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Tweets Claim Valve Removing Donation Links from Workshop Mods

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M

Mavromatis

Member
Rayge said:
Valve is going to put DRM on games that they don't develop? If it came down to that there are other distribution companies. Why not use them? Hell, there are free file hosting websites. Why not use them for mods and make post about it somewhere and hope that word of mouth gets it out there to the people. Include a donation link in the zip file.

"But it's not as convenient as the service that so and so provides."

Well them pay up buddy.

I'm not agreeing with what they are doing, but that's what happens when a company knows that they have a service that offers convenience to the consumer.
Click to expand...

Steam has a DRM on games they didn't develop an example being the one that we are talking around in this thread, Skyrim.
Nexus Mod Manager or Mod Organizer already works better than the workshop so the alternative is there too.
So the question, I assume, was what if Steam locks mods behind DRM disabling external mods for Steamworks games, what will happen then?
 
K

Keasar

Member
Acinixys said:
Dota 2 and TF2 workshop artists only get a 25% cut of all sales of their item

Plus something that you were providing for free you can now charge for on a massive platform used by almost 50 million people

The unwarranted anger is this thread is astounding
Click to expand...

On the consumer side, something you used to get for free before is now being suddenly charged for.

If many of the mods I have used over the years would suddenly cost money, I would have never been able to spend the time I have with Skyrim (which has been always for the modding). Hundreds of mods I have used and liked, tried and tested, but if I had to pay for each of them the bills would be in the thousands, hundreds if just a small margin of them was. I can't support that and the reason I even played Skyrim would then be gone.
 
A

Aureon

Please do not let me serve on a jury. I am actually a crazy person.
HariKari said:
Well if everyone started giving the modder 100%, there'd be no incentive for Valve to provide the service someone will say. Ignoring that Valve benefits tremendously in terms of sales ( along with the publisher ) when games have workshop support, and that they've comfortably provided it all for free up until now.

There's nothing stopping Bethesda or Valve from picking winners and losers either. There's money involved now. They can promote the most expensive mods, shut down mods that they don't like. The jig is up.
Click to expand...

Honestly no one is saying 100% to the modder.
Not even full games get 100% on Steam, they get 70.
But 50-25-25 or 40-30-30 would feel a lot more honest than freaking 25%. It's a third of what full games make, and a fourth of the gross.

I can't believe i'm saying this, but:
Has Origin something like the Workshop?
 
R

Rawket Lawnchair

Member
Regardless of what they're doing and how Steam will change moving forward, we really need someone to effectively break Valve's monopoly, and soon.

Let's hope GOG Galaxy will be that someone.
 
D

DarkFlow

Banned
While it's shitty that they only get 25%, I don't see the problem with removing the work around the people came up with. You want to play in the steam sandbox, you have to play by their rules. That said steam really needs to up that to 50% at least.
 
K

King_Moc

Banned
Well, this is what happens when you refuse to buy games anywhere but on steam. They grab 90% of the market and start acting like this.
 
D

diaspora

Member
Aureon said:
Honestly no one is saying 100% to the modder.
Not even full games get 100% on Steam, they get 70.
But 50-25-25 or 40-30-30 would feel a lot more honest than freaking 25%. It's a third of what full games make, and a fourth of the gross.

I can't believe i'm saying this, but:
Has Origin something like the Workshop?
Click to expand...
No. You can mod games through any external means.
 
M

Mavromatis

Member
Aureon said:
Honestly no one is saying 100% to the modder.
Not even full games get 100% on Steam, they get 70.
But 50-25-25 or 40-30-30 would feel a lot more honest than freaking 25%. It's a third of what full games make, and a fourth of the gross.

I can't believe i'm saying this, but:
Has Origin something like the Workshop?
Click to expand...

According to Origin/EA there is no mods, there never was a need for them since their game was perfect from the release and had anything you can imagine to add to it. So no, there is no workshop, but there is bioware points with which you can buy ME3 DLCs by paying more than the game.
But if they did Sims Workshop could provide them with enough cash to buy Valve.
 
