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

[Slothy]

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.

Except it is since it's not making an actual game, it's making modifications to a game someone else already spent millions of dollars making and selling so you have the audience for your mods in the first place. One person spending a few weeks/months in their spare time making a mod for a popular game is so far removed from making a game from scratch it's not even funny. It's a bit like comparing people build drums from scratch, making all of the shells and hardware, applying the finish, and assembling themselves to someone who just buys some shells and hardware, drills a few holes and calls it a day. Nothing against doing the latter, but calling them a drum builder would be a bit of a stretch. Just like comparing someone modifying a game to the team of a few hundred who built it from the ground up is a bit of a stretch.

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.

They've been paid for a copy of the game and a license for someone to play and enjoy it. They haven't been paid for the right to even make content for it, but that's something they generally let slide because they know it's beneficial to the community and by extension their bottom line. But they absolutely have not been paid for the privilege of making money off of content made for the game. Now I'm a strong believer in community content, and the rights of people to make money on their transformative works, but to say that Bethesda making most of the money is unfair when they did most of the work that allows a modder to make anything at all is still silly.

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.

In my more than 25 years of playing games I can think of one instance where people actually bought a game in large numbers just to play a mod. This is not a thing that happens frequently.

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.

If we are going to look at it as 3rd party DLC, no company hired in the industry would get 25% of the revenue if they were hired to make DLC for a game. They'd actually be lucky to see any of the revenue and not just get a fixed payment maybe with some bonuses thrown in for performance, meeting deadlines, etc. You're basically arguing that modders deserve more money just because. There's no basis for deciding what's fair here aside from the fact that 25% of revenue is way better than anyone in the business would usually get for similar work, but considering Bethesda could have just told everyone to smurf off and that no one could make any money from their mods, this makes them especially generous if you ask me. Aside from Valve I can't think of any other companies where anyone can make any money off of any mods they make. Get a job if there work is really good maybe, but that's about it.

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.

You've just described one of the problems with capitalism in general. I fail to see why people having to buy something before they can warn others away from the junk is a problem in this one instance when literally everything that gets produced in the economy has the exact same problem. People seem to act like the idea of community curation in the digital world is a horrendous idea that will bring about the death of gaming and digital distribution but everyone's already been relying on it in every industry for centuries.