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Gabe Newell doing AMA on reddit about the mod paying thing right now

My past experiences tell me that damage control and PR speak are incoming

Get ready for the neoliberal Steam/Valve corporate fans as well.
 
I have a feeling something will be done to change this. I may be delusional, but I think Valve likes their positive image from their customers and this has pissed off a lot of people
 
"For your troubles I'll let you in on what our cut is leading to"


Half life 3 trailer with real people, it's actually a movie
 
cyba89 said:
Everyone, ask him about HL3
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Hmmm…

Good to see that he's jumping into the opportunity to calm some fires.
 
Am I the only one wondering if he actually has any saying in business matters? Because he sure as hell seems like just a PR figure in the last year or so,.
 
No reason to be mad at Valve. If a modder wants money for his work you just have to ask yourself:

"Is this large chested animu waifu model worth 5.99?"


Edit: Also. Reddit has the shittiest layout ever. Wish there was a better way to do these things. Even Kotaku AMA's are easier to follow
 
I like Gabe but the way he communicates to customers and critics alike always sounds at the very least passive aggressive and at most cynical and unapologetic. I look forward to how he responds to these criticisms, though.
 
A bit off-topic, but I don't like the reddit style of posting. I'm having a hard time following the conversations (I lose track of which questions Gabe is answering).
 
Wowfunhappy said:
Okay, I know I asked for "brief", but... why are people upset about this?

I mean, change at all that, but are there no legitimate complaints?

(I've been studying for finals which is why I'm not up to speed)
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My biggest issue is that the modders only get 25% off the money.

80% is the absolute lowest acceptable amount, and that's lower than I would recommend. I'd say 90-95% is what's fair.
 
JoeTheBlow said:
They are exploiting cash out of a longstanding PC community that has always been volunteer based. And those guys only get 25% of all proceeds.
Its more complicated than that in its effects, read the skyrim paid mods thread for much more.
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Don't forget they need to make $100 before payout. Meaning they need to earn 4 times as much as they get in the end through the mod.
 
Wowfunhappy said:
Okay, I know I asked for "brief", but... why are people upset about this?

I mean, change at all that, but are there no legitimate complaints?

(I've been studying for finals which is why I'm not up to speed)
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A good post to answer it (partly):

Dwalls said:
How is this going to affect tutorial content and the open sharing of just how something or another was achieved. I'm coming at this from a perspective of other monetized industries. People tend to be really secretive in some of them and treat their methods like the most hallowed of secrets because they know somebody else being capable of replicating what they're doing is going to cut into their profits. In the modding scene of old those secrets didn't exist and people freely shared that knowledge. Take for example chesko figuring out how to do multithreading in papyrus, if that gave his mods a distinct performance benefit to other mods on the workshop and he'd make money off of that how likely would he be willing to share that knowledge? I mean this thought is likely largely irrelevant for Skyrim modding because I doubt there's a whole lot left to figure out and all of that knowledge is out there. But for future iterations of the workshop I'd see this as a barrier to "great content" that currently isn't there. That collaborative effort and hunt for new tricks and techniques is going to be inadvertently hampered by this change. I'm sure a lot of current incredibly awesome mods wouldn't exist if someone else hadn't shared how they'd figured out to do something.

Take the music industry for example, people are beyond secretive in that and they treat plugins and tools they use to achieve a specific sound as if it was the holy grail of knowledge because they know that's what's earning them their money and as someone trying to figure all of it out it's kind of infuriating and it feels like you're spending 90% of your time reinventing the wheel because the guy that invented it is being an ass about sharing his secrets.
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Gabe acts like a sensei at Valve in reality, while he tries to play down his role, people ultimately look to him regardless.
 
LaronX said:
Don't forget they need to make $100 before payout. Meaning they need to earn 4 times as much as they get in the end through the mod.
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Quite a few joke mods are priced at $100. I don't think those folks realise that they're not getting 100% of the revenue.
 
Nice damage control there. Crazy that even reddit got mad with Valve over this, they love the circlejerking over everything PC gaming.
 
You should be cynical. If any other developer rolled this out

"For example, two areas where people have legitimate beefs against us are support and Greenlight. We have short term hacks and longer term solutions coming, but the longer term good solutions involve writing a bunch of code. In the interim, it's going to be a sore point. Both these problems boil down to building scalable solutions that are robust in the face of exponential growth."

In the face of legitimate customer concerns, people would be losing their shit over how empty and buzzword laden that paragraph is. It's a non-answer that really means "Fuck you and your opinion," but since it's GabeN, he's getting a ton of "Hey, man, thanks for like, listening to us."
 
WanderingWind said:
You should be cynical. If any other developer rolled this out

"For example, two areas where people have legitimate beefs against us are support and Greenlight. We have short term hacks and longer term solutions coming, but the longer term good solutions involve writing a bunch of code. In the interim, it's going to be a sore point. Both these problems boil down to building scalable solutions that are robust in the face of exponential growth."

In the face of legitimate customer concerns, people would be losing their shit over how empty and buzzword laden that paragraph is. It's a non-answer that really means "Fuck you and your opinion," but since it's GabeN, he's getting a ton of "Hey, man, thanks for like, listening to us."
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wut

he's getting the "hey, man" cause it's weird to see someone this high a company straight up mention where and why people give them beef

hardly a PR answer in what we're accostumed to

but im just a crazy valve fanboy!
 
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