Steam to start selling fan mods of games on the Workshop.

[Vyk]

Not going to pretend I know the whole story, and haven't ready any articles on it. So take my opinion with a grain of salt. But I wouldn't point any fingers at Bethesda right away. If they were asked if its okay if modders make money off of working on their game, and they said yes, fans can make money off of our game. That's honestly pretty badass on their part. Unfortunate if it's not handled very well by Valve though. Which yeah. If they put the same amount of effort into it that they do with Greenlight, that's really just sad. I used to be under Steam's spell just like every other PC gamer. But having a gaming girlfriend has helped me need to look elsewhere for my games so we don't have to buy them twice, and it's sort of disenchanted me with Steam overall. I like Steam for it's great prices and convenience, but that's really just it and mostly only at face value. Their marketing leaves a bit to be desired. In that regard, I adore GOG way more. They bend over backwards to make sure everything is as good as it can be for all parties involved

[Spuuky]

I like Steam and think it's perfect for what I want, which is an easy way to have all my games tied together. There are obviously situations that it isn't great but none of them apply to me.

The Skyrim mods subreddit, like any passionate group of people, is automatically going to violently resist change as a whole. That should not surprise anyone.

[Yeargdribble]

I don't understand why people don't think Valve and Bethesda deserve such a large cut. You're using Bethesda's game and tools. Surely some of you do some creative things and have an idea how much it costs to get access to AutoCAD, or Maya, or Photoshop, or Premiere, or ProTools. These premium creative tools can cost ridiculous amounts of money even on their subscription models.

Bethesda is giving their game, and their TES Construction kit for a ridiculously low price by comparison. Oh, and did I mention it's their game?

Valve is providing a distribution platform seen by millions. It gets your wares in front of the eyes of tons of people and cover costs of hosting and bandwidth.

Obviously both Valve and Bethesda deserve a huge cut of what modders make.

People want to blame Valve and Bethesda for the destruction of community. They are only a small player in that. The community has proved to be ridiculously toxic. They are acting so entitled. They have shifted slightly in the last 24 hours thankfully. Yesterday they were saying they don't think anyone deserves and compensation. Now just a few are saying they think the issue is too little compensation. Some are even saying that we should start donating to modders.

So here's some of the numbers of on that. One modder mentioned getting 1 donation in over 1 million downloads. Durante (of DSFix fame) mentioned he got donations from 0.17% of people who used his various mods. Nobody has been donating in all the time. When you're getting those numbers getting 25% from Valve seems fantastic.

Chesko has been burned at the stake. He was one of the most notable modders in Skyrim (Frostfall was probably his most well known). Everyone was calling him a miserable sellout and even far less savory things. This is a guy that has no doubt spend 100s of hours on his mods. But the community turn on him hard. He's announced that he's basically leaving the community and the community is blaming Valve.

Really, it's Valve's fault entirely? No, gaming is a toxic place. We threaten people in online games. We threaten women on twitter. We call modders sellouts for wanting to make any money. Just watching how acerbic the comments have been in the Skyrim modding community, I think the blame lies almost entirely on the community itself.

Sure, paying for mods sucks. I've been an obsessive TES modder for a very long time. I binge on mods like crazy and this will probably curb that. It's an inconvenience in my life, but that doesn't mean I should abandon all reason and say that all these people are pieces of crap for wanting to get paid for their work.

Maybe it's that I'm unique in working in a field that most people do as a simple hobby. Maybe it's because people believe that a job is something that is supposed to be miserable and soul crushing, not something you enjoy. They resent those who get paid to do something that is also enjoyable. I know I've been the target of that plenty as well, so I identify with modders. I think people just need to stop being so entitled.

[Skyblade]

I don't understand why people don't think Valve and Bethesda deserve such a large cut. You're using Bethesda's game and tools. Surely some of you do some creative things and have an idea how much it costs to get access to AutoCAD, or Maya, or Photoshop, or Premiere, or ProTools. These premium creative tools can cost ridiculous amounts of money even on their subscription models.

Bethesda is giving their game, and their TES Construction kit for a ridiculously low price by comparison. Oh, and did I mention it's their game?

