Interview with Valve employee about selling mods on the work

[ltsune]

This is one of the better ones I've seen in a long time.
The last sentence is hilarious: "I bet we'll start selling bugfixes soon too". Especially funny because I wonder why Joymax haven't started doing that yet

[poehalcho]

So... In case somebody didn't hear the news yet:

Valve has introduced a new steam workshop mechanic which allows modmakers to start charging money for their mods. Currently it's only active for Skyrim. Most people including modders are heavily against it.

Major glaring issues atm are:

• Valve taking money from modders (75%!) (likely split between Bethesda and Valve)
• No system in place to stop stolen mods
• No system in place to limit low-effort mods
• Overpriced "micro"transactions.
• No guarantee that the mod will be patched if an update happens.
• Modders lose rights to their mod after uploading.
• 24 hour return policy which does nothing to ensure that a mod is compatible. Errors may only become evident days after "purchase."
• Not even a minimum guarantee of Quality Assurance. At least developer-produced DLC is expected to have gone through QA.

There's a petition's going around to get Valve to cut the crap, which are gathering signatures quickly:
https://www.change.org/p/valve-remove-t ... eated=true
https://www.change.org/p/valve-steam-re ... d-workshop

Depending on how this all turns out the workshop may end up in approximately the same position as the hell that is the mobile market, filled to the core with paid shovelware, from an influx of money-hungry opportunists with zero relation to the games.

People are suggesting pay_what_you_want schemes or donation buttons as an alternative, which seems like a much cleaner way of doing it, without destroying one of the best parts of gaming as a whole.

---

That vid is seriously hilarious btw ;D

[*BlackFox]

Seems like a really bad idea.

[ltsune]

So... In case somebody didn't hear the news yet:

Valve has introduced a new steam workshop mechanic which allows modmakers to start charging money for their mods. Currently it's only active for Skyrim. Most people including modders are heavily against it.

Major glaring issues atm are:

• Valve taking money from modders (75%!) (likely split between Bethesda and Valve)
• No system in place to stop stolen mods
• No system in place to limit low-effort mods
• Overpriced "micro"transactions.
• No guarantee that the mod will be patched if an update happens.
• Modders lose rights to their mod after uploading.
• 24 hour return policy which does nothing to ensure that a mod is compatible. Errors may only become evident days after "purchase."
• Not even a minimum guarantee of Quality Assurance. At least developer-produced DLC is expected to have gone through QA.

There's a petition's going around to get Valve to cut the crap, which are gathering signatures quickly:
https://www.change.org/p/valve-remove-t ... eated=true
https://www.change.org/p/valve-steam-re ... d-workshop

Depending on how this all turns out the workshop may end up in approximately the same position as the hell that is the mobile market, filled to the core with paid shovelware, from an influx of money-hungry opportunists with zero relation to the games.

People are suggesting pay_what_you_want schemes or donation buttons as an alternative, which seems like a much cleaner way of doing it, without destroying one of the best parts of gaming as a whole.

---

That vid is seriously hilarious btw ;D

Great summary of the whole thing!

I do believe, however, that Valve will find a solution at some point. This is probably just them, testing how people will react. Not trying to protect them at all. I don't even like Steam all that much. But I'm pretty sure that if we give them a year or so, they'll have figured something out.

Anyway, about the whole 75% thing, it kinda does make sense. After all, this should be seen as the leverage that will make game developers accept that modders make money off of their game at all. As it is right now, most developers don't allow modders to monetize (charge money) for their mods. But now, because they get a cut of the money, they might be more willing to allow modders to monetize their mods, which could potentially be good!

But of course, as it is right now, it looks kinda horrible

[omier]

This is brilliant. The video, I mean. But this situation sucks. Steam needs some actual competition these days, there's no reason it should be a monopoly. Also, how about a petition for some actual quality control on games that get on Steam?

[poehalcho]

GabeN has created an AMA (Ask Me Anything) on /r/gaming
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comment ... and_steam/

We are adding a pay what you want button where the mod author can set the starting amount wherever they want.

It's decent improvement but not a solution yet. Namely due to steam's infrastructure and the remaining 75% cut for valve/publisher

[DarkJackal]

-.- Another part of games being used to sell for extra. It feels like soon enough extra lives and reloading or using a minimap is gonna be a feature that costs money.

lol 75%

[poehalcho]

-.- Another part of games being used to sell for extra. It feels like soon enough extra lives and reloading or using a minimap is gonna be a feature that costs money.

lol 75%

It already is in the mobile market though...

