General News - The Key to Making Paid Mods Work

Lostforever found an article on Shack News discussing in what way paid mods could be made into a working model.

Valve, the studio that gave PC gamers Steam, has always been a company that reveled in testing boundaries. However, the studio’s most recent endeavor, teaming up with Bethesda to allow Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim modders to charge money for their work, was pretty much a colossal failure. The paid mods system was taken down mere days after it was first put up in the wake of severe consumer backlash and Valve even admitted on the Steam website that the plan clearly hadn’t thought through. There’s no denying that the issue of paid mods is controversial, but I’m here to offer a few potential solutions that could make all parties happy. If Valve were ever to try implementing paid mods again, I think it should focus on two different areas: the issue of monetization and the kinds of games it introduces paid mods to.

More information.

I somehow missed Valve taking down their paid-mods scheme. Good for them for seeing their mistake relatively quickly (or at least bowing to consumer pressure) and correcting it. Let's hope they don't try it again.

Originally Posted by Capt. Huggy Face
I somehow missed Valve taking down their paid-mods scheme. Good for them for seeing their mistake relatively quickly (or at least bowing to consumer pressure) and correcting it. Let's hope they don't try it again.

Oh but they will try again. In their 'apology' post, they didn't say that it was a mistake, but that it was not 'well thought'. Basically, they said they made a mistake by doing it with an old(ish) game with an established mod community like Skyrim. I have no doubt they will do it again, but only with a new game where all modders start on the same ground.

Ahh, well, that's not so good.

No mention at all of oversight. That's half the problem (the other half being Steam/Bethesda's role as greedy exploitative schmucks). Any paid modding scheme will be unhealthy if it practically nurtures rampant piracy both on and off Steam, with practically no administrative recourse.

I especially liked how Gabe said that they absolutely weren't greedy, and his ""proof"" of this was that this mistake actually cost them a lot of money. So now we know, it's not possible to be both stupid and greedy, it must be either of the two.

The author incorrectly treats modding as if it is not an end onto itself; that the journey is not a big part of the reward. I suspect that most modders are currently doing it for personal satisfaction. Creating mods can be a satisfying process just from knowing that others are enjoying what you have built.

Adding in financial compensation will likely increase the pool of modders, but many of the new additions to the community will be there for the money. I expect they will often act like contractors: hording information instead of sharing because doing so improves their financial position. It will definitely change the hobby. But it will provide a new avenue for new people to enter the business.

For the end gamer, of course, it will increase the cost of playing a modded game. But I suspect that most people will not be willing to pay a large sum for a minor mod, so the cost of mods will likely spiral downward. The vendor supplying the mods will need to create an incentive to purchase the mods so they get their cut, which will lead to drastic sales price reductions and bundling. The end result will be that paid modders won't make very much money… just like most artists in the real world.

Around the turn of thge Millennium I met an early NWN player and enthusiast, who told me that the parent company of NWN originals had "terms of use" or how iot is calle - legal rules - that made ALL Mods created by the NWN tools AUTOMATICALLY become property of the parent company. Only loud protests by the players, he told me, were able to keep the lawyers from actually including these legal rules.

I always fear that companies will try the same : Harvest upon user-generated stuff = 100 % profits, because the company put 0 % ressources in that. It'd be like parasitism.

Originally Posted by Capt. Huggy Face
(or at least bowing to consumer pressure)

Which consumers? The ones who have kept shouting that games in their vanilla release version are crap and they are only turned playable by mods?
Sooner or later, companies were bound to notice and expected to charge where consumers see the value.

Beside, the problem was about the cut. The split was not considered balanced enough by the modding scene.

The PC gaming scene has turned all about the money. Gaming for gaming is being expelled from that platform.