Mod Marketplace
April 23, 2015 3:52 PM Subscribe
Steam has released news that they will be adding a paid marketplace to one of their most popular workshops (meaning mod database): Skyrim. This GameSpot article has more details about the specifics of what the new mod monetization entails. VentureBeat rounds up the distressed reaction from fans. Here is the FAQ provided by Steam for payments through Workshop if you would like to draw your own conclusions.
If ye' dare: reaction threads from The Escapist, NeoGAF, and r/Games.
If ye' dare: reaction threads from The Escapist, NeoGAF, and r/Games.
Heh. Gamers are never not upset.
posted by Artw at 3:58 PM on April 23, 2015 [13 favorites]
posted by Artw at 3:58 PM on April 23, 2015 [13 favorites]
Hahaha oh god this is going to produce rich syrupy Drama like an entire forest worth of Drama Maples.
posted by Sebmojo at 4:12 PM on April 23, 2015 [11 favorites]
posted by Sebmojo at 4:12 PM on April 23, 2015 [11 favorites]
Seems to be a lot of negativity around the 25% revenue cut for Skyrim mods, but this actually strikes me as pretty generous, given that the work is essentially valueless without the development and marketing investment from Bethesda and the infrastructure from Steam. It's a better royalty than most creative projects will net you, in any case.
posted by howfar at 4:14 PM on April 23, 2015
posted by howfar at 4:14 PM on April 23, 2015
And infinitely better than the old royalty of 100% of fuck all.
posted by howfar at 4:15 PM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by howfar at 4:15 PM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]
The people over at nexus must be cock-shitting mad right now (cock-shitting is also a mod that costs $2.10 now).
posted by boo_radley at 4:16 PM on April 23, 2015 [9 favorites]
posted by boo_radley at 4:16 PM on April 23, 2015 [9 favorites]
Those poor roosters.
posted by howfar at 4:17 PM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by howfar at 4:17 PM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]
Can mod developers ignore Steam Workshop and still release mods on their own for free? If so, Valve is adding more options for both gamers and developers, which can only be a good thing.
I play Valve's Counterstrike. A lot of players complain about the high price of weapons skins in the game even though they are a completely optional aesthetic feature that does not affect gameplay.
Valve knows very well that a lot of their customers are young and don't have much money. I think they have done a great job of making high quality games available for a fair price, and offering premium content like TF2 hats so customers with more money can subsidize development. Unlike Farmville these premium options are purely for bling, it is not "pay to win". Its a good model that works well for developers, poor gamers, and rich gamers.
posted by foobaz at 4:34 PM on April 23, 2015 [3 favorites]
I play Valve's Counterstrike. A lot of players complain about the high price of weapons skins in the game even though they are a completely optional aesthetic feature that does not affect gameplay.
Valve knows very well that a lot of their customers are young and don't have much money. I think they have done a great job of making high quality games available for a fair price, and offering premium content like TF2 hats so customers with more money can subsidize development. Unlike Farmville these premium options are purely for bling, it is not "pay to win". Its a good model that works well for developers, poor gamers, and rich gamers.
posted by foobaz at 4:34 PM on April 23, 2015 [3 favorites]
Cool. I've been all for the proliferation of professional-quality mod scene work, both as stepping-stone and bedrock for years. This makes it easier to reward the artists who provide. It's an option. If they want to release their work for free, and ask for donations, they still can. Now, they can charge for a more limited audience, as well. Valve quietly upped the mod-size limit, recently, which points to very large and complex Nexus-type mods making the transition. I'd happily pay a few bucks for integrated and current patches and support for some of the top shelf mods, ie DarthMod, XCOM Long War, Deus Ex.
posted by chainlinkspiral at 4:51 PM on April 23, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by chainlinkspiral at 4:51 PM on April 23, 2015 [4 favorites]
What this means as far as I'm concerned is that modders will be able to justify working much harder on their beloved mods, and also making sure that they work really, really well; and it will provide a better entry point for would-be game designers to turn pro.
Gamers love to complain, but this seems like YouTube paying for views: they're not in it for their health, no, but they're generating a lot of creativity.
posted by musofire at 4:52 PM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]
Gamers love to complain, but this seems like YouTube paying for views: they're not in it for their health, no, but they're generating a lot of creativity.
posted by musofire at 4:52 PM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]
This seems reasonable. I've put about as many hours into the Long War mod as into XCOM proper, and expect to put more. I haven't paid them yet, because I'm incredibly poor, but I certainly intend to. Why shouldn't they be able to profit off what in their case is essentially a whole new game?
posted by Lemurrhea at 4:53 PM on April 23, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Lemurrhea at 4:53 PM on April 23, 2015 [2 favorites]
Can mod developers ignore Steam Workshop and still release mods on their own for free? If so, Valve is adding more options for both gamers and developers, which can only be a good thing.