I

Intheflorsh

Banned
Rayge said:
Valve is going to put DRM on games that they don't develop?
Click to expand...

Uh, they already do. It's called Steam.

If it came down to that there are other distribution companies. Why not use them? Hell, there are free file hosting websites. Why not use them for mods and make post about it somewhere and hope that word of mouth gets it out there to the people. Include a donation link in the zip file.

"But it's not as convenient as the service that so and so provides."

Well them pay up buddy.
Click to expand...

Your argument is entirely from the perspective of the consumer, completely ignoring the struggle this is going to impose on the creators of the mods. "Convenience" is not the problem. Distributing mods outside of Valve's ecosystem is going to immensely lower downloads and therefore the possibility of donations/sales. So, since the only viable place to sell mods is through Valve's service, and the effort to compensation ratio for doing so is incredibly low, Bethesda is screwing over the community that's been a large part of their success on the PC platform for years.
 
M

Momentary

Banned
Mavromatis said:
Steam has a DRM on games they didn't develop an example being the one that we are talking around in this thread, Skyrim.
Nexus Mod Manager or Mod Organizer already works better than the workshop so the alternative is there too.
So the question, I assume, was what if Steam locks mods behind DRM disabling external mods for Steamworks games, what will happen then?
Click to expand...

Companies can release their games elsewhere. But that convenience of Steam is too good to them. In that case you can blame the publishers as well as Valve fo wanting to monetize convenience and the latter using the service for a wider distro. There's other distribution services out there that they can choose. Consumers have the power to make change, but most (not all) of the time they are too disorganized and too busy huffing and puffin to do anything about it that could make a major impact.
 
D

diaspora

Member
Mavromatis said:
According to Origin/EA there is no mods, there never was a need for them since their game was perfect from the release and had anything you can imagine to add to it. So no, there is no workshop, but there is bioware points with which you can buy ME3 DLCs by paying more than the game.
But if they did Sims Workshop could provide them with enough cash to buy Valve.
Click to expand...
There are ME3 mods.
 
M

Mavromatis

Member
diaspora said:
There are ME3 mods.
Click to expand...

I hope you don't reveal this shocking information to EA.
Rayge said:
Companies can release their games elsewhere. But that convenience of Steam is too good to them. In that case you can blame the publishers as well as Valve fo wanting to monetize convenience and the latter using the service for a wider distro. There's other distribution services out there that they can choose. Consumers have the power to make change, but most (not all) of the time they are too disorganized and too busy huffing and puffin to do anything about it that could make a major impact.
Click to expand...

The large bulk of "Consumers" is people who buy/rent/lay games at weekend and people who talk about it at forums like this. So the reaction is polarized, they either scream like hear or never even notice like the rest. I can't blame Valve for making money and helping people make money or at least the illusion of money.
 
W

witchedwiz

Member
weeeeeeelll..
if you remember, it all started with oblivion horse armor dlc..
now it continues with this..
I guess bethesda is keeping their shitty attitude at a consistant level of growth...
 
blacklotus

blacklotus

Member
Merely talking about %, why is it greedy in this model?
How do you come up with your own numbers, to justify the ones known are greedy?

Genuinely asking.
 
D

diaspora

Member
Mavromatis said:
I hope you don't reveal this shocking information to EA.


The large bulk of "Consumers" is people who buy/rent/lay games at weekend and people who talk about it at forums like this. So the reaction is polarized, they either scream like hear or never even notice like the rest. I can't blame Valve for making money and helping people make money or at least the illusion of money.
Click to expand...
Bioware knows that people mod their games. EA doesn't care.
 
R

Rawket Lawnchair

Member
diaspora said:
What are they doing now that's more greedy than valve?
Click to expand...

Some third party games may be a bit more expensive than on Steam, but that's not the main problem.