Valve is providing a distribution platform seen by millions. It gets your wares in front of the eyes of tons of people and cover costs of hosting and bandwidth.

I don't blame Bethesda at all. I blame Valve almost entirely. Honestly, if Valve came out with the numbers and showed that they were receiving 5-10% of the total, I'd be fine with it. Any more than that, and I think they are blatantly extorting their position of market dominance.

The 75-25 split is fine with me, as long as that split is with the people who are actually make the games being modded. I don't mind Bethesda getting a massive cut. They poured far more resources into the original product, and the mod work is derivative.

Valve is doing diddly squat here. They're "hosting the content". Something with has zero oversight, zero quality control, zero long-term investment, and costs next to nothing. They don't deserve a massive cut of the profits. I'm pretty sure, however, that they're receiving at least half of that 75%, if not more.

[Ayen]

25% sounds reasonable to me considering they were making zip before. The others getting 75% doesn't surprise me considering their position. Don't know if Value plans to show the numbers or not, but I wouldn't hold my breath. They're kind of not obligated to. This has little to no impact on me since I seldom play PC games, and when I do I don't use mods for anything.

Letting modders choose whether they want to give their mods away for free or charge them seems the best way to go about it. Not gonna stop people from troutting on those who choose the latter.

[escobert]

The owner of Nexus, Dark0ne, responded to Chesko on Reddit:

"Hmmm, the reason we're positioned there is because (1) I don't want to charge for mods and (2) even if I wanted to, I can't. Valve approached me about being a service provider, where I could take up to 5% of their cut of things and it was seen as the Premier League paying a very, very tiny amount towards grass roots football. Which is handy, because it'll end up paying about 10% of the cost of upgrading and running the forum server in light of the increased traffic we have right now, which adds nothing to the upkeep of the Nexus sites. Every little helps, right?

It was offered as a gesture of thanks, directly from Valve, to Nexus and several other tools and sites in the community for the continued work done within the community, and is accepted as such, with the stipulation that it wouldn't stop me from forming my own opinion and sharing said opinions openly and publicly. And I said up to 5%, so if a mod author selects 5 service providers, each service provider gets 1% of Valve's cut. I knew this was coming since they messaged me a few weeks ago, but I had no idea when. I was under no NDA, though, and a few mod authors approached by Valve have said the same. Wasn't for me to get involved, I'd already made my news post pre-empting everything.

Not really too worried about that one biting me in the ass.

I'm sorry about what has happened to you. I've been watching the events unfold and it's been horrific to watch. My Skype is available in the private mod author forums if you would like to chat. A lot of mod authors have been privately talking to me about what they think, some even apologising to me for some reason for contemplating using the service and I've told them all the same thing; I cannot and will not begrudge you for wanting to make money from your work. This backlash was always, ALWAYS going to happen. I told Valve as much, and they said they knew. I'm not entirely sure they knew it would be THIS bad, however.

Edit: With a bit more clarity on how service providers work. It's not hidden, it's on their service provider listing at the bottom of this page (https://steamcommunity.com/wor..., which explains how it works. Mod authors select service providers who they think helped them in their modding, and in turn, the service provider gets between 1%-5% of Valve's cut of their profits, depending on how many service providers were picked by the mod author.

So the mod author opts in to it themselves, and the money comes from Valve's cut."

hopefully that clears a couple things up.

[Bolivar]

Maybe it's that I'm unique in working in a field that most people do as a simple hobby. Maybe it's because people believe that a job is something that is supposed to be miserable and soul crushing, not something you enjoy. They resent those who get paid to do something that is also enjoyable. I know I've been the target of that plenty as well, so I identify with modders. I think people just need to stop being so entitled.

I get that you want to see your peers get paid for their work but you're misconstruing this as "the community vs. modders." Some of the most vocal opposition is coming from within the modding community, most notably Chesko himself. He writes in his post that he isn't leaving the scene, just the Workshop, in part because of how infuriated he is with how Valve is handling this. Steam has had tremendous success with its Content Creation initiatives but it's not something that translates well when shoehorned into a modding community, especially TES modding, as I'm sure you're well aware of yourself. For anyone who wants to know more about this topic, and why there is legitimate opposition to it within the modding community, not just gamers being toxic, should read the post on Nexus Mods by its founder (starting with the section "Permission changes regarding paid mods").

