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

[Spuuky]

What's the time frame for how long I have to wait to demonstrate that this won't happen? If it's still fine 1 year from now, will you recant? How about 5 years? I'm just curious.

You always needed support infrastructure. InstallShield has existed since the early 90s. Windows has been required for decades for most PC games, too. Valve is, in fact, doing a lot to break Microsoft's monopoly on the OS used to run PC games with their relentless Linux support. Is that not admirable, or does it somehow not count?

Steam is DRM that has a wide user base largely because it's good for many people. I benefit from it, and my gaming experience would be worse without it. I use Steam because I opt in by choice to it, not because I "have to."

[Yeargdribble]

Um, I've hated Valve and Steam since I first bought a non-Valve game, with no online interaction, from a brick and mortar store, and it told me I had to install Steam in order to use it. Steam is nothing but DRM, and a LOT of people hate it.

Oh yeah, it's totally DRM, but I just choose not view that is purely negative. It's DRM done the best way possible. DRM is not always and entirely a greed based thing done by evil companies. It's a necessary evil spawned by the rampant piracy of entitled consumers. At least Steam has tried to find a balance to make it palatable which is vastly more than most do when it comes to making ridiculous restrictive DRM. Nintendo's region locking and tying games to devices rather than accounts is a much worse version. Steam's version ultimately makes the games better in a lot of ways than the boxed copies. I've rebought so many games on Steam and put my 90s era boxes in the attic for pure convenience sake.

The ability to monetize mods is GREAT. The ability to only do so through Steam SUCKS.

Steam now has the monopoly on legally profiting from mods. In a few years, the free modding community will largely disappear. There will be no reason to keep making mods for free when you can make them and get paid. Again, this is no problem, except that Valve now owns that entire market.

I agree it sucks and the monopoly worries me. But I don't think most people even realize why it's the case. Modders have always been in a legal gray area. Steam has just made it possible for them to finally sell what they do. But rather than people treating Valve as a facilitator, which is really what they are, they are treating them as a greedy villain.

At that point, Valve can do whatever the hell they want, and everyone has to accept it. When Valve declares that the 75% take is rising to 80%, 85%, or more, modders have no recourse. "Well, you can go back to making mods for free then! Bye!" Valve can dictate prices, market strategy and viability to the modders wholesale.

What's more, they can do the same to game publishers. "Oh, Bethesda? Yeah, you're only getting a 10% cut now instead of the 20% you had been getting. Oh, you don't like that? That's fine, we'll just stop allowing your games to use our service." So Bethesda has to take the cut. Or has to pay extra to get on Steam, or however else they want to do it. And since Steam has such market dominance on the PC console, Bethesda will fall in line and comply.

Companies will either charge more for games, or start slashing features to keep the budget down in order to make up for the increased costs. Modders will start charging more or making lower quality mods that they rush to make with less effort because they are getting less for them. Both of these directly affect the consumer. Who do they not affect? Valve. Valve, who is doing the bare-bones minimalist effort of a middleman and collecting the vast majority of the pay.

Valve is attempting to monopolize PC gaming through their service, and that is going to be bad for EVERYONE. Except Valve, of course.


When this happens, don't say you weren't warned. Don't act as shocked as people were when Amazon began extorting book publishers to pay them or they wouldn't get their titles carried. Monopolies are bad. Period.

This just sounds like rabid, tinfoil hat paranoia to me. If it was Comcast, or EA, or even Apple; someone with an actual history to back up this sort of worry, I'd be all in with you. But Valve has a pretty good track record so I'm not going to go in assuming the absolute worst until they give me good reason to. Yes, they have the potential power to do those terrible things, but I just don't see it as being likely. Yes, monopolies are bad, but a lot of companies with relative monopolies aren't exactly destroying people with their corporate greed. Hell, Amazon has a virtual monopoly on dozens of things and they barely make a profit because Jeff Bezos pours anything they make into constantly trying to innovate. Gabe strikes me much more like a Bezos type than a corporate suit bent on dominating for pure financial gain.

It seems a little early to be alarmist.

[Skyblade]

What's the time frame for how long I have to wait to demonstrate that this won't happen? If it's still fine 1 year from now, will you recant? How about 5 years? I'm just curious.

I'm guessing 5-10 years, but I'd say 15 is probably the maximum.