The main problem is that they see their clients as a simple platform from where they can pocket 100% of the sale, and from where you can only launch your game.

There is no workshop, no broadcast feature, and the rest of the features (some boring achievements or collecting tokens to unlock skins or missions in your game) are annoying and seem half-assed or half-baked.

They are effectively what Steam was between 2007-2010, almost one or two generations behind in terms of clients. Steam started changing during the Summer of 2010, after that first summer sale.
 
D

diaspora

Member
Ge0force said:
Origin has no mods Support/Workshop. Valve isn't charging for mods on Nexus either...
Click to expand...
They also consequently haven't monetised something that was originally free.
Rawket Lawnchair said:
Some third party games may be a bit more expensive than on Steam, but that's not the main problem.

The main problem is that they see their clients as a simple platform from where they can pocket 100% of the sale, and from where you can only launch your game.
Click to expand...

So... They're exactly like Valve?
 
R

Rawket Lawnchair

Member
diaspora said:
So... They're exactly like Valve?
Click to expand...

Well, Valve has at least tried to expand Steam (greenlight, community, broadcasts, market - some features worked, others didn't), even at a snail's pace, but at the cost of making a more functional client and some worthwhile games.

Origin and uPlay feel like they have been abandoned for the last couple of years and are only updated with new games and no new features nowadays.
 
D

diaspora

Member
Rawket Lawnchair said:
Well, Valve has at least tried to expand Steam (greenlight, community, broadcasts, market - some features worked, others didn't), even at a snail's pace, but at the cost of making a more functional client and some worthwhile games.

Origin and uPlay feel like they have been abandoned for the last couple of years and are only updated with new games and no new features nowadays.
Click to expand...
So the client only has new games? Oh damn, why would I want just that?
 
R

Rektash

Member
This whole "paid mods" thing is like the great reveal of why Valve integrated modding into the Steam client in the first place.

At the end of the day, all workshop mods do now, is giving Valve and ip holders more ways to control and monetize stuff.
 
S

SigSig

Member
While I think that the cut is not acceptable (imo it should be at least 50% for content creators and 50% for valve and the publisher), I can't share many of the points being made in this thread.

First, the "modding should be free" -> it's bad for the gamers argument:
It still is. You can go to the Nexus and download tons of free mods. You can go to the workshop and download tons of free mods.
Complaining about the content creators getting an additional way to monetize their creations is as entitled as it gets.

Then, the "if this continues, Fallout/TES will ship without unpaid/non-workshop modding support" -> it's bad for the gamre argument:
That's a legit worry, however I really can't see that happening. When Oblivion had that hilariously infamous horse armor DLC, people worried future games woudn't have mod support. A lot of available mods (and I guess quite a fair share of paid ones, too) rely on free third-party dependencies and couldn't have been created, were it not for them. Bethesda will always rely on people fixing their game for free and those patches tend to be incompatible with the way the workshop works.
If mods were workshop-only (and possibly even paid-workshop-only), their next release would either be rock solid (unlikely) or would come crashing down in it's first years.
They'd also would lose a metric ton of goodwill.

Next up, the "content creators are being ripped off" -> it's bad for the content creators argument:
I agree that the cut could be way better. Removing donation links also is a dickmove, yes.
Then again: The workshop is Valve's territory, Valve's infrastructure. If you want to monetize your content using Valve's platform to deliver it while sidestepping the official way of monetization, no shit this will be cracked down on. Some of these mods have a big filesize, you are welcome to build your own mod-platform and pay for that traffic yourself.
Feel free to get a Patreon account or put your donation links on your Nexus profile.
People are actively pulling the content they have provided for free before (see my first point) and migrate to the paid workshop though, so this kind of doesn't seem like it would be worse for the content creators than whatever they had before.

In the end, right now, all of this comes down to irrational fear and entitlement for me.
All in all, paid workshop seems like it would be a good thing for modders and gamers alike, seeing as how people could now make it a fulltime job to create mods.
 
