Monetized Mods

[Ulfengaard]

Some interesting discussion is happening about monetization of mods in the Elder Scrolls community, sparked by this post from Dark0ne: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/news/12444/?

Gopher, of whom I'm a fan, has a video on the topic, as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pfLJwH0zc0

I tend to agree with Gopher in that, should this be the way that Steam is going, it has been coming for a while. He makes a few good points about the issue as it sort of arrives on the stage. I just cringe a little bit when I think of the chaos-drama that could ensue as pay-mods are reposted by third parties, downloaders make heavy demands on the mod developer(s), and we see the advent of modding 'early access' *shudder*. I don't know. I might be a pessimist, but the possibility of pay-walls for mods just sounds terrible to me, not because of quality content-modders like FC, but because of the incredible number of garbage-modders drooling over the possibility of monetizing and luring in players with unfulfilled promises. I worry about the effect that would have on the modding community in general, not just for Elder Scrolls, but other moddable games as well.

Thought from others more educated on this than I?

[Stormweaver]

Well, that's one way to get the steam workshop flooded with poor quality content and creating drama within the modding community. Not sure why they'd want those things though.

Oh wait, the whole monopoly thing. Steam likes money. Fucks sake.

[FlowerChild]

If they're doing it, I suspect Steam is looking at ways to promote both modders supporting their workshop, and in turns, to create pressure on developers to support it.

Not the kind of thing I'm interested in, so beyond that, don't really have much of an opinion either way :)

[logorouge]

I think it's a great way to create a clear cut divide within the community and promote conflict / underhanded practices.

Apart from that, it really depends on how the modders themselves handle it. I read one saying he'll just release his mods a bit earlier on the workshop with a price and then for free on Nexus when the "exclusivity period" is over. I'm actually okay with that. If I don't want to pay, I just have to be patient and wait for the free release. Unfortunately, I think the "Spit the cash or GTFO" method will be far more popular, which kinda rubs me the wrong way. If I want to support my favorite modders with cash, I don't need a paywall to force me, I'll just grab my paypal and do it.

That was my two septims on the subject. :)

[FlowerChild]

One question I'm wondering about here is whether or not any of the profit is kicked back to the original game developer. Anyone know?

That might be a bright side in that I could see that promoting modability in games.

[logorouge]

One question I'm wondering about here is whether or not any of the profit is kicked back to the original game developer. Anyone know?

Yep. Not sure of the exact numbers, but the cuts are supposed to be something like 25% for the mod author and the remaining 75% being divided between the game dev and Valve.

[FlowerChild]

Yep. Not sure of the exact numbers, but the cuts are supposed to be something like 25% for the mod author and the remaining 75% being divided between the game dev and Valve.

Well...wow. "Wow" good in that the original game dev is receiving something as I can see that serving to cause modding support to increase. "Wow...wtf?" on 25% for the mod author.

I took a look and they're marketing it as a way to give back to mod authors for Pete's sake, when it's minimizing the amount of money that actually gets sent their way relative to other methods :P

I suspect that's going to serve to also inflate the prices, as in order to make a buck a copy or something, the author is going to have to charge 4$. I suspect it'll also encourage spamming of many small mods rather than comprehensive packages.

EDIT: Yup...they really hid that bit of info away under a couple of layers of FAQs (I suspect they don't want it being common knowledge as I doubt players will feel as generous if they realize how little the author is actually getting), but:

The percentage of revenue an item creator receives from direct sales of their item in this Workshop is 25%, as stipulated in the Supplemental Workshop Terms. Your individual share may be smaller if you have added other contributors that share in the royalty payments.

Not sure if that's only for Skyrim itself, or general blanket policy for Steam, but: fuck me. That's an obscenely low percentage to throw to the person actually doing the work. I suspect most prostitutes probably get more from their pimps :P

I had no inclination towards using this system before finding that out, but after knowing it it's a total "fuck no" as even the ethics of charging someone 4 times what you actually receive are highly questionable in my mind.

[Stormweaver]

There's also the fact that modder will only be able to get those funds once they've raised $100 - that is, made $400 in sales. And then taxes, because you're a self-employed contractor working for steam iirc.

Theres so much unconfirmed rumour going around at the moment it's almost impossible to tell the difference between scaremongering and reliable sources. Hopefully this'll be a bit calmer in the morning :/

[FlowerChild]

There's also the fact that modder will only be able to get those funds once they've raised $100 - that is, made $400 in sales. And then taxes, because you're a self-employed contractor working for steam iirc.

Yeah, I read through a bit of that (all on Steam, not through secondary sources). The 100$ minimum payment is correct (which I believe only occurs at month's end as well), and it looks like you have to jump through a whole bunch of hoops for the IRS even if you aren't in the states.