You always needed support infrastructure. InstallShield has existed since the early 90s. Windows has been required for decades for most PC games, too. Valve is, in fact, doing a lot to break Microsoft's monopoly on the OS used to run PC games with their relentless Linux support. Is that not admirable, or does it somehow not count?

Steam is DRM that has a wide user base largely because it's good for many people. I benefit from it, and my gaming experience would be worse without it. I use Steam because I opt in by choice to it, not because I "have to."

That's fantastic. I'm not arguing that Steam hasn't done good things, or doesn't have its benefits. It does. It has a brilliant shop system, some fantastic patching functionality, and does offer good networking.

But it gained the functionality in order to make itself viable against competitors. Without competition, the quality is going to go downhill. It's not going to be fast, any more than Amazon's approach to extortion was fast (in fact, I expect it will be slower than Amazon's shift). But it is going to happen. When there is no competition, there is no need to stay competitive.

This just sounds like rabid, tinfoil hat paranoia to me. If it was Comcast, or EA, or even Apple; someone with an actual history to back up this sort of worry, I'd be all in with you. But Valve has a pretty good track record so I'm not going to go in assuming the absolute worst until they give me good reason to. Yes, they have the potential power to do those terrible things, but I just don't see it as being likely. Yes, monopolies are bad, but a lot of companies with relative monopolies aren't exactly destroying people with their corporate greed. Hell, Amazon has a virtual monopoly on dozens of things and they barely make a profit because Jeff Bezos pours anything they make into constantly trying to innovate. Gabe strikes me much more like a Bezos type than a corporate suit bent on dominating for pure financial gain.

No, Amazon barely makes a profit because their entire market strategy has been based around driving their competitors out of business. When those strategies failed to achieve their objective in time, Amazon turned to blatantly extorting their market dominance (as it was either that, or they would have to raise prices, thus undercutting their value in the eyes of consumers). They got sued for it, sure, but it happened. And it will happen again.

That's why this isn't just tin-foil-hat paranoia. Name me a SINGLE monopoly that has not shifted to screwing its customers.

It seems a little early to be alarmist.

And, again, I've been alarmist since games stopped offering me Steam as an option. Since it became mandatory in order to play them. This is just me expanding those same warnings.

[Bolivar]

Yearg, there's a lot of problems with your counter-examples as well, namely DRM. The obvious comparison is GOG, which is flat out better than Steam, yet you instead brought up Nintendo. Even then, Nintendo's faults lie almost entirely with their inexperience running online networks for multiple interoperable devices than piracy concerns.

You're also continuing the narrative that Valve is being unfairly villified. You seem really disdainful about the gaming community. By now, almost every major Skyrim modding team, even some from Morrowind, have come out to promise they will never charge for their projects or their successors. While it's great they can charge without fear of suit, I doubt anyone could say the creators were asking for this or it has been worth the divide amongst modders. Maybe a good solution would be to provide an official quest creator and 3D asset submission space like Valves content creation games but keep that separate from the traditional creation tools.

What's the time frame for how long I have to wait to demonstrate that this won't happen? If it's still fine 1 year from now, will you recant? How about 5 years? I'm just curious.

Bethesda Game Studios' next project will be announced at E3 and possibly ship this Fall. If Steam Workshop is the sole resource for mods on this game, you can definitively say Valve has leveraged its monopoly to the detriment of the consumer and further limited the open source foundation of PC gaming.

[Spuuky]

I can say that they "leveraged" it (by saying hey Bethesda, would you like free profits that you wouldn't have otherwise been getting? Just let us be the official mod distributor), but that is not sufficient proof that it's detrimental to the consumer.

How would you view it differently if the situation was completely identical, but Bethesda running the mod shop instead of Valve (not likely in their case, but entirely plausible if it was Blizzard instead, for instance)? Is that suddenly a "monopoly" on mods for that one game?

If you don't like the business practices of Bethesda you're free to not buy their games, obviously. But if you don't like the business practices of Steam, you're free to not buy games that require Steam, too. You will lose the ability to purchase things that are exclusive to them, just like you would lose any PS4 exclusives if you stopped buying Sony products. You certainly won't lose access to all PC games, or any console games; just a certain subset, like with any other vendor.

[Bolivar]

I can say that they "leveraged" it (by saying hey Bethesda, would you like free profits that you wouldn't have otherwise been getting? Just let us be the official mod distributor), but that is not sufficient proof that it's detrimental to the consumer.

