Steam General Thread

Under at least some EULAs, none, and all IP rights go to the original producer. Of the game, not the mod.

edited 23rd Apr '15 9:55:19 PM by Balmung

So how okay is it for one person to make a mod and sell it for a fixed price and another person to make a very similar mod and give it away for free?

That's for Gabe N's highly paid team of lawyers to sort out, I think.

Given how poorly thought out Greenlight first was upon implementation, I've got a feeling this new idea is gonna be up for one hell of a rocky ride too. Just as some of the other tropers already posted this won't go over well with some of the other game development companies, such as EA, Activision or Ubisoft. And if certain companies who were previously OK with their modding communities get bought by a developer who isn't, it means the modders making a profit off of their products are going to be in a rude shock when the "Cease and Desist" and Royalty Payment requests start coming in.

edited 23rd Apr '15 10:11:41 PM by SgtRicko

I'm not going to worry about this too much, unless of course I suddenly can't use most of my mods because they have paywalls interfering with everything and try to charge me. Now I was initially infuriated with the whole thing, but after considering other perspectives I have a more complex view about this ordeal than I did last time. To simplify it, I'll just list the pros and cons I have about this:

Pros:

- Funding hypothetically allows modders to focus on their projects since more often than not they get discontinued due to the author(s) having to focus on affording life itself.

- It's a considerable way to encourage talented modders to do their work.

Cons:

- T Here's also the potential for modders to demand money, only to do nothing with their mods and make off with what people spent thinking they'd be getting something that works.

- Rampant theft of property that can't even be fully considered original since it's bound to a game they didn't make.

- Valve gets a very disproportionately larger amount of funding for less work.

- There's no real means of quality control other than consumer input. (Quite frankly I think this reason alone is going to tear apart the whole plan entirely.)

- The whole thing is built to ensure that it's damn near impossible to get refunds.

- Never mind the modders getting sued by third parties for whatever reason, imagine how much Valve would have to deal with if someone decided to sue them instead!

- The fear of paywalls for modding itself could add potential ways for rivals like (those slaggers at Origin) to make money by promoting what Valve already used to (AKA free modding) if they ever had the brain cells to process such an idea!

- There's no clear system of what kind of mods deserve prices, if at all. How likely are we to see an absurd system where a reskin pack costs $10, but original maps are only $2?

Personal reasons aside, I can't help but foresee this paid modding system just collapsing in on itself. Hopefully Valve can recover from this fiasco. I know nobody's perfect, and it'd be asinine to assume that they'd be immune from mistakes, but unless they react effectively to this (I.e., don't pull of an EA move that blames the consumer and treats them like garbage), it's going to be an even worse disaster than it was.

Check it out. All paywall mods are down. Do you think that they've backpedalled on this? I hope so.

They're back. It was just a bug.

This is going to be a disaster. There are no quality controls and Valve/Bethesda gets 70% of income. That is a huge incubator for shovelware like the Android Market/Google Play store.

I'm against this, simply because it's just asking for a giant legal shitstorm the moment copyrighted material comes into the picture.

Gabe Newell just went to /r/Gaming on Reddit regarding the paid mod thing. It's here. It's a massive thread that contains answers from Gabe that you may or may not like.

Reddit and it's layout makes me sad because I'm not smart.

What's the gist of it?

That's the one thing I dislike about Reddit: comments are ordered in reverse after a certain point. I know it's to ensure newer posts aren't ignored, but it makes things confusing.

The main point he made was that the pricing structure was Bethesda's decision, not Valve's. So...yeah.

I presume this will apply to any future games, so it will be the developer calling the shots in terms of how much of a cut the modders get.

edited 25th Apr '15 8:46:17 PM by TotemicHero

There's this post that analyses some of what Gabe N said, take it with a grain of salt though, because it's very biased.

For some reason I can't help but suspect that Valve still somewhat misinterprets all the disdain and total rejection of the Paid Modding concept as nothing more than short-term fear of change they feel will subside as they expect people to get used to it. The reason I say Valve and not Gabe N is because last time I checked, the corporation didn't consist of exactly one guy.

To be fair, a lot of new concepts that later on turn out to be successful often had rocky starts. They get refined as time goes on and the creator learns what works or doesn't.

Take Disneyland, for instance: the first opening day was known as "Black Sunday" due to how disastrous the promotional opening went, and Walt himself had doubts due to all the potential issues and lawsuits popping up from the rides being defective, the overly long lines, the lack of public utilities, etc.

Another more gaming related example would be most MM Os today that focus heavily upon combat and typical RPG combat. Notice how many shortcuts, menus and stats clutter the screen, whereas most other genres would consider that to be terrible game design?

Valve calls it off

A shameful mess all around, but an understandable decision.

This is going to be a disaster. There are no quality controls and Valve/Bethesda gets 70% of income. That is a huge incubator for shovelware like the Android Market/Google Play store.

That's an odd comment to make, it costs less to put apps on Google Play then iTunes. In any case, I don't see a huge disparity in the amount of shovelware between the two stores.

I'm surprised they're pulling it so quickly, I thought they'd have planned for initial difficulties and blowback.

edited 27th Apr '15 4:17:05 PM by occono

As someone pointed out, I wouldn't mind a "donate" button, but at the end of the day, game modding is very much a hobby and usually one done out of love for the game or the act of modding.

I mean, I can think of a few cases in which the "paid mods" model might hypothetically work, but I don't think any such cases currently exist and it would likely get criticized as the developers expecting the players to finish their work.

EDIT: Almost forgot about the above link. I feel silly now.

Anyways, this is good news. There's just gotta be a better way for this if revisited at all. Not against premium mods by any means, but for the meantime it does seem that those with similar models to Patreon can work out.

edited 27th Apr '15 6:04:29 PM by EarlOfSandvich

Slightly late on that. Read three posts higher :-P

edited 27th Apr '15 5:30:37 PM by Ghilz

Umm, do companies even allow modders getting money by donation? I mean it is still a way to make money off their product...

Anyhoo, yeah, kinda annoyed they backpedaled this quick, but I guess if they do it again, they should try it out with game with almost non existant mod base :P Since Skyrim mod scene is years old already...

It usually takes a few years for a modding community to take off for a variety of reasons, so it makes sense to work with older releases like Skyrim. For one, the modding community usually needs a bit of time to get used to the game engine and it's internal mechanics, or to even see if the engine is flexible enough to achieve their goals.

A good example of this would be the SAGE engine from Command and Conquer: Generals. It's outdated by over 10 years now, but it's versatile enough for modders to work with, hence why we're still seeing high-quality mods such as Shockwave, C&C Contra and Rise of the Reds released for the Zero Hour expansion. Whereas Red Alert 3's engine proved to be such an inflexible pain in the ass to work with that most modders end up having much of their original ideas stifled or even quitting work altogether. And many of the bigger, more polished mods take a couple of years or more to build into a playable state. Some even get completely overhauled into new engines or have entire gameplay mechanics scrapped or overhauled, and the result of is that you only start seeing the really high quality mods more than several years down the line after the game was released.

edited 28th Apr '15 3:21:13 AM by SgtRicko

Skyrim's modding community didn't take years to form - though it formed off the back of Oblivion's and Fallout 3 / New Vegas which itself formed off Morrowind. Admitedly it helps when the devs release an official modding toolkit for every game they make.

edited 28th Apr '15 1:28:03 AM by CobraPrime

How long does it generally take for password reset emails to arrive? Cause I've been waiting for almost 15 minutes...

Check your spam folder, it's usually automated and takes like 30 seconds at the most.