I haven't read any of the fear mongering you're talking about, so all my doom and gloom is coming straight from the horse's mouth ;)

[DaveYanakov]

On the one hand, I'm glad to see a way for the people who put hundreds of hours into a mod to get a modest income from it. It is unfortunate that while makers of freeware do receive donations, some of them quite generous, the high percentage of users who never pay a cent means that the average amount per user is small. Being able to charge $5 for a new companion or $10 for a full quest pack could mean an actual career for people with the talent to provide a compelling experience. I'm not as worried about a flood of expensive garbage mods thrown together since they very clearly stated a try before you buy option in the press release.

The way it's set up on the other hand feels very off to me. While I can appreciate that Valve does have overhead to keep the Workshop servers running, a 75/25 split makes it look like the original intent of the Workshop was to corner the market on mod authors in order to monetize them. The people who invested in the development and distribution of the title are also entitled to some kickback but I couldn't see anything more than maybe 10% tops. It's free revenue for them as opposed to the cost of developing and marketing DLC themselves and if there were no mod authors making content, they wouldn't receive any more money from someone playing 5000 hours because mods keep the experience fresh than someone who played a hundred hours to beat the vanilla game and uninstalled it forever.

[Stormweaver]

I haven't read any of the fear mongering you're talking about, so all my doom and gloom is coming straight from the horse's mouth ;)

It comes from someone asking steam how mod dependancies would be managed - if mod A needs assets from mod B to function, can they include mod B? And that the response was that it's fine so long as it's freely available content. Some people are taking it to mean that 'freely' is anything not monitised on steam, and that modders would be forced to monitise on the steam workshop to defend thier IP or whatever. Combined with the...lack of competance normally associated with steam support and that they'll be swamped with DMCA claims and disputes for the time being, there's a lot of worry that things will go south quickly. I'd assume that the bulk of the outrage is coming from users as opposed to modders though, unless there are a few orders of magnitude more modders for skyrim than I thought. Shitstorm in a teacup and all that.

[Dralnalak]

According to an article on Forbes, the cut is 30% to Valve, 45% to Bethesda.

[Wafflewaffle]

It just sounds that Valve is trying to make Tf2 out of Skyrim. Let the players build their own assets and we can monetize them without much efford. They did it with dota 2 and CSGo why wouldnt it work again? The thing is Mods are not as simple as new skins and hats, mods can break, mods are always mutating ( can you imagine modders dropping development on their patches to remonetize in version 2.0? And again at 3.0 and so on? ), mods not always add anything of value like naked mods and perhaps most importantly if the devs have control over the shop they have control over the mods themselves. Would you let people monetize on a piece of content that can actually hurt the release of your other properties, like skyrim multiplayer vs elders scrolls mmo?

I believe in awarding modders for their effords i just dont like the idea of it being handle by Valve.

[Gilberreke]

Steam is known for iterating its features until all parties are happy and trucks with bags of cash start driving into the valve parking lot.

I'm going to hold my opinion for a while, as I'm not quite sure where I lean right now. Might be best if they at least add a clause to the contract saying that mods can't depend on non-steam workshop content. That way, at least they don't hurt the general community much and the workshop ecosystem becomes the test-bed instead. If a non-paid modder then adds his mod to Steam Workshop, he'll at least know for sure that either A) paid modders can take advantage of the mod or B) he's able to opt out of it through a license option or whatever.

[Mikko_blu]

Economically - no, objectively, this was wrong on so many levels.

I'm gonna start with the trend that this has already started. We can see Garry, from garry's mod ready to cash in on this. I'm not even sure if that was written by him, it's so poorly written with such flimsy arguments - the exact opposite of cogent. OH. and then he has the audacity to say this. The very community he came from. Awesome dude.

Marek Rosa (Developer of Medieval Engineers and Space engineers, cute as he is, announced this on twitter. Uh Marek, how about a system where valve doesn't cut out 75% of your profits. If i give a modder 20 dollars for their work, i want them to get 20 dollars. Not 5. But wait! that wouldn't benefit your company, now would it. Not to mention early access mods for an early access game? Great. Awesome. Fantastic.

Let's talk about refunds. You can refund a mod in 24 hours. If you abuse the system too much, they revoke your ability to refund but not your ability to buy. When you refund a mod, the amount you spent gets credited to your steam wallet. From the Agreement, we can see that you never get the money back. You buy a mod, steam gets your money - forever.

Some mod authors are so greedy, they added ads to their free version of their mods. Great. Awesome. Nice system.

