Skyrim Skyrim - Paid Mod Status Update(Re-Opened)

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
new mod i did really quick.. i call it "Gabe for one day" :)

m73hr.jpg


up1n5.jpg

This mod needs to have some sort of shiny object at the end of the dollar bills that he is trying to reach.
 
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The truly sad thing out of all this is the mod authors. If you read some of the comments you can see how many in the community display pure self-entitlement.
But that's nothing new or surprising is it wolf? Since Morrowind there always was that bastard part of the community which thought that modders are there to serve THEM. And they also tend to be most vocal as well.
 
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But that's nothing new or surprising is it wolf? Since Morrowind there always was that bastard part of the community which thought that modders are there to serve THEM. And they also tend to be most vocal as well.

That's very true, and I think wise modders pretty much tune out the bad noise. The internet is clearly infested with tossers, and The Nexus has a particularly dense concentration of them. In the end, you know there are thousands of appreciative, sane people enjoying your work, and the bad buzz is just the wasps at the picnic. If someone lets internet outcries affect them - god help them.
 
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Well, a couple years back, Nexus gave authors the ability to block users from their files entirely with the click of a button. I've used it a couple times. So extreme self-entitlement can be curbed quite easily.

Overall, entitlement is not the Nexus' #1 problem, however. That would instead be the increasing ignorance of users, incapable of doing anything but click the "Download with NMM" button. I simply hope it's only a vocal minority of dumbasses.
 
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I think that entitlement is one of ignorance's many siblings Drithius. Some users probably expect that modders should come to their place and install the damn mod for them :)

In the end, you know there are thousands of appreciative, sane people enjoying your work, and the bad buzz is just the wasps at the picnic. If someone lets internet outcries affect them - god help them.

Wellll, I'm not watching modding scene as carefully as I used to but I know that, in the past, we have lost quite a few talented modders due to wasps stings. Not everybody has the patience or the thick skin to shrug it off…
 
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That's true, but, sadly, I regard the clamour from obnoxious, anonymous brats as inevitable, so a thick skin is almost a requirement for a modder.
 
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Have these been brought up?

DarkOne interview by Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

Bethblog with Bethesda PR doing its best to tread water on a 45% cut.

Darkone said:
RPS: In light of that, how do you feel about the current revenue split which – although it’s variable by game – currently gives 25% to the Skyrim mod creators? I’ve heard the “standing on the shoulders of giants” argument and the “users have already paid for those giants” argument. Where do you fall? How would you change it?

I understand Bethesda’s and Valve’s reasoning or, should I say, I think I understand what they would say if they were to actually come out and try and reason the 25/75 split. And I do think they should. [A couple of hours after this interview was conducted, and shortly before paid mods were pulled, Bethesda did explain their reasoning behind the system.]

From a completely personal stand-point, I do think that having the same 25/75 split for Skyrim that there is with TF2, DotA 2 and CSGO is daft. Skyrim was sold at an AAA price-point. DotA 2 has been free from the start, TF2 wasn’t free but is now, and I don’t know much about CSGO but I’m pretty sure it was never sold at an AAA price point. It makes sense that the revenue split for DotA 2 and TF2 is skewed so much because that’s one of the only ways the game generates money. You can play both games for free and the developers make their money through in-app purchases which, much to Valve’s credit, aren’t necessary to get the full experience.

Makes sense then that the revenue split is skewed that way. But Skyrim was sold as an AAA game. It was £34.99 for me to buy off Steam at launch. I bought it because they’d already announced the game would be moddable and the price of the Creation Kit (the SDK) was included in that. On top of that, I don’t think anyone could argue that Skyrim’s modding scene hasn’t contributed in some part to the continued success and popularity of Skyrim even now. I would say, from no position of authority on the topic what-so-ever, that Bethesda have already reaped the rewards of the time, effort and money they invested in to creating and releasing the Creation Kit. And lets not forget that they don’t need to go to the effort of doing that, but they do, and we’re all really, really grateful that they do, but as much as they talk about it taking considerable effort I don’t think they could argue that it wasn’t worth their time. So to come out and say that Bethesda should be taking the same revenue split as free games that rely on their in-app purchases in order to survive is, to me, just a little bit silly.

And lets not forget that Skyrim is the first game they’ve done this on. Instead of taking it easy, not pushing things too far and easing people in to it they’ve gone in to it full steam ahead (ahem, pun intended). If they’d been a bit more reasonable, 50% to the mod author, 25% to Valve, 25% to Bethesda, I think it would have done a hell of a lot to not only show that this is actually about mod authors getting paid for their hard work and not just about lining their pockets further.

Having said that, I understand the arguments that Bethesda would potentially put forward, that this is their intellectual property, and that game developers or people looking to profit off of it would typically have to pay to license out that IP, and that 25% of something is better than 100% of nothing. But still, you can’t help but think if they’d thought this one through a little bit more then a lot of the vitriol being thrown their way right now could have been avoided. I’m told that the mod developers who were privately invited to consult Bethesda on this topic had told Valve and Bethesda words to similar effect. But at the end of the day, in a couple of years time, when paying for mods is more mainstream (but hopefully free modding isn’t killed off completely), it will be water under the bridge for Bethesda and profit they can actually see on their bottom line.

RPS: Is there any way paid mods could have been introduced to an existing community without it causing a rift between the paids and the paid-nots? It feels like this would have been a more useful experiment if introduced with a new game that didn’t previously have modding support.

Absolutely not. This would have caused a rift in the Skyrim modding community no matter where or how it was done.

I imagine, and once again I say this from a position of absolutely no authority on the subject, they wanted to do it now with Skyrim, a 3 and a half year old community, to get all of this drama out of the way and get people used to the idea so that it doesn’t sour their next game release, likely to be announced during their E3 show.
 
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most of which are people afraid their mods are going to be stolen and uploaded to Steam for profit.

The impact of greed so so heavy nowadays that people have to fear that their FREE goods are stolen and SOLD to be UNfree.

It's almost as if there was - already in the minds of the people - that things just shouldn't be free - because being free = no profits = unfun.

Very extreme and drastic thought : From a company's perspective, everything that's free is an offense as such, because free thgings as such - or their mere existence - undermines the philosophy of everything being sold - being a tool to generate profits - in a world in which everything is measured against its value in money (the "economization of the world"). It's a bit like in 1984, where the mere existence of a thing is a violation of ... a kind of philosophy. Only heretics would disturb a given order.
 
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