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[Leyic]

Because $99 horse genitalia is a cogent argument against what Valve was doing?

[Neonivek]

I am not actually opposed to modders selling their mods it seems like a pretty legitimate business.

But I shudder to think what will happen once it becomes common practice. That is what I don't want to happen.

Then again given I never mod...

It would make me seem much more sane for never doing so.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Guys, it's been pulled! Ze crisis. IS. OVER.

[10ebbor10]

http://www.bethblog.com

[Urist McScoopbeard]

thanks for the link ebbor.

I will be leaving this thread open in case you all want to beat a dead horse and discuss the finer points of ethics on paid mods.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

At least change the title and OP/.

Poof, it is done.

[Neonivek]

Guys, it's been pulled! Ze crisis. IS. OVER.

I know... I read through it... maybe I actually had this thing called independent thought that allowed me to form an opinion on the topic.

[Rolan7]

Well.  I suppose sometimes it's necessary to prevent people from getting paid, if you want them to continue working for free.  Steam offered an optional program to modders, and a portion of users abused every channel available until that option was withdrawn.

There were some good arguments against the system:
* Having everything free makes it much simpler to collaborate.  (Of course, the existence of paid mods doesn't stop people from collaborating all they want.  Using copyleft, they can even ensure any work including their work is still free and open.)
* Thieves would have a greater incentive to steal others' work.  (Of course, this has always happened and will continue to happen.  Thieves steal credit, and even donations.)
* Customers would have to pay for some mods.  (This was completely unacceptable, and obviously the reason that so many people were up in arms, and eager to believe the myriad debunked arguments and outright lies about this situation)

I have contributed a considerable amount of time and effort to an open source project over the past three years.  I only ever looked for respect, maybe gratitude and a better game experience for myself.  If I made Skyrim mods, I would have offered them for free, possibly with a donation link if I put enough effort in to warrant it.  I wouldn't have used this system.  But I should have had the *option* to charge, even if nobody would choose to buy.  Every creator should have the right to price their creations.  To say otherwise is to call them a slave.

I was probably never going to enter the Skyrim mod scene anyway, but now I know I won't.  I thought the Tgstation SS13 playerbase was needy and ungrateful...  Well, they generally were...  But this reaction was sickening as it was predictable.  Anyone contributing more free content to this community is feeding their already absurd expectations.

Which might not be a problem for many creators...  Who cares about the ungrateful whiners, when your work improves the experience for all the decent people too?  That's what kept me going for so long in Tgstation.  What made me leave wasn't that the greedy morons were too loud (they were always too loud) but that too many of the decent people, the ones who actually mattered, moved on.

So mod creators will probably keep doing what they love to do, particularly if the donations are right.  The mod community will remain free and strong.  The toxic, loud part of the gaming community will be mollified until they find the next "injustice" to rage about.  And they'll continue to define the gamer stereotype because they're the loudest, the most offensive, and because they always get exactly what they want - so from an outside perspective they must be the majority of gamers.  Heck, even I'm not sure anymore.  I feel less connected to this "culture" with every overblown controversy.

[Eagleon]

Am I really the only person to see the donation thing as spin? I feel like I'm on an alien planet, I seriously do not see the difference between a 'donation' and just buying something, except maybe the marketingsocial engineering is a little more twisted and guilt-driven. Why do you guys have to destroy people's businesses when you can already just pirate everything? What was the point of all this?

[Bauglir]

The point, as far as I was concerned:

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.

The involvement of money isn't inherently bad, and I have absolutely no expectation that modders will work for free. For me, at least, it was never about my own experience; I long since got my money's worth out of Skyrim, and with the ample forewarning this provided I could easily forego future installments that would have the arrangement in place right from the word "go".

On the technical side, literally all it did was add an option that was not already there, and as I said in another thread, that's probably all anybody involved with doing this ever saw it as. Nobody was trying to screw over the modding community for a quick buck, and the furious crusade that developed is at least a little bit on the shameful side. Particularly when people started attacking fax machines. Seriously, what the fuck? If this had gone on a few days longer I'm sure we'd have been seeing regular death threats, the way this was mounting like any other example of the Internet Hate Machine.

The problem was the way "Get modders some money" was implemented. It didn't just have technical implications. It had legal and ethical ones that Valve apparently never bothered to address (if Chesko's experience is any indication), and an especially nasty consequence was the injection into a hobby craft of marketing values and motivations. Creating a marketplace the way Valve did, of the kind that Valve did, in which a financial transaction is simply layered atop a system that evolved with no thought for the issue, is a bit like releasing rabbits into Australia.

[Eagleon]

The thing is, I'm not a hobbyist. Modders grow up, and some of them put their skills towards a career. In the case of a musician it can take decades before they find a niche to produce their work for a living wage, or never if they aren't willing to bend their skills to fit a style people are willing to consume. It's a constant battle to stay motivated to find that niche and maybe start doing something that doesn't destroy my body for a living. If I could take back dropping out of college for eng. physics I would in a heartbeat, but this is my skill now. Gods help me.

This absolutely sucks for me, it's depressing, and I feel a little betrayed to be honest. I grew up with Daggerfall and Morrowind, I was looking forward to making some music that fit with their compositions and working my way back into the community that way on a commission basis. I don't like donations. I was raised with the concept that asking for tips turns things into a competition, and at that point you may as well just charge more. I don't want to work on the basis that no one is buying my music, but instead a service that I have to shape and brand to fit my social media blitz or whatever.