And then the community, quoting from forbes, "Fans are looking at modders like this was their idea as an attempt to cash in. Free modders are looking at paid modders as sellouts. Legitimate paid modders are looking at newbie paid modders as opportunists"

Not to mention the cut. As it's already been said in this thread, the modder makes a pretty small cut. Let's say they use software to make their mods, which they'd have to buy. This means that,
$1470- license.
$1.99- skyrim paid mod
$0.49- after 75% valve/Bethesda cut
3000 downloads to break even, and valve + Bethesda walk away with $4477.5 profit.

It's a bad system. Bad bad bad bad bad. Something like this would have been much better.

Sorry about the rant - i just feel very strongly about this issue. Valve has been doing very shady shit for the last 3-4 years and I'm completely fed up with it.

[Taleric]

I have used workshop for Space Engineers and maybe one other game; the rest I modded manually. As long as we can still do this meh... If modders start only providing via workshop I guess I would heavily research before I purchased and be less likely to try stuff.

[Ulfengaard]

The entire thing is melting down. The community absolutely exploded. Loads of drama. What is shocking me is that the mod authors are getting a motherload of hate (like more than I've literally ever seen). I thought Valve would take the brunt of it, considering the split and conditions, and that would've made sense. But the sheer volume of poison being vomited onto the mod authors is staggering. One guy set up his mod releases to be paid, and then released for free two weeks later, like a sort of early access thing. His comment page won't even load, it has been so bombarded with angry users.

Some better modders left the community. This is just crazy.

[FlowerChild]

25% of the money, 100% of the hate...nice.

[BinoAl]

Gabe Newell did an AMA sort of thing on Reddit concerning this. He unfortunately doesn't really reveal anything new, and doesn't answer most of the important questions, but I figured some might be interested anyway.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comment ... and_steam/

[Mikko_blu]

It's like the part of the article from Forbes that i quoted - everyone's got their guns pointed at each other and everyone's afraid to make a move.

I just want to make it clear that I'm in no way against compensation for modders, however i am against the 25% that they get, and I'm against modders making money on unfinished, or unpolished content that had no QA whatsoever. This dude did a quality check on the paid mods, and the level of quality these mods were for being paid, is abysmal. Especially from the poster boy mod, which looked fantastic in presentation, and unfortunately isn't so much in execution.

there aremodders out there uploading mods they could pump out as quickly as possible to make a quick buck. I'm against this too.

Flowerchild's mods have always been stellar in terms of quality and content. If all mods were on par with his, then hands down every mod should be for sale (the modder making 100%, of course) But the sad fact of the matter is that they aren't.

[logorouge]

Yup. The whole thing is already gone as we can read here.

Seems they decided the benefits weren't worth having a constant shitstorm. Back to the drawing board for paid mods... for now.

[Foxy Boxes]

An interesting point that I saw: Each game sets the percentage for its mods. Presumably that means that you could have a game that gives all the money to the modders.

[Wafflewaffle]

Only Valve can piss off a giant chunk of its customers with a stupid idea, backtrack on it and then come out on top cuz they listened to the community.

Hey! How about asking what the community thinks of a certain feature before fully committing to it? I guess when you run a monopoly, market research is not that important...

[DaveYanakov]

30% for Valve seems fair to me. Server hosting on that scale is not cheap. If anyone deserves to be taking flak in this scenario it's Bethesda. 45% of the proceeds of a system that they would never have seen a dime from otherwise combined with the fact that people running mods account for a chunk of the game sales in the first place is ridiculous. They may have the legal standing to make that demand but half of an asset creators paycheck? What the hell?

[FlowerChild]

30% for Valve seems fair to me. Server hosting on that scale is not cheap.

I could be wrong, but isn't that actually more of a cut than they take for actual games? If it's a matter of server hosting or what have you, whether it's a mod or not shouldn't really be making the difference here.

If anyone deserves to be taking flak in this scenario it's Bethesda. 45% of the proceeds of a system that they would never have seen a dime from otherwise combined with the fact that people running mods account for a chunk of the game sales in the first place is ridiculous. They may have the legal standing to make that demand but half of an asset creators paycheck? What the hell?

Yeah, it's fucking nuts. I think if they hadn't been so greedy, this may have had a fighting chance, as mod creators would have been more willing to step up and fight for this. The way I see it though, one minute you're getting 100% of your mod profits (of nothing mind you) and essentially have complete control and access to the same hosting/services. Next minute, you decide to monetize it, and along comes a third party and says "thanks...give us 75% of that".

It's just plain obscene the way they did it, and I suspect that strongly contributed to it not working as it essentially turned everyone other than the original game devs against it.