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[Nzyme32]

Honestly that should change too

Probably, but there is no uproar and as several articles point out, modders and customers are generally pretty happy with it. It would be interesting if people now challenge that

 

[Yudoken]

If they would an donate button (which Valve should get a cut about 0-15% and Bethesda 0%) it would be great!

 

[cdyhybrid]

That doesn't have anything to do with what I just said so what the fuck?

You said it was mostly the modding "community" (i.e. mod users) getting upset, and not modders themselves.

I posted about modders explicitly forbidding their creations' use to sell mods on the Workshop.

Is that clear enough or do I need to walk you through it?

 

[HariKari]

The reaction must've been TOXIC.

Toxic? Well, that would depend on your perspective. Large and widespread? Certainly. The mod community was far from unified on this, and many were against it. I think that may have been the biggest shock for Valve.

 

[Macho Madness]

i.e. not with MY money. Let's be real the majority of the handwringing about compensation was motivated by selfishness not concern for the modders. That's why it was mostly the modding "community" getting upset not the modders themselves.

Doesn't matter. The apparent "not even" 1% of money Bethesda was making off the mods wasn't worth the bad PR.

 

[Spaghetti]

glad valve weren't stubborn about this.

 

[EventHorizon]

Wow. I haven't followed this too closely because I'm not into PC gaming at the moment, but even from the outside I could tell that the stink was starting to stick to Valve. Now with that very clear and direct turnaround and apology, Valve's looks to be coming out of this smelling like roses.

Failing is not as important as what you do after you fail. Way to go Valve.

 

[Majukun]

remembers me of how microsoft pull out from the "always online" policy on xbone..they made a move out of pure greed and without thinking too much about the implications..and finally gamers discovered their balls and stopped acting like we owe them something becaue we buy their products (and this it's true for both bethesda and valve)

yes,there is something good in this cluncky plan of them,but it needs a lot more thought behind it and a lot more investments on their part and time on the blackboard

you can't just put a price tag and call it a day like they did with dlcs

 

[David Ricardo]

It's not, but who should get paid when "your" mod contains work from 12 other mods? Who polices that? Who makes sure that each mod has original and not stolen content? Duplicate mods?

It's a mess dropping it into an existing mod community that operated on a collaborative sharing model. Valve realized this and corrected the problem.

Fully expect the eventual Fallout 4 mod scene to support paid mods from the start though.

I didn't understand what was the problem at first. This post helped me greatly.

 

[Stone Ocean]

i.e. not with MY money. Let's be real the majority of the handwringing about compensation was motivated by selfishness not concern for the modders. That's why it was mostly the modding "community" getting upset not the modders themselves.

Let's pretend all modders were on Valve's side and that these decisions affected the modders and the modders only!

 

[Gamesadict]

Good to see they listened and took it down.

Good concept, horrible implementation. They should have made it a donate button or something instead, while keeping all mods free. Also the 25% share was a joke, wtf.

 

[vcc]

If they would an donate button (which Valve should get a cut about 0-15% and Bethesda 0%) it would be great!

Bethesda lawyers would be shutting that down immediately. The 30/45/25 wasn't unfair with that set up.

 

[Odah]

As a modder myself I am glad this joke finally came to an end. I do it for fun not in order to make money out of it.

 

[Venfayth]

Nobody donates for mods. Paid mods should exist, but Valve's implementation was bad.

 

[Krakn3Dfx]

What will become of Companion Chicken now?

 

[espher]

Yeah, that makes it sound like they're still planning to do something like this in the future, but that starting with Skyrim was a bad idea.

I'm not automatically opposed to a mod marketplace. Lord knows I bought lots of RBN songs, and that was functionally a 'mod marketplace' for Rock Band.

Starting it with an Elder Scrolls game was indeed a bad idea.

I'll still donate to creators whose work I like as I have in the past. I think they should eyeball a humble bundle-esque donation model, where you can donate and pick your percentages (mostly so I can pick 100% modder).

 

[KimonoNoNo]

As I posted in the Jimquizition thread before the U-Turn.

Quite simply the best thing going for Skyrim was the dedicated community that has been built up over all these years and it saddens me greatly to see it ripping itself apart.

I'm pretty disgusted by the way they've been used by Valve as guinea pigs in their grand experiment only to be thrown to the lions when the shit hits the fan.

Well as Valve says, they've now got plenty of feedback in what not to do.
Hopefully no irreparable damage has been done.