Steam Workshop still supports free mods, and unless Valve is incredibly short-sighted that will never change. So even better news!
posted by chrominance at 5:20 PM on April 23, 2015
Steam Workshop still supports free mods, and unless Valve is incredibly short-sighted that will never change. So even better news!
posted by chrominance at 5:20 PM on April 23, 2015
There is already a mod (free of course) to go and kill Lord Gaben.
I'm a little salty about this whole thing but can't really say why, so I guess I'll see how it pans out.
posted by Sternmeyer at 5:34 PM on April 23, 2015
I'm a little salty about this whole thing but can't really say why, so I guess I'll see how it pans out.
posted by Sternmeyer at 5:34 PM on April 23, 2015
Valve is making a play to continue it's dominance in the Hat Simulator market.
posted by ethansr at 5:57 PM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by ethansr at 5:57 PM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]
This would explain the free-play weekend and sale on Skyrim right now.
BRB, finally buying all the expansions.
But probably not any of the mods, honestly. I feel like this might be a bit late. It's not that I won't still totally play this game. It's that it's been around long enough that I feel like $5 for something related to it is probably a bit steep unless it's got a serious amount of actual professional-caliber content. I am not paying 20% of that for a single sword.
posted by Sequence at 6:03 PM on April 23, 2015
BRB, finally buying all the expansions.
But probably not any of the mods, honestly. I feel like this might be a bit late. It's not that I won't still totally play this game. It's that it's been around long enough that I feel like $5 for something related to it is probably a bit steep unless it's got a serious amount of actual professional-caliber content. I am not paying 20% of that for a single sword.
posted by Sequence at 6:03 PM on April 23, 2015
I'm not outraged, but I can see a lot of problems. The main one is how many shared resources get put into mods. Even before monetization, if you've ever followed a mod community, you'll see a ton of these miniature dramas breaking out among participants - much less before you introduce real money into the equation. As it stands, most of the good (or at least extensive) mods for Skyrim make use of shared script libraries and extensions. Who gets a cut of the money there? Many mods I've used also tend to "borrow" resources from other games (skins, meshes, theming, etc.). Steam seems to be shrugging and saying, "Report it, but not our problem." Modding Skyrim right now is a labor intensive process that has a lot of problems. This is usually referred to as the "load order", and other mod managers such as Nexus try to mitigate this a little bit. But as mods become proprietary to Steam (and I would imagine Bethesda takes steps to keep mods within its for-pay ecosystem) how do they insure that the difficult process of getting mods to play nice actually works with stuff you're paying real money for? Right now they have a refund system, but what happens when I pay ten dollars for a mod that breaks in the next patch of the mega-mod I'm using? That's not the modder's responsibility, not Steam's, and not Bethesda's. I'd wager that the answer is "shrugguy.com", or "insitute stricter constraints on modding." Mods are also dead simple to pirate, photocopy, duplicate, or rip off. Modders have basically no legal power, beyond filing take-down notices.
So I actually think that a mod marketplace is a great idea, since it perhaps has the possibility to produce better and more comprehensive mods, and to provide payment to before unpaid labor, but I'm interested to see how it shakes out in practice.
As per usual, Steam is inserting themselves as a middleman into the practice (skimming the profit off the top), and shuffling off the labor of management off onto users. Basically they're increasing their value for almost no extra work beyond some changes to their front-end UI.
posted by codacorolla at 6:23 PM on April 23, 2015 [14 favorites]
So I actually think that a mod marketplace is a great idea, since it perhaps has the possibility to produce better and more comprehensive mods, and to provide payment to before unpaid labor, but I'm interested to see how it shakes out in practice.
As per usual, Steam is inserting themselves as a middleman into the practice (skimming the profit off the top), and shuffling off the labor of management off onto users. Basically they're increasing their value for almost no extra work beyond some changes to their front-end UI.
posted by codacorolla at 6:23 PM on April 23, 2015 [14 favorites]
There are a few problems as I see it.
1. Shared resources, libraries, etc.
2. Steam keeping 75%
3. Steam not doing any payout until the mod breaks the $100 mark, and commissions only paid at each 100 mark subsequently.
4. Refunds not offered in currency, only in steam dollars.
This looks to me like a monopoly move to try and cut the knees out of places like nexus.
posted by dejah420 at 6:31 PM on April 23, 2015 [3 favorites]
1. Shared resources, libraries, etc.
2. Steam keeping 75%
3. Steam not doing any payout until the mod breaks the $100 mark, and commissions only paid at each 100 mark subsequently.
