Thread: Paid mods

Valve has partnered with Bethesda to allow for modders to charge for mods in the Workshop. The modder gets 25% of the payment. A lot of the mods so far are simple weapons, but Wet and Cold is now $5 on the workshop. The next big release of that mod is only going to be on the workshop as well.

Valve intends to carry this over to other games.

What are people's thoughts?

Personally I don't see what the problem is. Valve isn't forcing modders to not release their stuff for free, just giving the option to. And Valve should totally get 75%. Modders didn't make the game from scratch, they are using an engine they didn't pay to license, valve's distribution platform, and valve's steam workshop software.

Totally fair in my opinion. If you didn't make the game from scratch, you shouldn't get mad when valve gets 75%. Additionally, and I could be mistaken, but I was under the impression that this is all only a factor if the modder chooses to put their mod up for sale right? Seems to me like Valve is just giving an opportunity to modders that they previously didn't have.

If the majority of the 75% goes to Bethesda, then I'm fine with it.

Sent from my SGH-I337 using Tapatalk

Originally Posted by DJ Mr. White

If the majority of the 75% goes to Bethesda, then I'm fine with it.

Sent from my SGH-I337 using Tapatalk

Exactly.

The people that make the game and create the mod are the one's that should be getting paid the bulk of the funds. Steam should be collecting nothing but a small fee for providing the store.

And evidently people are snagging mods off of sites and putting them up as their own as well. So... broken from the get-go.

Originally Posted by Kanati

And evidently people are snagging mods off of sites and putting them up as their own as well. So... broken from the get-go.

And there are early access mods, too.

This just means I'm going to continue getting my mods off Nexus Mods. I never used the workshop for skyrim mods anyways.

Originally Posted by Kanati

And evidently people are snagging mods off of sites and putting them up as their own as well. So... broken from the get-go.

That's one of the two factors that make me think that this is something that's obviously broken. For one thing, it's very hard to verify authenticity of work, someone could say "Hey, I totally made this mod! Now pay me for it!" And there are very few avenues of recourse to take unless you're a very popular mod that everyone knows, Long War for X-com would be an example. But a Skyrim Lord of the Rings Armor set? The creators are inconsequential and one could easily claim another person's work as their own.

The other factor is that mods are not totally independent of each other. In Arma for instance, in order for game modes like the Epoch we run to work, they are based upon a set of mods. There's a mod for the Terrain, a mod for the Weapons, a mod for the Missions, and of course the core Epoch mod. The majority of good Arma MISSIONS are also built upon a set of mods(Note, Arma differentiates between Mods and Scrips/Missions in an odd way, given their interaction, but any script could easily be put up as a mod on Steam Workshop) you probably have a Mission Framework, a Revive script, perhaps a HALO Jump script, and an Advanced AI script, all of which could be considered mods.

So...who gets credit, and who gets paid? I don't think Bohemia will buy into this, but it's a good example that I know enough about. So, let's say that TPG style EPOCH goes on sale on the workshop. If you worked on say, the script that they borrowed in order to get the revive working, do you have a right to any of the profits? If you worked on the weapons mod that is essential to the game, do you have a right to try and get it taken down?

The modding scene is rarely a bunch of agents working independently, there are codependencies, and often mods are built upon the work of other mods. I can imagine a total Lord of the Rings conversion for Skyrim that uses someone's weapons mod, someone else's armor mod, a third person's race mod, and meshes them together with original work that is mostly quests and storyline modification. When any of those people start to say "Hey, pay me money for this." The whole item can fall apart. I can't imagine anything but having a less robust and frankly inferior modding environment as a result.

A lot of the follower mods are built like this as well. Many of them will use a Body Mod to get the followers to look right, a Hair Mod, for that super anime hair, and maybe a Behavior mod in order for them to not get stuck, but then have original content in Voiceover work and quests. Oh, and while two of the modders are on Steam, a third is only on Nexus. I can't see a good way of handling that which doesn't involve horrendous possibility of abuse and misuse.

If people want to donate their money to a modder they really like that that is completely fine but to lock a mod behind a pay wall goes against the entire idea of user generated content period. To me this is just another attack on our much cherished open a free internet. Ugh what was Valve thinking.

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.