 

[KR_remix]

This literally the biggest issue. Trying to get money from outside help to fix their pos engine/game is a scummy move and doesn't surprise me that it was birthed by Zenimax/Bethsda

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/amid-controversy-bethesda-defends-paid-steam-mods/1100-6426929/

But when Valve first approached Bethesda in 2012 about the idea of paid mods, the developer said it saw this as an opportunity to bolster modding so that it could reach more players.

Sounds like it was Valve's idea.

Also I'm surprised that they have been planning this for three years, it seemed so poorly implemented and thought out. If it returns I hope they decide to shoulder more risk themselves.

 

[Gattsu25]

Toxic? Well, that would depend on your perspective. Large and widespread? Certainly. The mod community was far from unified on this, and many were against it. I think that may have been the biggest shock for Valve.

I specifically am referring to the brands (e.g. toxic to Bethesda's image)

 

[Aselith]

You said it was mostly the modding "community" (i.e. mod users) getting upset, and not modders themselves.

I posted about modders explicitly forbidding their creations' use to sell mods on the Workshop.

Is that clear enough or do I need to walk you through it?

That disclaimer is intended to keep people from stealing thier work and from integrating their work into paid mods that they won't be paid for so that has nothing to do with anything.

Now some of them may want their mods to be free and that's cool. That's the way it was intended to be but in that case it's not necessarily about the percentages unless the specifically said that.

 

[Roshin]

Hopefully they do allow for some sort of optional donation system in the future for mod makers.

Agreed. Given time, a donation system could work.

Also, I think this could have gone a lot smoother if they had actually said something in advance, instead of just suddenly dropping it on the internet like they did.

 

[zombieshavebrains]

They listened.

 

[not psycho]

Good news. The execution was awful, not even up to the standards of a trial run. I get that they like to experiment, but even an experiment has to have thought behind it.

The concept is loaded with inherent difficulties. How do you sell mods when forced updates can break the game, a mod, combinations of mods, and there is zero recourse for the buyer? How do you judge and enforce copyright disputes? What happens if devs say "Steam mods only."? It seems like they didn't even consider these questions.

Doing it retroactively with Skyrim was insane. Copyright issues will be a problem even when modders know about the money before they start working; they are impossible when they had no idea.

The way they divided up the money is something to reconsider, but there were plenty of fatal flaws before getting to that. This has nothing to do with the basic idea of modders having options to get paid. The execution was well below the standard for even an experiment.

 

[Giever]

The implementation was fucked. Hopefully they can get a better system in place with a fresh title, since Skyrim was probably the worst choice in regards to rocking the boat.

I still think, at this point, it would be good if they added donation buttons to workshop pages. The visibility of a button like that officially being on the steam page itself along with the awareness this minor controversy brought about would hopefully bring some more donations for modders.

 

[Kalnos]

Props to them for listening. I don't really think the idea is/was bad but the decision to use a community as established as Skyrim's was a problem.

 

[UnluckyKate]

Valve pulling the plug ? Or bethesda ?

 

[Vostro]

Yep, implemeting it on Skyrim was just a bad idea.

 

[HariKari]

I specifically an referring to the brands (e.g. toxic to Bethesda's image)

I don't think Bethesda cares. Valve cares about their image, to a certain extent, although their customer service begs to differ. People simply didn't roll over in the way they were expected to. Many of the most important Skyrim modders stood with the community and said this was a bad idea. That had to throw them for a loop.

 

[hamchan]

It was a move by a big company to move into a space that has existed for decades sharing content for free, monetising it while refusing to do any curating themselves, leaving any copyright violations or problems with mods up to the users to police and report, basically just taking their cut without wanting to do any of the work.

That's what it looked like to me anyways.

 

[bobawesome]

I would've had more respect for them had they just stuck to their guns, regardless of how terrible the idea was.

 

[Vlaphor]

I had two major issues with this. One was that the advent of paid mods meant that publishers now had motivation to fight against free mods, and the modding scene in general is already kind of thin, with most games today barely having any (hacked together) mod support at all (take Dragon Age Inqusition for example, an RPG with no mod support sounds ludicrous to me).

The second is (and I've been saying this for awhile), we gave Valve too much power and trust. Now, if/when they decide to fuck us, we have nowhere else to go. Valve and Gabe are not our friends, they are a business looking for profits. Their actions today showed that they can recognize when they screwed up, but what if they couldn't recognize that, then what would we do? We only considered Steam an amazing thing because the PC scene was so poor before, but please understand that Steam is not a platform...it's a store. A game does not come out on Steam in the same way it does not come out on Gamestop.

