games, by definition, unfair. As advertised, yes, but "fair," no. Again, you're bringing the discussion off-topic (in your own topic no less) and I would advise you to return to the topic at hand.

I'm addressing your argument in its entirety (which is a courtesy you refuse to extend to anyone else). "Fair" means that the rules are ere applied equally and as advertised. "Fair" means that the blackjack dealer isn't going to swap cards in the middle of a game in order to ensure that he always wins. Casinos are strictly regulated to ensure that games are fair. This is what gaming commissions are for. If you don't think games are fair in casinos, please do explain the function of gaming commissions. Unlike casinos, modders have no such oversight. You can promise that this grand mod that you'll develop over years and then vanish as soon as you get the money you want. If you check the workshop, "early-access" mods are available to purchase, meaning you get paid for doing little to no work at all.

 

[ABookshelf]

ok dude

Credentials being common sense. It'll be like if I opened a store and allowed people to advertising signs for free. I've already paid for the store, my income and everything else needed to open my store. But when I suddenly charge people for putting ad signs on my store, I'm not doing any extra work but just charging them.

Advertisers paying just to put signs up is what happens in real life. Nobody gets free advertising space in stores or on soccer jerseys or stock cars or anything because the store owner is going to realize that the advertiser has a real stake in him operating his store and making sure the store is open so people will walk in and see the sign. Actually the advertisers are generally the ones who go out making offers for ad-space and endorsements so lets imagine this instead: You own a store and an TV executive comes in and says "I'm going to put a sign up in the window for my television program. I'm going to make thousands of dollars from people seeing my sign and watching my program but I'm not going to share any of that with you." Even though his sign doesn't affect anything you do, you're still getting cheated because he relies on you continuing to keep your store open and keep customers coming in to see his sign.

 

[Hraktuus]

There is absolutely no justification for Valve and Bethesda doing this. Modders should not be paid for their work. And I say that as a modder myself. The one good thing about all of this is I believe it will have the effect of more free mods getting put out on multiple sites. I know I for one will be putting out more mods now with the guarantee that they will always be free. If I ever decide to make my own game, not based on anyone else's work, then, and ONLY then, will I charge any money, as it will be a unique GAME of my own creation, and not a MODIFICATION of someone else's work.

 

[skynet464]

I would pay money for HOI4:Kaiserriech if it was expansion level quality. (Or if it was an expansion, wink wink)

 

[Wagonlitz]

Steam/Steam workshop is not something that just operates itself and is free to maintain. Game/mod data for thousands of games needs to be stored. Every day thousands of people all around the world download a huge volume of data, and they need to have staff available at all hours to fix problems that arise. Its a huge deal if their system goes down for even 10 minutes. If you can't understand how maintaining a digital distribution platform with over 100 million users isn't zero work then I don't know what to tell you.

Anyway I probably wouldn't pay money for a mod unless a lot of people said it was really good and definitely worth it. So since it wouldn't really affect anything on my end I don't have any strong feelings either way. Would be interesting to see if/how it affects the quality of user-created content.

You are already paying for steam's services when you buy the game though.

Well BICE for HoI3 TFH gets many more downloads than that and my sub-mod got about 600 this last week alone. So if that is in the first 2 or 3 days of a version release that is a lot, but if that has been out for more than a month it is not very much.

I remember Magna Mundi Ultimate bragging about having been downloaded 750 000 times; or was it 1 000 000 times

 

[Arakhor]

I remember Magna Mundi Ultimate bragging about having been downloaded 750 000 times; or was it 1 000 000 times

And if Ubik could have charged for it, no doubt he would have done.

 

[PanzerCorps]

And if Ubik could have charged for it, no doubt he would have done.

Yes, that's why he tried partnering up with paradox. We know how that ended.

 

[oak]

Well many potential bad things and worries of this change has probably been listed here already but one good thing I can see from this is that developers and their dlcs will be in direct competition with mods now. Perhaps we can expect more quality and maybe even cheaper dlcs in the future from developers

 

[Naselus]

If I ever decide to make my own game, not based on anyone else's work, then, and ONLY then, will I charge any money, as it will be a unique GAME of my own creation, and not a MODIFICATION of someone else's work.

So you'd even code the engine from the ground up? After all, if you base it on an existing engine, you're just adding things to someone else's work - HOI, CK and Vicky all basically started as modifications to EU, after all. And while you're writing that engine, remember not to include any .NET libraries in there - otherwise you're using someone else's creations. In fact, steer clear of any existing programming languages to avoid just modifying other people's stuff - create a new one instead. TBH, probably best to just write the whole lot, from scratch, in binary - though bear in mind that's derivative of both Babbage and Turing - better to completely re-invent the computer from the ground up to avoid using other people's work. Otherwise, it's just a MODIFICATION of someone else's work; all existing games are really just very, very intricate mods for Spacewar!, after all. They just move the 1s and 0s to different places.

OK, I'm being a little unfair here, but really, you can push the logic as far as you like with this. Anywhere you choose to draw the line is pretty arbitrary. The events and decisions I've added into various games are unique creations. Many of the graphical assets added by mods are unique and original creations, too. Just because they're adding them into another game doesn't suddenly mean they're 'just' mods. The graphical assets could be uploaded and sold on things like the Unity store as products in their own right. Why, if they're put into an existing game, do they have to be free? While I won't charge for my mods either, the issue is too complex to just say 'modders should never be paid for their work'.

 

[Wagonlitz]

And if Ubik could have charged for it, no doubt he would have done.

So true.

 

[Pete0714]

Well many potential bad things and worries of this change has probably been listed here already but one good thing I can see from this is that developers and their dlcs will be in direct competition with mods now. Perhaps we can expect more quality and maybe even cheaper dlcs in the future from developers

Ah, but if your getting money either way, where is the incentive? The potential scenario for Paradox is win win and no competition. If they develop their own DLC, PDOX gets paid for it. If somebody makes a mod, and sells it, PDOX gets paid for it. That's part of the problem here. Its potentially a highly exploitative system that is opening up.

 

[Jia Xu]

http://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/33qcaj/the_experiment_has_failed_my_exit_from_the/

I called it in my 2nd post. This guy was harassed into oblivion until he became disenchanted with modding altogether, and now he's being told that Valve basically owns his mod and will not take it down unless forced to do so by a court of law.

The only people who are going to be hurt by this more than consumers will be the modders themselves. They're coders, not businessmen and women.

 

[oak]

Ah, but if your getting money either way, where is the incentive? The potential scenario for Paradox is win win and no competition. If they develop their own DLC, PDOX gets paid for it. If somebody makes a mod, and sells it, PDOX gets paid for it. That's part of the problem here. Its potentially a highly exploitative system that is opening up.

You're right. I didn't think this through!

 

[Arakhor]

I called it in my 2nd post. This guy was harassed into oblivion until he became disenchanted with modding altogether, and now he's being told that Valve basically owns his mod and will not take it down unless forced to do so by a court of law.

The only people who are going to be hurt by this more than consumers will be the modders themselves. They're coders, not businessmen and women.

I love Frostfall as much as the next person, so I'm sorry it had to happen to Chesko, but there you are. Valve is just as much a soulless money-grubbing corporation as all the others.

 

[Jia Xu]

As of this post, all of the paid mods on Steam seem to have been disabled by Valve. Not sure if this is a maintenance thing, or if they're backing down after having the entire internet explode at them at once.