The first "mandatory" mod has announced it is joining the paid workshop - SkyUI. For anyone who doesn't know, it's an absolutely essential plug in, recommended on nearly every major guide. It reconfigures the interface to make the game much more manageable with mouse & keyboard. It's a great example of the interconnected problem, in that it relies on other mods and other mods incorporate it in turn. Suffice to say, people are having metldowns about this, including the team members who helped to create it and do not want their work being sold. The irony here is that Bethesda is being rewarded for screwing up so bad on the PC interface that their fans had to fix it for them.

[Yeargdribble]

I think many of the issues concerning the community collapsing are really being blown and exacerbated by the community. We're not ever 48 hours in at this point. I think time will allow for the inter-connectivity to work itself out the same way issues of DLC compatibility or version comptability did. Things will take a while and then they will start to settle out.

The top quality mods will float to the top. When the community is done being super angry, they might realize that $1 for something as quality as SkyUI is a steal. It's likely the new versions of SkyUI will slowly get incorporated into more mods and we'll all just get over it. Ultimately, people will probably stop buying silly single armor packs and only things with reputable modders behind them will really be bought.

It'll be a lot like the way apps work on phones and tablets. The market kinda sorts itself out by the reputation of the developers and the quality of their apps as well as how hard those devs work to keep the apps updated and working in tandem with other apps they are meant to cross support with.

It's funny, we all freaked out about some of the first DLC, ironically enough, Horse Armor in Oblivion, but to a degree it has worked itself out. There's good DLC and there's terrible cash grab DLC out there by all sorts of different studios. Some people have wised up and while there will always be people stupid enough to buy worthless DLC, informed gaming consumers have started being more selective about the DLC they by. They are getting wary of the early access games they buy, the Kickstarters they back, and the pre-orders they place... myself included.

Once everyone is done throwing a hissy fit, I think this could be a great thing for modding in the long run. People getting paid to make something are more likely to polish it up and less likely get burned out by an entitled mass demanding improvements on a free product.

I think we just have to move past the weird psychology that binds us all. We all sort of balked when you started seeing phone games for $2 or $3 instead of $1. Even if it was a better product, we didn't like the idea. Some of us drop $5 or $10 on a whim every frequently on other dumb thing, but are hesitant to pull the trigger for a $5 app. Some people go to Starbucks every day for a something super transient, but won't spend $10 on a high quality app that will get used every single day and improve their lives.

I guess I just finally figured that out for myself long ago and stopped being a miser about $10 apps that I would literally use daily when I so flippantly spend equal amounts of money on much more trivial things.

I've also realized that ultimately, I'm renting everything. You buy a nice piece of electronics or a computer and you pay a lot and you like the idea of ownership and you do own it, but what you're really paying for is the limited shelf life of that product. My iPod Touch 4 cost $300 and barely functions now, but I got several years of great use out of it, so why should I be that angry that it no longer is super fantastic?

I just really think once people get over the psychological hurdles and the community stops being butthurt, we'll probably move on to having even more polished mods that people will gladly pay for and even with the interconnectivity, people will find interesting ways to deal with all of that. Perhaps people who making modding resources could sell licenses to people who plan to use them in mods that go up for sale.

It's quite similar to music and what you can do with it for free versus if you plan to make money off of it.

[Fox]

I don't understand why people don't think Valve and Bethesda deserve such a large cut. You're using Bethesda's game and tools.

Which the modder has already purchased.

When Bethesda buy a license for a tool like Maya, they pay an up front fee and that's generally the end of it. Sometimes you might get small royalty agreements here and there, but Autodesk are not going to take 75% of every copy of Skyrim sold. Bethesda made the game, they have already been paid for the game, Valve have already taken 30% of that sale. Now they're taking 75% between them of content they either a) did not create at all or b) have already been paid for. It's fine that they take a cut but this isn't a cut, it's 3/4 of the entire revenue stream.

[Slothy]

I don't understand why people don't think Valve and Bethesda deserve such a large cut. You're using Bethesda's game and tools.

Which the modder has already purchased.