[omier]

Mobile market is cancer, and too much of that has spread to Steam already.

[poehalcho]

Victory

http://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWo ... 5253244218

We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we'll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.

We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing. We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different.

To help you understand why we thought this was a good idea, our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid. We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it.

But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop. We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here.

Now that you've backed a dump truck of feedback onto our inboxes, we'll be chewing through that, but if you have any further thoughts let us know.

Edit:
here's Bethesda's side of the story
http://www.bethblog.com/2015/04/27/why- ... -on-steam/

[Toshiharu]

Edit:
here's Bethesda's side of the story
http://www.bethblog.com/2015/04/27/why- ... -on-steam/

aka "We noticed we gained 20,000 steam reviews bring our game's positive rating from 98% to 82%. Our sales went to shit this weekend and clearly that cash grab of 45% cut for us was a mistake."

[DarkJackal]

Glad to hear this failed. There's already enough profit in games alone, not even counting DLC and addons, they need to let up on the greed a little ffs.

[poehalcho]

Glad to hear this failed. There's already enough profit in games alone, not even counting DLC and addons, they need to let up on the greed a little ffs.

It's not entirely clear how much they're backing out though...
Judging from their words it sounds like they would like to give it another try, just in a more thought out way... Besides, they only state they're pulling it from Skyrim, not other places :/?

It sounds like this won't be the last we hear of it...

[ltsune]

Well, that idea was rather quickly pulled. You gotta hand it to Valve. They at least listened to what people were saying.

I still don't completely get why people on here seem to hate it so much, though? If modders could go full-time on developing mods, there would be even more and way way better mods to chose from. And about the 75% part? Well, that's what is going to get the publishers and game developers to even want to implemented mod support (apart from those who already have it support, of course).

This is great by the way. Gotta love boogie2988.

[poehalcho]

The biggest reason for the outburst is that people are really sick and tired of every single thing getting monetized. Over the years more and more aspects that make a game complete have been getting transformed into DLC or obnoxious microtransactions. Cheat code content is DLC now, extra lives costs pennies. The worst perpetrator is Day 1 DLC, selling already complete content that should've been part of the game seperately. Games are getting designed around this money-grabbing mechanic. Games are getting worse in order to get more money.

Now think about the games Bethesda makes...
Bethesda games are buggy as ****. Often the only way to get past the gamebreaking bugs is to download things like unofficial patches and bugfixes AKA mods. Monetizing mods, especially for Bethesda, means that they can now get away with making EVEN BUGGIER games, which will get fixed by 'volunteers' which earn them even more money, without losses. This is in fact the exact thing that was said at the end of the video of OP. Charging for bugfixes...

Now this is of course a lot of theorizing. It doesn't necessarily have to happen exactly like this, but it could. And it probably would eventually. Murphy's law: What may happen, will happen.

People are sick and tired of spending additional money on top of the base game price for things that were in the past expected to be part of a complete game. We see the quality of games drop, the difficulty curve for creating them drop, and yet prices rise. And no consumer should ever be happy to be paying more.

There's still more to it, a lot from the actual culture around modding. But I can't comfortably explain that, as I haven't been in on it for long.

In simple terms: A lot of modders and mod users consider modding to be a sort of holy hobby. Much like fan-art, you do it out of love for the subject. Shoehorning in a monetization scheme is going to result in something similar to the mobile market as we know it right now. People that have previously not really had anything to do with the game are going to swarm it to produce overpriced low-effort mods that may or may not work anymore as soon as a patch for the game comes. These people don't care for anything more that a pretty penny.
Meanwhile the people that sorta do deserve it, suffer the same bad rep and only get a measly 25% anyway... and only after a $100 initial sum has been reached to boot.

It's a horrible deal for anybody but the publisher. It doesn't properly aid the modders whom we'd like to help, and it's absolutely horribly disadvantageous to consumers.

Generally the world should be going towards paying less for things, not more. It's especially painful to see something that was once free and dear to you suddenly require payment.

[Toshiharu]

Glad to hear this failed. There's already enough profit in games alone, not even counting DLC and addons, they need to let up on the greed a little ffs.

It's not entirely clear how much they're backing out though...
Judging from their words it sounds like they would like to give it another try, just in a more thought out way... Besides, they only state they're pulling it from Skyrim, not other places :/?

It sounds like this won't be the last we hear of it...