4. Refunds not offered in currency, only in steam dollars.
This looks to me like a monopoly move to try and cut the knees out of places like nexus.
posted by dejah420 at 6:31 PM on April 23, 2015 [3 favorites]
This looks to me like a monopoly move to try and cut the knees out of places like nexus.
Yep, exactly. Also, let's say that a modder uses an asset they've ripped from The Witcher (which one of the most popular mods, Immersive Armors / Weapons actually does). I don't realize that at the time, they get reported by CD Projekt (Witcher's developer), and the mod gets pulled. Now their mod isn't being supported, if it ever was... do they also pull the mod from my system? I now have five dollars worth of software that's essentially worthless with following modifications to other super-mod packs (which many smaller mods tend to write modules to accomodate). Let's say that the above is the case, but that there is no stolen content, and instead just some asshole trolling a competitor. Woops!
Because of the huge overhead, modders are now technically getting paid for their labor, but it's an infinitesimal amount. Especially when you get into all of the further unpaid labor that goes into moderating these systems. Not to mention the fact that a lot of people (myself included) tend to put up with exceedingly mediocre products from companies like Bethesda because I know that eventually modders will fix the game. If I know that TES6 or Fallout 4 are going to have paid marketplaces out of the box, then I'm far less likely to factor that into my purchase.
posted by codacorolla at 6:40 PM on April 23, 2015 [7 favorites]
Yep, exactly. Also, let's say that a modder uses an asset they've ripped from The Witcher (which one of the most popular mods, Immersive Armors / Weapons actually does). I don't realize that at the time, they get reported by CD Projekt (Witcher's developer), and the mod gets pulled. Now their mod isn't being supported, if it ever was... do they also pull the mod from my system? I now have five dollars worth of software that's essentially worthless with following modifications to other super-mod packs (which many smaller mods tend to write modules to accomodate). Let's say that the above is the case, but that there is no stolen content, and instead just some asshole trolling a competitor. Woops!
Because of the huge overhead, modders are now technically getting paid for their labor, but it's an infinitesimal amount. Especially when you get into all of the further unpaid labor that goes into moderating these systems. Not to mention the fact that a lot of people (myself included) tend to put up with exceedingly mediocre products from companies like Bethesda because I know that eventually modders will fix the game. If I know that TES6 or Fallout 4 are going to have paid marketplaces out of the box, then I'm far less likely to factor that into my purchase.
posted by codacorolla at 6:40 PM on April 23, 2015 [7 favorites]
I'm not sure that your position that mods are really awesome and fix games but that they should remain completely free despite requiring loads of work is all that tenable, though.
posted by Justinian at 7:41 PM on April 23, 2015
posted by Justinian at 7:41 PM on April 23, 2015
(It's also not like people can't release their mods for free if they choose. So the argument is that people shouldn't be allowed to charge for mods.)
posted by Justinian at 7:42 PM on April 23, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Justinian at 7:42 PM on April 23, 2015 [2 favorites]
I'm not sure that your position that mods are really awesome and fix games but that they should remain completely free despite requiring loads of work is all that tenable, though.
You must have missed me saying, repeatedly, that I think modders should have a marketplace, but that this is a bad implementation of it. It's not difficult to comprehend before replying.
posted by codacorolla at 7:47 PM on April 23, 2015
You must have missed me saying, repeatedly, that I think modders should have a marketplace, but that this is a bad implementation of it. It's not difficult to comprehend before replying.
posted by codacorolla at 7:47 PM on April 23, 2015
Well, I see you saying that you think a marketplace is a great idea theoretically but then listing a bunch of problems which I don't think are particularly problematic about Steam's implementation. A 25% royalty is anything but infinitesimal and shared resources are going to be an issue with any mod marketplace and isn't specific in any way to Steam's marketplace. Load order and any theoretical action on Bethesda's part to keep mods in a for-pay ecosystem are likewise not steam specific.
posted by Justinian at 7:55 PM on April 23, 2015
posted by Justinian at 7:55 PM on April 23, 2015
All these online market places overcharge. iTunes and Amazon do basically zero work for the digital content they deliver, but they take like 30%, right? Valve taking 75% sounds outrageous, but maybe the mods depend more heavily on actual work by Valve, like writing public docs, fixing engine bugs that only impact mods, etc.
I expect folks would shut up about the 75% if Valve promised it'd go for stuff that mod writers and users liked, along with some transparency, maybe even if they just spend it on stuff Valve currently pays for. Just get the rent extraction component down below what iTunes, Amazon, etc. charge.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:45 PM on April 23, 2015
I expect folks would shut up about the 75% if Valve promised it'd go for stuff that mod writers and users liked, along with some transparency, maybe even if they just spend it on stuff Valve currently pays for. Just get the rent extraction component down below what iTunes, Amazon, etc. charge.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:45 PM on April 23, 2015
Seems simple enough to me; if you think 25% isn't high enough, sell the mod yourself through your own website and using PayPal. Oh, that's too much work and not worth it? I guess 25% was high enough after all.
posted by Justinian at 9:32 PM on April 23, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by Justinian at 9:32 PM on April 23, 2015 [3 favorites]
Also, let's say that a modder uses an asset they've ripped from The Witcher (which one of the most popular mods, Immersive Armors / Weapons actually does).
