And I am off,
probably the best read so far about the subject:
from Iced_Eagle @ Gabe Newells reddit
"Hi Gabe,
I worked on Eternal-Silence, which was a HL2 space combat mod released many years ago. We even got to present our mod to Valve many years ago (2006-ish), and suffice to say, I would not be working in the games industry now if it wasn't for that opportunity and experience with Valve back then, so thank you to all of the team at Valve for everything over the years. Also, I want to add that I'm viewing the workshop changes through the lens of my own experiences working on a total conversion mod.
Now, I do think offering content creators the option to have the ability to create revenue for themselves is an extremely noble goal. I'm not completely sold on the current direction, but I believe your north star is true. After all, it's the dream of many modders of total conversions at least, to be able to create enough interest where they one day can devote the massive amount of resources required to turn their mod into a full retail game, which is not cheap by any stretch of the imagination.
However, there are two tweaks which I would consider: - Publisher/developer education on appropriate revenue splits for mods. I think it's fair that there should be a split, but with Skyrim, I think the pendulum is not enough in favor of the developer of the mod, who were the ones to devote their time to build on their game. Yes, Valve and Bethesda created the platform and tools inside of the game to allow mods to happen (which is why I think the split is fair), but the actual developer(s) of the mod may have spent a lot of their time and resources working on a mod. Previously, yes, they would get nothing, but as of now, it's tough to imagine anyone to be able to count on the Workshop revenue as something that they could live off of. For smaller mods, let's say a new sword or armor, you likely would need to achieve a large volume of mods and sell those cheap and overall you could make a decent amount of revenue especially compared to the time investment. However, if you work for 3 years with 10-20 people on a total conversion, getting 25% of potential revenue would be extremely rough because you will only have a single mod to sell, and thus can only bank on your mod being extremely successful (which let's face it, statistically is unlikely).
Two-tiered system of content creators. By this, I mean that if you are a new author to the workshop, you have certain limits on what you could charge, until the author can develop a sense of trust with their customers. Let's say that at the beginning, I can only use Free or Pay-What-You-Want. Once I have X amount of downloads/payments, or perhaps if there were an author rating system where I could achieve 4+ stars out of 5 from the community, I would then graduate to have the ability to be able to create a static price mod. Maybe this would be too unfair, but the root of my concern is that there needs to be a trust relationship between the mod author and their customers. If a game update breaks the mod, and I had $15 for the mod, I want to have trust that the mod author would help their customers and fix the mod.
The root of that two-tier system is from a very old Valve presentation on surviving modding. In the presentation (which I can not find unfortunately), the general advice was that if you created a mod that was able to sustain 5,000 players on a consistent basis, you would be considered to be "successful" or at least have a fun mod, and Valve may look into helping you become a retail title. Having a structured system in the workshop like that old advice may be something worth investigating.
Finally, I wonder if it would be feasible to have a humble-bundle style slider system when you do payments. Perhaps create a floor for which category, and it would of course require buy-off from the developer/publisher, but it would be interesting if as a customer, I could influence where my funds went. Most of the time I may just leave it at defaults, but if I thought the developer deserved more, that would be my choice.
If you read this, thank you, and I hope you are enjoying your coffee. As I live in the Bellevue area, I would be more than willing to talk to you in person to have a larger discussion (private message me). However, as I said, I think your north star is true, and I'm glad you are soliciting feedback from the community and open for changes to make this a good system for all parties involved."