When Bethesda buy a license for a tool like Maya, they pay an up front fee and that's generally the end of it. Sometimes you might get small royalty agreements here and there, but Autodesk are not going to take 75% of every copy of Skyrim sold. Bethesda made the game, they have already been paid for the game, Valve have already taken 30% of that sale. Now they're taking 75% between them of content they either a) did not create at all or b) have already been paid for. It's fine that they take a cut but this isn't a cut, it's 3/4 of the entire revenue stream.

The comparison to Maya doesn't really work since you aren't just using a tool to make something you sell for money and thereby entitled to all, or even necessarily a large amount of money. You're using someone else's intellectual property to make your mod and sell it. If paying for Maya also came with the entire game made and IP developed for you to integrate your work into you'd have a valid comparison then. But 25% for making and selling content that builds on and relies entirely on the work of others to even be relevant? That's pretty smurfing generous. You won't get a deal that good anywhere else in the industry for that kind of work. And if people get over themselves enough for it to actually take off to some degree then congratulations to the better modders out there because Valve just made them millionaires if the payments people have received for user made content in other games is any indication.

If anyone really wants to complain about that not even two days in when we've yet to see how everything will shake out then they're crazy. And if anyone wants to call Valve evil, stupid,or whatever else for giving more content creators the opportunity to get in on the millions they've already paid out to people for things like TF2 items and CS: GO skins then I have to wonder what sort of world I'm living in.

The only legitimate complaint that I think has fallen out of this is concerns about quality control, but even then, I think Valve has wanted to move more and more to community curation for years with a large part of it being because Steam is simply getting too big to manage effectively with how relatively small they are and because they don't want to be gatekeepers deciding who can and can't put their stuff on Steam. They may not be there with games yet, but there's more than enough community rating and commentary features to root out the scammers and the shoddy mods right now making it extremely easy for those not willing to blindly spend a few bucks trying a mod to stay informed and spend their money wisely.

[Slothy]

I don't understand why people don't think Valve and Bethesda deserve such a large cut. You're using Bethesda's game and tools.

Which the modder has already purchased.

When Bethesda buy a license for a tool like Maya, they pay an up front fee and that's generally the end of it. Sometimes you might get small royalty agreements here and there, but Autodesk are not going to take 75% of every copy of Skyrim sold. Bethesda made the game, they have already been paid for the game, Valve have already taken 30% of that sale. Now they're taking 75% between them of content they either a) did not create at all or b) have already been paid for. It's fine that they take a cut but this isn't a cut, it's 3/4 of the entire revenue stream.

The comparison to Maya doesn't really work since you aren't just using a tool to make something you sell for money and thereby entitled to all, or even necessarily a large amount of money. You're using someone else's intellectual property to make your mod and sell it. If paying for Maya also came with the entire game made and IP developed for you to integrate your work into you'd have a valid comparison then. But 25% for making and selling content that builds on and relies entirely on the work of others to even be relevant? That's pretty smurfing generous. You won't get a deal that good anywhere else in the industry for that kind of work. And if people get over themselves enough for it to actually take off to some degree then congratulations to the better modders out there because Valve just made them millionaires if the payments people have received for user made content in other games is any indication.

If anyone really wants to complain about that not even two days in when we've yet to see how everything will shake out then they're crazy. And if anyone wants to call Valve evil, stupid,or whatever else for giving more content creators the opportunity to get in on the millions they've already paid out to people for things like TF2 items and CS: GO skins then I have to wonder what sort of world I'm living in.

The only legitimate complaint that I think has fallen out of this is concerns about quality control, but even then, I think Valve has wanted to move more and more to community curation for years with a large part of it being because Steam is simply getting too big to manage effectively with how relatively small they are and because they don't want to be gatekeepers deciding who can and can't put their stuff on Steam. They may not be there with games yet, but there's more than enough community rating and commentary features to root out the scammers and the shoddy mods right now making it extremely easy for those not willing to blindly spend a few bucks trying a mod to stay informed and spend their money wisely.