Codacorolla, this has happened in the DOTA2 workshop with the Timebreaker mace for the Faceless Void which was discovered to be a model import from Aion. While no one can know the true details of what went on between Valve and NCSOFT, what happened in the game was that all players who owned copies of it got to keep them (it got renamed to Vintage Timebreaker) and Valve designed a new Timebreaker for the Faceless Void for sale. Prices of Vintage Timebreakers went up 10x and have remained at that level ever since as it became a rare collectible.
I am assuming Valve negotiated with NCSOFT for the ability to keep the existing Vintage Timebreakers in the game. In the event that NCSOFT refused Valve would then offer a refund to players.
posted by xdvesper at 9:34 PM on April 23, 2015
Codacorolla, this has happened in the DOTA2 workshop with the Timebreaker mace for the Faceless Void which was discovered to be a model import from Aion. While no one can know the true details of what went on between Valve and NCSOFT, what happened in the game was that all players who owned copies of it got to keep them (it got renamed to Vintage Timebreaker) and Valve designed a new Timebreaker for the Faceless Void for sale. Prices of Vintage Timebreakers went up 10x and have remained at that level ever since as it became a rare collectible.
I am assuming Valve negotiated with NCSOFT for the ability to keep the existing Vintage Timebreakers in the game. In the event that NCSOFT refused Valve would then offer a refund to players.
posted by xdvesper at 9:34 PM on April 23, 2015
Seems simple enough to me; if you think 25% isn't high enough, sell the mod yourself through your own website and using PayPal. Oh, that's too much work and not worth it? I guess 25% was high enough after all.
I suspect that's the point that a lot of publishers would swoop in and shut you down as well.
posted by Artw at 9:35 PM on April 23, 2015
I suspect that's the point that a lot of publishers would swoop in and shut you down as well.
posted by Artw at 9:35 PM on April 23, 2015
Actually, I think I may be mis-remembering (it was a long time ago), I think Valve probably replaced all existing Timebreakers with their own redesign: players who had it didn't mind because the value went up by 10x.
posted by xdvesper at 9:40 PM on April 23, 2015
posted by xdvesper at 9:40 PM on April 23, 2015
I have seen it suggested that part of that 75% share of the money will be going to the creators of the original game. On the one hand, this might incentivise game-makers to support modding when they usually shun it in favour of their own profitable DLC. On the other hand, this might lead to game-makers only allowing mods on Steam.
Another part of the 75% is apparently going to be donated to the mod-makers choice of a list of charities and open development tools like Blender.
posted by Eleven at 3:02 AM on April 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
Another part of the 75% is apparently going to be donated to the mod-makers choice of a list of charities and open development tools like Blender.
posted by Eleven at 3:02 AM on April 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
I don't have any problem with being asked to pay for mods. The two action games I loved most and actually played at a reasonably competitive level were mods. Counterstrike and Tribes Renegades. Counterstrike is still going strong but Renegades is long dead and I would have loved to pay to keep that one going. I think in the long term this is a really good move.
posted by Drinky Die at 3:39 PM on April 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Drinky Die at 3:39 PM on April 25, 2015 [2 favorites]
Heh. Gamers are never not upset.
I'm sure we can find some way to blame women for this.
posted by shakespeherian at 2:50 PM on April 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
I'm sure we can find some way to blame women for this.
posted by shakespeherian at 2:50 PM on April 26, 2015 [1 favorite]
They've killed it, and rightfully so, I think. The core idea was not a bad one in principle, but, yeah: the implementation wasn't well-thought-out.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:45 PM on April 27, 2015
it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing.Good on Valve for listening to their customers, recognizing they messed it up and being upfront about it. The odd and experimental way they structure responsibilities within the company means that stuff can get out the door that is less than fully baked, and they can seem awfully unfocussed sometimes, but I still reckon their collective heart is in the right place.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:45 PM on April 27, 2015
Good. As I said above, it's a good idea, but this was a bad implementation.
posted by codacorolla at 8:34 PM on April 27, 2015
posted by codacorolla at 8:34 PM on April 27, 2015
« Older "...it has been enormously fun being two people." | The Hardee's-Carl's Jr. Line Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by BrotherCaine at 3:58 PM on April 23, 2015 [1 favorite]