Thread: Paid mods

Skyrim Fishing mod removed and subscribers were refunded

Originally Posted by salty99

I think those are all very valid concerns, and theft is not only a huge issue with mods, but more in the nature of software products as a whole. I have some friends at information security firms who tell all kinds of horror stories of how software written by small time devs gets reverse engineered, copied, or flatout stolen. A colleague of mine launched a game he made for free on the Android app store. A third party downloaded, used a reverse compiler to get access to the source code, and relaunched the game under a separate name and put a price tag on it, subsequently getting several thousand purchases off a game my friend released for free.

My initial post was more in reference to the idea of offering an avenue for the monetization of certain mods should the devs choose. I don't see what's wrong with that idea, though where the issue lies is in the implementation. I think steam dropped the ball as for how they are planning to do this and police it. It could all work out but they are opening a can of worms that is tough to keep under control.

It reminds me of a reddit thread from a week ago. A guy went in for an interview (for Vulcun, the betting site), and he was sent home with a software project to prove himself. It was a fairly specific project that could directly benefit their site. He bugged out when he realized they just wanted him to do work for them for free.

The SKSE people have given approval for any mod that uses SKSE.

Also, what some modders are doing is offering two mods. One you can pay for. The other is free. I think that's the case for Wet and Cold. The mod author said he was going to always update the free version first.

The thing that's really annoying me is that if a good mod transitions completely to Steamworks, then it makes it hard to incorporate with other mods especially if those mods have conflicts. The way steam installs the mods is just abysmal and hard to work with. It's a system that hasn't made sense since the first mod management programs came out (earliest I can think of are things like FOMM, Wrye Bash, the manager for KOTOR--at least I think that was KOTOR that had one). Basically, if you use Steamworks, your install folder becomes an unorganized clusterfuck. That's not too bad if you just install the community patches. Those are single files. However, you still need to clean those files to avoid crashes that happen when you mod the game.

Yeah, I've only ever used nexus for skyrim mods, it's far superior from what I've seen. I haven't really played around with the steam workshop though for any games. Texture/graphical mods for crysis and arma/dayZ mods I've always just done externally without the steam workshop.

It pretty much how Skyrim handles mods not working with how Steamworks handles mods. Steamworks is fine for the likes of Shadowrun where the mods are mainly new storylines, so you just load a separate module instead of having to deal with all of the possible changes for Skyrim.

It would be nice if you could just download the mods via Steamworks and then use a manager to install them. That does seem a little iffy with paid products though.

Valve essentially did the same system they do for their own games but didn't black box it more, if that makes sense. Kind of like trying to use a Sublime Text plugin, just drop it into Visual Studios, and expecting everything to work with no changes.

This is a terrible decision, its a cluster of cluster fucks. So many problems have risen.
-Mods often work off of each other
-How to you fairly split profits from large teams. What if someone wants compensation from that sword he made 2 years ago?
-People can easily sell others people's mods
-Most people could easily pirate it anyways, do you think individual or small groups modders are going to be able to protect their work?
-Brings up a legal nightmare of trademark content
-Valves/Beths pricing is ridiculous if you want to support the community add a donate button to steam works, have monthly contest where the best can get official licensing, or even slowly introduce paid mods instead of opening up the flood gates and taking the lions share of the profit.
-24 hour refund time is not enough to get a good test.
-Mods can easily break in the future and the mod creators can little to do with it.
-People can charge mods that contain others free work, meaning they earning money off of others work.
-On the other hand if you want your mod to be free but contains content from paid mods your patrons are SOL
-Companies can now actually make money for the faults, skyUI will start earning Beths money because of their poor vanilla UI. This will encourage even more unfinished games and early access garbage with the excuse "we support the modding community!"

This is one of the most anti consumer moves I can remember in video games. Whats next? Paying for patches? Paying for individual levels/missions? Paying for single maps in multiplayer? This is outsourcing dlc and the fact that people are defending it is pretty unsettling and shows how the gaming community as no backbone. I'm not saying mods users are obligated to work for free, many of them deserve money but this system has too many holes and is being implemented too fast and seeing vavle's nonexistent quality control for greenlight and early access can only lead to a mountain of crappy cash grabs and the actually good mods caught in this web. This is EA levels of crap.

It could be worse. We could be console gamers!

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comm...ods_and_steam/

Valve yanks new mod-sales feature from Steam after only four days | Ars Technica

it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing.

TOOK THEM LONG ENOUGH TO KILL THAT BAD IDEA