F

funkystudent

Member
Dont have a issue with the paid mods idea but removing the option for free mods backed by donations (or at least not allowing the promotion of donations on steam) is a straight up scumbag move by Valve.
 
V

ViviOggi

Member
hemo memo said:
But at least you have the choice between 3 greedy companies and not one.
Click to expand...
Hardly, one of them locks their flagship titles to their client while the other is on Steam but adds their malware regardless. Outside of a select few titles no one cares about Uplay and Origin aren't Steam competitors but vehicles to circumvent Valve's cut.

GOG, hell even Desura are what you would call alternatives to Steam.
 
Q

Qassim

Member
Klossen said:
Bethesda and Valve get 75% for doing absolutely nothing?

Come on, how can anyone defend this? Just another desperate money grab to kill one of the last remaining instances of community-run content creations.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't say absolutely nothing. Valve provide all the infrastructure to host the mods in their worldwide CDN and payment infrastructure, Bethesda created the game and tools in order to create the mods.

Now, that isn't to say I agree that 25% is a fair cut, but I don't agree that Valve and Bethesda have done "absolutely nothing" in this equation.
 
D

DMiz

Member
Keasar said:
On the consumer side, something you used to get for free before is now being suddenly charged for.

If many of the mods I have used over the years would suddenly cost money, I would have never been able to spend the time I have with Skyrim (which has been always for the modding). Hundreds of mods I have used and liked, tried and tested, but if I had to pay for each of them the bills would be in the thousands, hundreds if just a small margin of them was. I can't support that and the reason I even played Skyrim would then be gone.
Click to expand...

This is the major thing.

I have used and tested hundreds of mods at this point - and this is not an exaggeration, thanks to a handy spreadsheet I've kept since Skyrim's release to document what I've used - and to imagine having paid for each and every single one is not a friendly thought.

I have donated to some mod authors whose work I think has been truly exceptional, but there have also been several duds that have either wrecked save files or have simply been underwhelming. This is not a good precedent. The donation system worked wonderfully well, and while I can see why all authors would want to make a little money off their work, this does not bode well for the upcoming Bethesda titles.
 
A

A More Normal Bird

Unconfirmed Member
Mushroomer25 said:
They likely foresaw mods. They probably didn't assume anybody would try to sell them. Personally, I don't see Steam interfering with free mod installation the way it is. However, if another service tried to sell mods without compensating Bethesda, that's a cease-and-desist letter right there.
Click to expand...
Maybe it's your wording but this post makes me thinks you've misunderstood the situation. It's not a matter of "foreseeing" mods; they knew their game would be modded because they've developed and fostered a modding community for more than a decade with their previous releases. They released official tools and partnered with Steam to add a new mod distribution network. They wouldn't have assumed that people would try to sell mods (in any large numbers) because no-one did with their previous releases and no-one did with Skyrim either because it's illegal. Allowing donations is not illegal and is not the same as selling mods (the largest mod distributor outside of Steam, the Nexus, doesn't allow authors to do anything more than passively allow donations; no campaigning, soliciting etc...).

Valve and Bethesda have now decided that selling mods will be allowed through Steam; they haven't done this because people receiving donations were making a profit off their services, but because they wish to monetise a heretofore free service. Disallowing donations for free mods increases the likelihood that the mod becomes paid, therefore bringing the mod into their ecosystem and giving them another revenue stream. As I said in my earlier post, the question is to what lengths they will go to ensure that mods are released via their network when it comes time for the next Fallout/Elder Scrolls.
 
T

tuxfool

Banned
alexandros said:
Are you guys serious? Bethesda made the game and provided the Creation Kit, Valve is providing the whole infrastructure. How is that "nothing"?
Click to expand...

Everybody that paid for the game has funded the creation kit. Unless Bethesda is going to add features and maintain that kit, then yes, it is nothing.
 