It'll be back in another form. Valve(And also stirred the through into other developers both positively and negatively) seems very keen on having a way for modders to get money. What I hate the most is they compare every mod to the very tip top of success ie Counter Strike, DayZ, etc etc. In my opinion in the end they got a job to work on their game, how is that not the success story? If you impress someone, you can get a job. Not what everyone somehow thinks would have happened where every modder can quit their job to be making money off their garbage reskins, weapons, etc. I personally cannot fathom how people can think that. It's just not possible for everyone to be making a 30k salary off modding and it's way too volatile.

Well, let's see what will happen with Dota2 custom maps. It was clear this was the path it was going on.

[ltsune]

Shoehorning in a monetization scheme is going to result in something similar to the mobile market as we know it right now. People that have previously not really had anything to do with the game are going to swarm it to produce overpriced low-effort mods that may or may not work anymore as soon as a patch for the game comes. These people don't care for anything more that a pretty penny.
Meanwhile the people that sorta do deserve it, suffer the same bad rep and only get a measly 25% anyway... and only after a $100 initial sum has been reached to boot.

You certainly raise some great points, but I do have a comment to the part quoted and highlighted with bold text above.

I don't think it is going to be as bad as you might imagine. The market will stabilize itself. Over time, the bad "modders" who only joined to make a pretty penny and don't care for supporting the mods WILL get a bad reputation. And people WILL stop buying their mods if they're not good. It takes time, yes. And yes, some consumers will end up buying a mod only to realize that the modder isn't going to support it anymore. But over time, those modders who use such tactics will get a bad reputation.

Very much like online scams typically only exist for so long because eventually, gradually, people will become aware of what is going on.

What will happen is that the good modders, those who genuinely want to make something great, will rise to the top and now they may even earn a penny or two for something they were doing anyway.
And new modders might arrive to the scene as well. They may have other ideas and mindsets, which will bring different mods to life too. Hurray for diversity!

In the end, that's just how the internet works. People talk to each other about the bad things. They'll rant! And in this case, that's a good thing.

[poehalcho]

You certainly raise some great points, but I do have a comment to the part quoted and highlighted with bold text above.

I don't think it is going to be as bad as you might imagine. The market will stabilize itself. Over time, the bad "modders" who only joined to make a pretty penny and don't care for supporting the mods WILL get a bad reputation. And people WILL stop buying their mods if they're not good. It takes time, yes. And yes, some consumers will end up buying a mod only to realize that the modder isn't going to support it anymore. But over time, those modders who use such tactics will get a bad reputation.

Very much like online scams typically only exist for so long because eventually, gradually, people will become aware of what is going on.

What will happen is that the good modders, those who genuinely want to make something great, will rise to the top and now they may even earn a penny or two for something they were doing anyway.
And new modders might arrive to the scene as well. They may have other ideas and mindsets, which will bring different mods to life too. Hurray for diversity!

In the end, that's just how the internet works. People talk to each other about the bad things. They'll rant! And in this case, that's a good thing.

That's a good point I guess. I was thinking that nothing really stops anybody from making a new account to upload stuff on, but considering you need to register a game to your account every time that's not actually true. The $100 barrier also serves as a deterrent to low-quality mods.

But it may take a pretty long time. If it takes too long it's still capable of harming the modding scene, by giving it a bad name. Besides, unless they cross legal barriers (probably?), even the crappy mods will stay around and make finding the good ones harder. Valve has taken a very hands-off approach, so it's to be expected that they probably won't clean up the low-effort mods :/

Another thing that I hadn't really mentioned before is the amount of possible legal attention it will draw.
People like adding franchise-inspired mods. For instance Crusader Kings has some Game of Thrones mods afaik. Even if they're not getting sold, it's somewhat of a breach of copyright. Nobody really cares from the consumer's side, but HBO (or whomever owns the IP) now has ample reason to start sniffing out any unauthorized content. It'll be like youtube, loads of amazing content getting banned because of minor breaches.

I also have no idea who will actually be the one that's counted as the breacher. Bethesda? Valve? The Modder? It's kind of a legal nightmare.

But don't get me wrong. I'm not against, the idea of modders earning money. The problem just lies in how badly this was executed. It was possibly implemented even clumsier than Google would've done it. If Valve and Bethesda simply want to provide modders a source of income, then all they need to was to simply add a clean, attractive, easy to use donate button. I don't really understand how they couldn't predict that the 'in-your-face' tactic they pulled here was going to inevitably backfire on them...

[ltsune]

It was indeed very badly executed, so I'm glad to see the decision revoked again.

Especially because of the legal issues that you also mentioned.