How would you view it differently if the situation was completely identical, but Bethesda running the mod shop instead of Valve (not likely in their case, but entirely plausible if it was Blizzard instead, for instance)? Is that suddenly a "monopoly" on mods for that one game?

If you don't like the business practices of Bethesda you're free to not buy their games, obviously. But if you don't like the business practices of Steam, you're free to not buy games that require Steam, too. You will lose the ability to purchase things that are exclusive to them, just like you would lose any PS4 exclusives if you stopped buying Sony products. You certainly won't lose access to all PC games, or any console games; just a certain subset, like with any other vendor.

I'm not talking about the addition of the paid Workshop. If the next games' mods are available only through the workshop, at the expense of the real modding scene on the Nexus or the personal sites of the creators like enbdev.com, Skyblade will be right and the near-Monopoly will have detrimented consumers.

[Spuuky]

So take it up with Bethesda at that point. It's their product. If they choose to license only Valve to use/resell it in that way, that's not Valve's fault, it's Bethesda's fault.

[Bolivar]

Holy trout, Valve just got Xbox One'd:

http://steamcommunity.com/games/Stea...32365253244218

[Spuuky]

Definitely seems like a company bent on enforcing a price-fixing monopoly =/

[Skyblade]

Seems to me like a company that overestimated its clout and is forced to try again.

I'm sure Microsoft's new DRM with the XBox One were all in favor of the consumer as well, and were cancelled over a misunderstanding.

If Valve wants to build a system to benefit modders and build a closer relationship with the mod community, they can do that.

Stepping in, dictating terms to all parties, and presenting a done deal is not the way to do that.

Witness the power of the consumer.

[Spuuky]

You have no idea what terms they "presented" to Bethesda. Their initial proposal could never have been announced without their buy-in. This is not a unilateral decision, never was, and never could have been. So stop acting like it was.

[Skyblade]

You have no idea what terms they "presented" to Bethesda. Their initial proposal could never have been announced without their buy-in. This is not a unilateral decision, never was, and never could have been. So stop acting like it was.

You're right, and I do actually regret that last post. It was unnecessary, inaccurate, and childish, and I apologize for it.


I have been making gross generalizations with regards to Valve. I do not think that it is fair to categorize the entire company as being amoral, money-grabbing bastards. There are thousands of people who work for the company, and there are undoubtedly employees, even plenty of high ranking employees with real authority, who were doing this specifically because they were trying to do something good and positive for the community.

I do not feel I was wrong with my predictions of what the results would have been, however. I do not believe that, had Valve acquired a monopoly on paid modding, that the results would have been beneficial for either the mod producers, or the consumers. These policies may have been thought up and implemented by people who were working to benefit the community. However, they would be changed and maintained by those who are looking for profit, the stockholders.

Monopolies are never beneficial. Even if Gabe kept Valve under his iron fist and maintained it as a purely beneficial company for his entire stint with the company, he would be replaced eventually, and the next director might not be as pure. Leaving that much market control in the hands of a single entity is just NOT a good idea. It's too easy to exploit, it's too easy to manipulate.

Long term, it wouldn't even be good for Valve. Without competition, companies stagnate.

but everything you’ve invented you did to fight your sickness. And that’s brilliant. That is so human. But once you get rid of sickness and mortality, then what’s there to strive for? Eh? The Cybermen won’t advance. You’ll just stop. You’ll stay like this forever.

Competition breeds competitiveness. It encourages ingenuity, it encourages innovation, and it encourages companies to continue to try their best to appeal to customers.



There is definitely some merit to what Valve tried to do. There are also a ton of pitfalls that they didn't anticipate that they will need to iron out before they do this again. And they WILL do it again, and I look forward to seeing what their new strategy will be.

But I do not look forward to the day when PC gaming is owned and operated solely by Valve.

[Spuuky]

I don't look forward to that day either; I think that primary difference is that I don't think that will ever happen. Valve is actually extremely dependent on its overall reputation for their continued success, which is probably the main reason they changed courses when they saw the public response to this.

[Skyblade]

So, TotalBiscuit interviewed a few high-profile members of the mod community. Specifically, Robin Scott, the owner of Nexus Mods, and Nick McCaskey, the developer of the Static Mesh Improvement Mod for Skyrim. It gives some good insight into a different perspective on the situation here.

Be aware that it is quite a long listen.