LiquidMetal14

LiquidMetal14

hide your water-based mammals
I just won't be supporting this initiative but some of the hyperbole is rampant. Let Valve fine tune it or just ultimately scrap it.
 
Dr. Buni

Dr. Buni

Member
I don't really get why modders should get money from modding other people's games and the only mod I ever used was basically a fix (the Dark Souls one by Durante), so I can't say this bothers me or that I find it "shitty". But that is just me :p
 
G

Gruso

Member
I'm sure there is more to this than some guy's tweet might suggest. AFAIK this is the screenshot that started it:

wW5j5yu.jpg
Click to expand...

Trawling reddit so you don't have to, this commenter suggests that the link was removed because it used a URL shortener (an automated process which happens throughout Steam):

Just gonna repost this from the /r/Pcmasterrace thread. For those too lazy to look, it seems the link was removed due to using a link shortener which is done as a security measure by valve. The nexus page seems to confirm. On my own I found several mods currently up on the free workshop containing functional paypal links and also many which link to a donation button on Nexus. Seems we might be jumping to evil conclusions a bit early.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comm...ng_donation_links_from_steam_workshop/cqmzv1y
Click to expand...

Here are his examples of currently available mods with functional donation links:


This guy suggests another reason:

Title is a bit misleading. They disable the mod so the author can check if they want to charge for it before they re-enable it themselves; it's better to do that than to just remove the donation information and leave the mod there.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/33oahx/valve_is_removing_mods_that_accept_donations/
Click to expand...

And an interesting observation from the same comment thread. There is a suggestion that Steam doesn't use that type of parentheses for removed links. Can anyone confirm?

If this is a reference to the "{LINK REMOVED}" shown in the screenshot, it's probably worth pointing out that the author typed that in, or perhaps accidentally copied and pasted that text form elsewhere. There is no removed link.
Click to expand...

[edit] The above comment was posted by afarnsworth_valve, a Valve employee.

I'm not a fan of what Valve introduced today. But there is a lot of unsubstantiated stuff flying around, including not just the removed donation link in question, but a lot of people saying they've received community bans for posting polite and rational opposition to what's happening (riiight).

There are things to be mad about today, but there are a lot of silly sideshows happening as well.
 
iNvid02

iNvid02

Member
remember how excited everyone was when the workshop launched for skyrim, they must have planned this from the beginning. fuck thaat
 
S

Stone Ocean

Member
The only issue with the whole thing to me is the removal of donations

Modders get the same cut as Valve so I don't see why the split is a problem
 
B

Bluth54

Member
Lime said:
"Valve is already exploiting consumers, so why should another exploitation matter?" is the argument you are making.

Secondly, you then completely ignore that they are taking 3/4 of labor they don't even own.
Click to expand...

I've never seen a TF2 item contributor say that Valve was exploiting them by taking 3/4th of the cut of the sales of their items. Some contributors have made 5 or 6 figures off their TF2 items. Will pay for mods prove to be as popular as items for Valve games? I doubt it, but you never know. It's possible some mod makers will make a good amount of money off of this.

Check out the Meet Your Makers article on the TF2 podcast Kritzcast, you can see how Valve exploiting them by taking 75% of the revenue of their items has affected their lives.

Of course mods are a bit different then items added to TF2/DOTA/CSGO. Is the 75% too high? Maybe, though of course that number is probably being split between Valve and Bethesda (I've heard 25% to Valve and 50% to Bethesda but I don't know if that's true or not). Of course without Valve they wouldn't have the platform to sell their mods on and with Bethesda they wouldn't have a game to make mods for, much like for TF2/DOTA/CSGO items without Valve they wouldn't have a game to make items for.


I do think Valve handled this poorly though, an optional donation system where Valve and Bethesda take a far smaller cut probably would of been better then this. I can kinda understand Valve deleting links to donate directly to mod makers, since they aren't able to verify that and if someone could get scammed, though from what I understand they have deleted/blocked people for being against it in the steam community discussion, which is awful.
 
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