 

[Stone Ocean]

I don't think Bethesda cares. Valve cares about their image, to a certain extent, although their customer service begs to differ. People simply didn't roll over in the way they were expected to. Many of the most important Skyrim modders stood with the community and said this was a bad idea. That had to throw them for a loop.

Wasn't like most of the flack directed torwards Valve?

 

[mysteriousmage09]

Good.

 

[HariKari]

Wasn't like most of the flack directed torwards Valve?

It was, but with Bethesda's blog post, they were opening themselves up to be next in line. Valve does deserve the lion's share of the blame for the poor implementation and their absurd cut of the potential revenue. Gabe gave some really shitty, unsatisfactory answers in his posts on reddit. That only infuriated people more.

 

[RK9039]

Valve pulling the plug ? Or bethesda ?

Probably Valve, sounds like it was their idea in the first place.

 

[bearythebear]

It's strange that people think that it's fine for developers to charge for early access, but modders only deserve donations at the most....

 

[Sober]

Nobody donates for mods. Paid mods should exist, but Valve's implementation was bad.

I feel like Valve maybe missed how the mod scene, at least for Skyrim if not some other games, grew to support modders who just released resource packs or dependencies for other projects.

 

[Jimrpg]

It was a great idea but the 25% share was not fair. Just fix the share percentage valve to something that is fairer for the work done.

 

[cdyhybrid]

That disclaimer is intended to keep people from stealing thier work and from integrating their work into paid mods that they won't be paid for so that has nothing to do with anything.

Now some of them may want their mods to be free and that's cool. That's the way it was intended to be but in that case it's not necessarily about the percentages unless the specifically said that.

Right, and there was basically nothing preventing people from stealing their work and implementing it into something they were selling - Valve's response to that possibility was essentially "send them a DMCA notice", i.e. get them to take it down yourself.

 

[vareon]

I would've had more respect for them had they just stuck to their guns, regardless of how terrible the idea was.

The idea stuck, they just think it's best not to start with Skyrim, if I'm reading this right.

 

[HariKari]

I would've had more respect for them had they just stuck to their guns, regardless of how terrible the idea was.

Valve will scrap an entire game if they don't like it or think it's good enough. That's why there in the position to do this sort of thing. Sticking to your guns isn't an option if the people your feature is supposed to help most are telling you they don't want it, or think it's poorly thought out.

 

[agiantenemycrab]

The hysteria that this feature provoked was ugly and I can understand why Valve would want to prevent their reputation from being damaged further by it, so this move was somewhat inevitable.

That said, I am almost certain that this feature will return at some point, and in a number of years this will be a stable and well liked feature of Steam, much like the regular workshop is now. The goals that Valve provides in their statement of intent are reasonable, and the ideas they have presented would achieve those goals.

 

[Kalnos]

The idea stuck, they just think it's best not to start with Skyrim, if I'm reading this right.

Valve has been doing this for a while with their own products, this was just the first real attempt to facilitate another company doing it.

 

[Chezzymann]

I think the idea is actually pretty interesting cause lots of established franchises today started off as mods and it would be cool to see how things could develop but doing it on Skyrim of all places that already has a deeply entrenched modding community that has been going for 4 years is probably not the best place to start

 

[kpaadet]

We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing.

You don't say?

 

[Stone Ocean]

I would've had more respect for them had they just stuck to their guns, regardless of how terrible the idea was.

Sticking to something that is incredibly stupid isn't respect worthy, it's just stupid

 

[vcc]

It was, but with Bethesda's blog post, they were opening themselves up to be next in line. Valve does deserve the lion's share of the blame for the poor implementation and their absurd cut of the potential revenue. Gabe gave some really shitty, unsatisfactory answers in his posts on reddit. That only infuriated people more.

I think that was the most uninformed part of the outrage. There was legitimate problems with lack of Q/A and curation on a paid system. There were legitimate concerns about implications on mods. But the split, that was close to industry standards for that kind of IP licencing/publishing. Good luck ever getting better than that sort of deal.

 

[Ganzlinger]

We did it!

Thanks for your understanding, Gabe.

 

[Vulcano's assistant]

I would've had more respect for them had they just stuck to their guns, regardless of how terrible the idea was.

That's a position that can be only held when one is not affected.

 

[Ruff]

- double post sorry.