The idea that I would steal from someone to sell my work is offensive, and I really am not sure that would have ever been a problem here for others - I think the community would have self-regulated, the same way that developers get called out practically instantaneously if they steal assets from others. Obviously everyone loves a good witch-hunt. I really think this could have been good for modding, there hasn't really been anything like it, so I was shocked to see people saying it would destroy it. What a weird-ass concept, like there's even room for that much marketing frenzy over mods that it could drown out the generosity of the community. Regardless, it could have been worked out rationally. I'm sure Bethesda would have preferred a renegotiation of the way the system worked to just doing away with it altogether. Instead we get the fax shit, and I'm seriously wondering how this might have affected mod support for later games.

There are people that want to run a business (it isn't really fun unless you're that particular brand of sadistic), and there are people that want to have a hobby. Neither disappears in a market that allows both. I still release my music under CC-By-SA for the reasons made crystal clear here - people don't care about buying art, they know they can go to pirate bay for that. They want to buy a sense of superiority. I just didn't think that had extended to pitchforks and torches yet.

[Bauglir]

Y'know, you're really not wrong about any of that. At all. Thing is, making that world for you isn't as simple as Valve bolting payments onto the Workshop. There are definitely better alternatives to donations, but that's probably the best that Valve could implement trivially, and through Steam. Modding doesn't work as a transaction-per-file scheme.

That cripples the experiment-and-tweak installation that gives you a market to sell to. If it's a meaningful source of income for you, it means you're either one of the absolute most popular modders out there, or else you're constantly retreading the same material in order to regenerate a safe revenue stream. It forces you to monitor the distribution of your material in order to ensure that you're being fairly compensated and that nobody else is putting your work up as their own - and you sure as shit don't have time to do that and actually make mods. These aren't arguments from the mod-user perspective. The pitchfork-wielders are assholes, but they are vaguely correct on this one by sheer happenstance.

Patreon sorts of arrangements are more effective ways of doing it, perhaps. Or maybe people pay a one-time fee for mod blocks ("Pay $20, you can download another 100 mods") and the money gets shoved into a giant pool and then divvied up among modders with some weighting for popularity. It's nearly 2 AM and I'd be asleep right now if the line for the bathroom were faster, so I'm not in tip-top shape for spitballing ideas, here. But you can't have this fee-for-product model that sustains most of the industry, because the product models are so deeply divergent.

[wierd]

I already mentioned that once you go away from donations to direct pay, you lose fair use and a bunch of other things!!

It isnt like this is some crazy "Oh, I dont like that, URRRGH!" poop slinging thing here.  It's about "Hey, doing that will seriously ruin EVERYTHING because then lawyers HAVE to get involved!!"

That thing where Bethesda sued the maker of Minecraft?  Know why they did it? THEY ARE LEGALLY REQUIRED TO, TO PROTECT THEIR TRADEMARK.  Why? Because that's the way the laws are written!

Introducing direct-market mods opens a legal pandora's box the likes of which the people arguing FOR that system simply have no comprehension of!  No, it was poison-- absolute poison.

And when you get down to it, the real issue against the donation model boils down to "I dont want people to say that my mod is worth 0$, I think it is worth more than that."

Having feelings hurt is not worth calling down nuclear war using attack trained lawyers-- because THAT is EXACTLY where direct-paid mods WOULD end up.

The attack trained lawyers are what would have fully destroyed the modding community, as everyone would have to protect their IP like a mother hen, or risk losing legal protection of that IP-- Because that's the way the law works. Even when using copyleft licenses, you are STILL having to resort to being a mother hen about it-- because you have to constantly expose incorrect use, and seek remedy from the courts when discovered, or else you lose the legal protection on your IP.  (Look up Laches doctrine, and Equitable Estoppel. If you DONT aggressively go after people who misappropriate your IP, then you cant sue them later, because they can use these defenses to torpedo your suit. That's why the attack trained lawyers ARE NOT OPTIONAL.)

That's why the EFF constantly is sueing the pants off people misappropriating GPLed source code, et al.

Seriously.  Just use the donation system, PLEASE. For a safer, saner, happier future for modders now and later.

[Eagleon]

Having feelings hurt

It's degrading, yes, but I also think it's much more manipulative of your customers when run as a business. If you want to be treated that way I guess that's on you. I happen to think that it's destroying the market with more and more layers of spin, and that without the social manipulation side of a successful donation campaign, it's practically identical to the sentiment from developers that approach me and others on the basis that we be paid with 'exposure' - which results in no exposure and nothing.

I really don't think it works that way. It was built to be modified. Clay manufacturers are not slinging lawsuits when sculptors sell their work. Bethesda is not obligated to do so if they enter partnership with someone (the modders) to use their trademark in a way that profits them, which was probably a big factor in determining the cut they received. In any case, I'm done here if it's down to calling me butthurt.

Bauglir: I see what you're saying. Thank you for responding. I still think it would have been an interesting experiment, particularly because Steam and Bethesda would have had a vested interest in making it work and could have worked out promotional efforts that could have pushed it in the right direction.

[Putnam]

Am I really the only person to see the donation thing as spin? I feel like I'm on an alien planet, I seriously do not see the difference between a 'donation' and just buying something, except maybe the marketingsocial engineering is a little more twisted and guilt-driven.

That's almost entirely just cynicism. I have donations set up, hell, in a way that I consider somewhat cynical (my mod downloads take you to a webpage with a very prominent donation link on it) but I would never think of that as selling a mod for the pretty goddamn obvious reason that you don't actually pay to play the damn thing.