I wish I had some way to vote with my wallet, but I already bought the game under the premise that mods were free. I guess I'm glad I wound up returning that busted video card and never got a better one; a properly modded up Skyrim was half the point, and it looks like that plan is half a victim of the scheme and half a victim of the resulting shitstorm. I can't say Valve does me much harm this way; I'm not a modder. I've got no community fractured by different ideals from this. All they've done is remove future value from a product. I'd already gotten more than my money's worth from Skyrim, but if ES6 goes the same way I won't have any particular reason to buy it.
That minimum payments can be set is a huge problem; there's a lot more space between 0 and 1 than between 1 and 100, after all. That Bethesda gets a cut is equally annoying; they deserve payment for their work, of course, but they got that when I bought the game. I doubt this move will come with a permanent, commensurate cut in the game's price point. These are reasons I won't buy things, but they're not reasons for me to chew out Valve. They're just failures to deliver on value to me, like smartphones.
The legal bungling of the copyright aspects is, now that I've thought on it, probably the most troubling part of this whole debacle; it suggests that it was envisioned as a free money add-on, instead of as something to benefit content creators, because it ignores them entirely in favor of the most optimistic answer. That's probably a good reason to get upset with them. Quality control is pretty bad, too - I know mods need to be vetted, but the financial aspect creates an expectation on the part of the purchaser that there will be compatibility and support that simply can't exist. When vanilla Skyrim breaks, you can submit a bug report, and you can expect that somebody at Bethesda, or at least on the unofficial patch team (whose scope is narrow enough to be feasible), will make an effort to fix it. There's no possible analogue for mod compatibility; it's a purely caveat emptor system, and that's a huge problem with including cash. No amount of vetting will be able to handle that, and if we rely on the community to do it, then by the logic that we should pay modders, we ought to pay testers, too. These are things worth complaining about.
I'm upset on behalf of the people who are in the modding community, to be sure. It's really not fair that you have to go through this massive ideological clusterfuck when, presumably, your primary goal is to make awesome things. Bleh. I can't help but feel some people are blowing this out of proportion to what it does to them for the sake of having a good fight, but you guys have got some pretty damn legitimate grievances here.
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Topic: Paid Mods -- Round 4: McGregor vs mAAAyweather (Read 100779 times)