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[Bohandas]

What part can't you agree with?

IP does nothing more than create artificial scarcity, which I am absolutely opposed to.

[wierd]

The problem is what happens with every really big open collaboration, when a change in licensing happens.

You saw this pretty starkly about 8 years ago when GPLv3 came out. A LOT of FOSS contributors refused to permit relicense under the v3 terms, causing quite a bit of headache, regressions, rewrites, and in somecases, total failure to relicense.

With a motley assortment of CC:SA, CC:BY, GPLv1, GPLv2, GPLv3, BSD, et al licensed assets, getting *ALL* parties to agree to a set of terms can quickly become intractable.

Most likely, it would not be possible to make the big TC mods under that climate. Implied noncommercial enables fair use exemptions in some circumstances, since marketability is one of the qualifications for fair use. Once direct marketing is involved? nopeynope. you lose that.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

I've been PC gaming since I was a little kid, and as I see it, modding is a proud tradition. Modding has always been a free endeavor. An endeavor that both modders and players enjoyed doing and playing. Take, for example, the Mount & Musket mod for M&B. Both the modders and players enjoyed the mod immensely with incredible dialogue between the two sides and considerable support in the form of hosting by the modders. It was eventually turned in to DLC, but only once it was significantly different from the base game, and frankly it continued with its success only because it was so wildly popular and the fact the nodders made the DLC significantly better. To top that all off, there WAS STILL considerable discontent about the change.

just gonna repost this from earlier in the thread.

[Retropunch]

As someone pointed out on Reddit, what happens with this is that EVERYONE ends up charging for mods, because it's too expensive not too.
Basically, as Valve won't/can't properly content control all of this, it'll mean that you'll need to charge to offset the cost of having to make sure your work isn't just ripped off and sold. We're ALREADY (literally 2 days in) seeing loads of mods that have been 'stolen' and sold on by someone else.

So, putting yourself in the shoes of an enthusiastic modder, would you bother creating something for it to be ripped off and sold by someone else, or would you sell it yourself first? Secondly, as mods are all derivative, at what point do you say that one mod is ripping off another?

It's just a terrible, terrible idea.

[Graknorke]

Who wants to bet that a good chunk of hobbyist modders (Gods, that is not a thing I thought would ever need clarifying) will end up giving up out of frustration?

[Retropunch]

Who wants to bet that a good chunk of hobbyist modders (Gods, that is not a thing I thought would ever need clarifying) will end up giving up out of frustration?

I'd bet most of them. It seems like a lot of the big ones have already gone into full sales mode though.

I can't blame them though, if you had a chance of making money out of something it's difficult to say no. The sales have been paltry so far though, and I can't imagine they'll pick up much. I'm really hoping it becomes more hassle than it's worth.

[Bauglir]

That's the thing - this is not about giving modders something they deserve. That's a handy side effect that can be used rhetorically, but let's look at how things actually play out from their perspective:

1. You invest vast quantities of spare time into a project. Only those mods with tremendous time investments are likely to become staples capable of topping that $400 in sales threshold. Could an experienced modder give me vague estimates of time spent on mods of various scales?
2. You set the price for your mod. Only those mods with a low price are likely to become staples capable of topping that $400 in sales threshold. Certainly, some might be so compelling as to command a high price, but if they are, you probably sunk so much time into it during the last step that you're still making pennies on the hour.
3. You get 25% of the sales from your mod, after it passes $400 in total sales. Most mods will never reach this requirement, but several dozen probably will.

Now, modders probably would have spent their time on the mod anyway. But we're clearly not giving people fair compensation: most modders will get nothing at all (but they'll be likely to sabotage themselves by charging anyway, because people are generally bad economists), and those who do invest the time, effort, and skill to create a mod worth paying for and figure out a fair price point wind up being woefully underpaid for the work they do. That's not an issue for a hobby, but when you start bring money into it we getting into questions of how much money is fair. And "fairness" introduces all the issues upon which this whole fustercluck turns.

I mean, I'm not really sure that Valve's cut isn't fair. I'm pretty sure Bethesda's isn't, but it's all honestly beside the point - the hobby should never have been about fairness. It was always about making awesome things, and now it manifestly is doing less of that.

[Retropunch]

That's the thing - this is not about giving modders something they deserve. That's a handy side effect that can be used rhetorically, but let's look at how things actually play out from their perspective:

1. You invest vast quantities of spare time into a project. Only those mods with tremendous time investments are likely to become staples capable of topping that $400 in sales threshold. Could an experienced modder give me vague estimates of time spent on mods of various scales?
2. You set the price for your mod. Only those mods with a low price are likely to become staples capable of topping that $400 in sales threshold. Certainly, some might be so compelling as to command a high price, but if they are, you probably sunk so much time into it during the last step that you're still making pennies on the hour.
3. You get 25% of the sales from your mod, after it passes $400 in total sales. Most mods will never reach this requirement, but several dozen probably will.

Now, modders probably would have spent their time on the mod anyway. But we're clearly not giving people fair compensation: most modders will get nothing at all (but they'll be likely to sabotage themselves by charging anyway, because people are generally bad economists), and those who do invest the time, effort, and skill to create a mod worth paying for and figure out a fair price point wind up being woefully underpaid for the work they do. That's not an issue for a hobby, but when you start bring money into it we getting into questions of how much money is fair. And "fairness" introduces all the issues upon which this whole fustercluck turns.

