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[Flying Dice]

complete games with significantly new assets ... Bethesda

Spoiler: It helps if you know the context of this. (click to show/hide)

I mean, maybe relatively, if your point of comparison is with the various companies responsible for every Call of Duty after MW.


Oh hey actual content

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Leyic]

Bethesda turned on its damage control.

From this blog post: "Even now, at 25% and early sales data, we’re looking at some modders making more money than the studio members whose content is being edited."

The highest paid modder, as of a few hours ago, and assuming everyone buys at the suggested price, is Laast at $1,092.85. His work is a texture overhaul. If Bethesda just admitted to paying their texture artists less than a couple grand, then they're more evil than I first thought.

Edit: Oh, wait, I'm supposed to say that Bethesda shouldn't be paying their artists at all, then they'd get better work from them, because that's how it works. Right, Sergarr?

I mean, maybe relatively, if your point of comparison is with the various companies responsible for every Call of Duty after MW.

I don't play modern military shooters, so I'm not aware of what you're getting at.

[Flying Dice]

I mean, maybe relatively, if your point of comparison is with the various companies responsible for every Call of Duty after MW.

I don't play modern military shooters, so I'm not aware of what you're getting at.

Don't be coy. Even non-gamers are aware of the copy-paste nature of CoD.

[da_nang]

HAVE WE WON?

[forsaken1111]

HAVE WE WON?

I guess. It was the inevitable outcome. I knew this from the beginning.

[Flying Dice]

Who was saying stuff about how negative reviews, the petition, and the shit /v/ was pulling weren't going to do anything? Now we just need to stay alert and shut them down when they try it again.

Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here

[Leyic]

"We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating."

So they'll try it with a newer game, i.e. Fallout 4.

Don't be coy. Even non-gamers are aware of the copy-paste nature of CoD.

In all seriousness, the last time I thought about CoD it was a linear WWII shooter. I played the demo for about an hour then gave up on it. Never paid attention to the franchise afterwards. Next thing I know there's a Mountain Dew / CoD product placement ad on TV with guys flying around in mech suits or something. So no, I'm not much aware about CoD.

Edit: People are declaring victory (elsewhere) as if there were no casualties. Chesko's gone and there's no telling if he'll be back, and SkyUI 1.5 may no longer be a thing. If people really want to support modders and not ValveThesda, the time is now to put their money where their mouth is.

[Flying Dice]

That's the thing, though. If it was really just about allowing modders to benefit from their own work, you know what they could have done? A pay-as-much-or-little-as-you like slider when you downloaded a mod. 100% of the money going to the modder. Proper QA and fact-checking to prevent mods from being stolen.

But they fucked up and went for a cash grab with no QA, so this is never going to fly again.

They pretty much admitted that they're going to try this again:

But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop. We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here.

They're going to wait for people to forget and then try again with a new game that doesn't have a large, established community. I doubt it'll be Fallout 4 -- Bethesda's press release a little while ago threw Valve under the bus on this, and I doubt that they're going to want to touch the idea with an 11' pole now.

Now we get to have fun watching smaller devs and publishers that were so eager to play follow-the-leader scramble to retract their statements (Heya, Space Engineers!).

[Arbinire]

I'm glad they removed it, that said if they want to try in the future with a new game that's entirely their business.  I just hope they learned from this that if they're going to use the "it's for the modders!" rhetoric, they will tweak the percentages.  Mods aren't games, and they already host mods free so I'd say 10-15% is a much more reasonable cut on Valve's part should they remain an exclusive distributor, Bethesda would be fair at 20-25%, then the remaining 60-70% should go to the mod author.  And none of that shady "only after making $100 after cut" BS.

If Valve wants to take the full 30% then it needs to go to them doing the vetting of mods to make sure they're not stolen, using the assets of those who choose not to sell, etc.

[Flying Dice]

I'll be honest, even if they made a setup that was actually fair to modders (i.e. 5% cut to Valve, 95% to modder, no minimum threshold, real QA and anti-theft) I'd still have been opposed. It's not about the percentages, it's about how the introduction of money into a formerly free system fucks up interdependency and cooperation. The percentages and shady cutoff just make it a scummy cashgrab instead of a poorly thought out attempt at a nice gesture.

[nenjin]

I mean, I'm not wholly convinced of their explanation of why they did it, but I agree on one thing: you wanna do this, start somewhere new to "iterate." I sort of refuse to believe they didn't understand the community they were messing with when they announced this. It's not that I think they wanted to actively destroy the fan-based modding community and control of content.

But I think they weren't really concerned about what would happen to it if paid mods for Skyrim had taken off, which is arguably just as bad. "Look, I don't want to crush your house with my steamroller while I'm building my super highway. I've got nothing against you. But if it happens to be in the way and I roll over two corners of it, well, sorry, that's business." I think Valve and Bethesda were trying to capitalize on the informal nature of the mod scene, like they thought no one would notice a dude in a suit with a briefcase full of money and a consent form walk into the room.

Anyways, I was also feeling pretty confident that Valve would back off. But I wouldn't celebrate. All that's happened is someone has tipped their hand to the next revenue stream idea. This will be back.

The biggest problem to me overall with paying for mods is the lack of enforcement. Not even Nexus would probably have the power to police all the submissions for infringement and outright theft. The overhead burden user-generated content can introduce for whoever is responsible for it can be enormous. And I don't really see how they're going to get around that, being responsible for the content they essentially buy from the user at cut rate prices. For the companies that seem to care so deeply about intellectual property, they seem to have zero respect or understanding of it when it's not theirs.

TLDR: I pretty much refuse to believe people that make this much money simply didn't think about the ramifications, legal and social, of what they were doing. I'm starting to feel about Valve and Steam like I do about my cable company: a necessary evil.

[Frumple]

And none of that shady "only after making $100 after cut" BS.

For what it's worth, that's not actually shady at all -- it's pretty common to transfer funds like that for low value/high volume transactions. Saves on a fair amount of administrative costs, which still exist even when electronic processing slims the overhead down significantly.

Folks not being aware of that, on top of the rest of it, definitely contributed to the vitriol that came out, though.

[Flying Dice]

You know what would have been the right way to go about this, if they were actually about helping out modders? Donations directly from the Steam wallet. One guess why that didn't happen.

[Leyic]

And none of that shady "only after making $100 after cut" BS.

Eh, sometimes it costs money to cut a check or initiate a wire transfer. If they had to pay out everytime someone had $0.01 in their account, they'd probably see a loss. $100 is high, but this isn't really shady.

Edit: Ninja'd by Frumple.

...it's about how the introduction of money into a formerly free system fucks up interdependency and cooperation. <snip>

(Emphasis mine.) Because the old ways are always best? That's why we also protest against digital distribution and not having decoder ring DRM?

[Putnam]

No, because a large part of the community's success comes from its open nature that having paid mods actively destroys, as can be seen with the oft-mentioned Sims 2 community.