[Fox]

The comparison to Maya doesn't really work since you aren't just using a tool to make something you sell for money and thereby entitled to all, or even necessarily a large amount of money. You're using someone else's intellectual property to make your mod and sell it. If paying for Maya also came with the entire game made and IP developed for you to integrate your work into you'd have a valid comparison then. But 25% for making and selling content that builds on and relies entirely on the work of others to even be relevant? That's pretty smurfing generous. You won't get a deal that good anywhere else in the industry for that kind of work.

I'd say that using a game engine is pretty similar. Unity, Unreal, all come with pre-made assets, scripts, AI, tools, and so on and so forth. Modding Skyrim is not all that far removed from building something in a commercial game engine. Some of those are royalty free licenses, some of them require royalties. But they don't take 75% of your revenue.

Let's turn it around and look at it another way: Bethesda did not build a commercial game engine. They built a game which they released at a certain price and must be purchased by everyone before they can even start to think about installing mods. Bethesda have already been paid for their development work - that's what buying the game does. And if someone only wants the game so that they can play a particular mod, they still have to buy the game. So Bethesda have been making money from mods even when they were free, as every mod made for it increases the value of the game which attracts more buyers.

What we have here is basically 3rd party DLC. I develop a game. I release it and I get paid for it. Somebody else then develops new content for it at zero cost to me. I am not entitled to take three quarters of the revenue from that content. A cut, yes. It is my IP, I've graciously allowed them to use it for their own financial gain, it's fair I see a small percentage of that money. But the person who actually created the content deserves the largest slice of that pie.

[Bolivar]

Yearg, everything you said is reasonable and makes sense but again, it just doesn't fit well when you try to apply it to the culture of modding and why it's become as awesome as it is. I'm not sure what you mean with time working out the interconnectivity issues out on its own. Because many mods overlap and edit the same thing, it takes actual work to create a master load order and I just don't see how it's feasible if a team would have to go and purchase every mod to make a worthwhile sorter. It would no longer be feasible to run complementary or even a large number of mods because there's no way to sort out conflicts. As I said in my first post, maybe Bethesda could sort that out but they publicly abandon post-launch support once their next project ramps up.

This just isn't the same as DLC or cosmetic skins, build on top of the product without conflicting, and I think that's where some of Vivi's confusion is coming from.

The only legitimate complaint that I think has fallen out of this is concerns about quality control, but even then, I think Valve has wanted to move more and more to community curation for years with a large part of it being because Steam is simply getting too big to manage effectively with how relatively small they are and because they don't want to be gatekeepers deciding who can and can't put their stuff on Steam. They may not be there with games yet, but there's more than enough community rating and commentary features to root out the scammers and the shoddy mods right now making it extremely easy for those not willing to blindly spend a few bucks trying a mod to stay informed and spend their money wisely.

This is one of the most self-defeating aspects of the entire experiment. The community cannot police for quality control unless they buy the mod first, and they can only receive a refund to their Steam Wallet, meaning Valve gets their cut for your participation, no matter what. The community has to pay in order to be allowed to curate and control content. The same goes for modders wanting to make sure that they work is not being pirated - that's the part really mortifying the top modders, causing them to take down their content even from the Nexus, for fear that others are going to profit from it.

This entire thing just doesn't work and it's not worth trying to fix it when it obstructs what makes the community even viable to begin with.

[Spuuky]

I love how humans can be utterly mortified that someone else might profit that something they aren't profiting from.

What's more "fair," me giving Valve + Bethesda a combined 75 cents and you 25 cents, or me giving 0 cents to both of you? Obviously, the latter. Which is "better"? Well, for me as a consumer, it's the latter, too. But for Valve, Bethesda, and you? Are you really going to say that 25 cents is worse than 0 cents, just because someone else gets a different amount? Is that the actual argument I am seeing?

[Fox]

I love how humans can be utterly mortified that someone else might profit that something they aren't profiting from.

What's more "fair," me giving Valve + Bethesda a combined 75 cents and you 25 cents, or me giving 0 cents to both of you? Obviously, the latter. Which is "better"? Well, for me as a consumer, it's the latter, too. But for Valve, Bethesda, and you? Are you really going to say that 25 cents is worse than 0 cents, just because someone else gets a different amount? Is that the actual argument I am seeing?

No, 25 cents is not worse than 0 cents. But is it worse than, say, 50 cents. Or 90. Which would in my view be a much fairer distribution.