I mean, I'm not really sure that Valve's cut isn't fair. I'm pretty sure Bethesda's isn't, but it's all honestly beside the point - the hobby should never have been about fairness. It was always about making awesome things, and now it manifestly is doing less of that.

I completely agree. On top of all that though, you also get mod theft and disputes (oh the disputes!) which will drag down even a determined modder. On top of that, the customer will get ZERO support and a lack of recourse to deal with it (24 hour window).

My fear is that this is a concerted effort by a number of developers to force Valve to squeeze more money out for them - or else they'd leave to go somewhere else (I imagine skyrim alone makes them millions). Whilst I'm not a valve fanboy, I sorta feel they'd understand that they'd be a backlash. If that's the case, it could look shaky for them to withdraw this.

[Flying Dice]

That's the thing - this is not about giving modders something they deserve. That's a handy side effect that can be used rhetorically, but let's look at how things actually play out from their perspective:

1. You invest vast quantities of spare time into a project. Only those mods with tremendous time investments are likely to become staples capable of topping that $400 in sales threshold. Could an experienced modder give me vague estimates of time spent on mods of various scales?
2. You set the price for your mod. Only those mods with a low price are likely to become staples capable of topping that $400 in sales threshold. Certainly, some might be so compelling as to command a high price, but if they are, you probably sunk so much time into it during the last step that you're still making pennies on the hour.
3. You get 25% of the sales from your mod, after it passes $400 in total sales. Most mods will never reach this requirement, but several dozen probably will.

Now, modders probably would have spent their time on the mod anyway. But we're clearly not giving people fair compensation: most modders will get nothing at all (but they'll be likely to sabotage themselves by charging anyway, because people are generally bad economists), and those who do invest the time, effort, and skill to create a mod worth paying for and figure out a fair price point wind up being woefully underpaid for the work they do. That's not an issue for a hobby, but when you start bring money into it we getting into questions of how much money is fair. And "fairness" introduces all the issues upon which this whole fustercluck turns.

I mean, I'm not really sure that Valve's cut isn't fair. I'm pretty sure Bethesda's isn't, but it's all honestly beside the point - the hobby should never have been about fairness. It was always about making awesome things, and now it manifestly is doing less of that.

That's the thing, I don't have a problem with Valve taking a cut, as long as it isn't astronomical -- they're providing access to a hosting service on what is probably the best distribution platform for PC games (not talking about Workshop, just Steam itself. The Workshop is shit, but being on Steam is a massive boost of exposure to all the fools who don't look around for mods). Bethesda, though, are fucking jokers, taking half the money for doing literally nothing.

That said, if this does manage to survive, what I expect to see a lot of the more ethical modders doing is putting their work up on the Workshop for a pittance and also keeping it up for free on the Nexus or elsewhere, as to my knowledge there's no exclusivity clause. That gives protection from theft, but also avoids the issue of pay-gating and dependency. The thing in the EULA agreement about modders losing the right to take their work down, though, is the main thing standing in the way -- it's utter rubbish, and unfortunately I don't see things working out well primarily because of that.

[Putnam]

you know what

http://wryemusings.com/#GamingBusiness

wrye's entire website is basically a prophetic argument as to why this is a bad thing

[Flying Dice]

Or, as I said earlier, The Sims 2. Paid mods completely shattered their modding scene, turned it into a toxic shithole, and all of the paygated mods were promptly pirated anyways.

[Graknorke]

you know what

http://wryemusings.com/#GamingBusiness

wrye's entire website is basically a prophetic argument as to why this is a bad thing

Could you explain that? I'm not seeing the parallels.

[Putnam]

The main point that needs to be communicated to an outside audience is that mods are not simply minor tweaks or re-implementations of well known themes. Rather, mods for these games provide a vast expansion and improvement over the the original game world. In short, a "normally" modded Oblivion installation provides a 2 to 4 times content expansion over the original game.
 
Such a large expansion is not achieved simply by an aggregation of separate contributions, but rather is the result a large integrative effort involving the development of special libraries, several complex integration tools, and careful community organization. Rough analogies can be made to creation of large open contribution projects such as linux and Wikipedia.

[Graknorke]

Oh, I thought you meant it was an example of where paid mods have been implemented and gone wrong.

Yes I do agree with that point. I think that the Minecraft modding community might have been brought up as an example already, but there's plenty of stories out of there about the legally incompetent threatening to sue other mod makers for making mods that are compatible, not even really using their content. And they make at best a tiny revenue stream from ads on their download sites.

[Leyic]

Hey guys, remember when people started charging for games and it had a petrifying effect on the hobby and now things like Dwarf Fortress no longer exist?

In all seriousness, look at what Greenlight did for indie games. There's a lot more variety now than there was before. A lot of it is crap, sure, but a lot of the gems likely never would've been produced (certainly not at their current quality) in a purely hobbyist environment.

The same could be true for modding. Yes, a lot of modders rely on one another for their work, but that's because it's easy to use another's work when it's available for free. It is still entirely possible to make mods completely independent of others, reinventing wheels as necessary, there's just no incentive to do that now.

There's plenty of room for both professional and hobbyist modders, provided the two communities are appropriately segregated and the work of hobbyists is respected by the pros. The aforementioned experiments by Paradox are an example of this. ValveThesda's implementation is not the only way to monetize modding, but it is the worst.