As long as you don’t try to sell stolen content (i.e: using specific assets like a tie fighter from star wars) it’s usually quite fine. However, companies (or private persons) can also pull your mod away if you are simply using their stuff (there was a big skyrim-lotr mod that was pulled, it was a total skyrim to lotr conversion but there was no money involved). I’m quite fine with that, I wouldn’t want other people to use my stuff without me looking over it to make sure it is presented in a good way and if it’s something I would earn money from, I wouldn’t really want it to be released and used for free.
But if the game have modding support you can usually go bananas (unless their eula says otherwise), as long as you don’t steal stuff.
Well. Copyright is the right to make someone not use your stuff. But as long as its owner doesn’t feel or can’t bother enforcing it, it is still viable to do it.
There are tons of mods that use stuff from popular media like Star Wars, Battlestar, Stargate, LotR,
Skyrim mods has even some of them … yes a X-Wing too …
I think everyone working on such a mod need to know that their work can be in vain with a single mail from the copyright owner. …
When you then start making money with it … that mail sadly comes in even faster.
That wasn’t my intention. I just wanted to remind everyone again that this is a very relevant controversial topic.
Paying for mods isn’t necessarily a bad idea. Let’s say someone make a total conversion of Skyrim (let’s assume base/original content and keep copyright out of it for now) and wants to sell it, I don’t see anything wrong with that.
Similarly, a “donate” button, which would be pretty much an equivalent to a “pay what you want”, but you could “buy” it again if you wish, could be nice to be directly integrated to the system.
In fact, it could even help have copyright mods if the copyright owner gets its share (though I suspect many copyright owners will prefer ruin a good project and a potential source of revenue by incompetence instead).
That said.
25% going to the modders? You bloody ogres!
As mattk50 writes, the original developer has already been paid. Similarly, Steam has already be paid.
I could understand that the original developer get a small cut so they are incentivized, and a slightly bigger one for Steam for running the system.
And I don’t know in what Apple-wet-dream of a world this adds up to 75%, but it’s certainly not one I would wish anyone to live in.
My initial reaction was actually similar to the first posts in the thread, i thought “hey, that’s cool i guess, wonder how it works out” but the devil is in the details, i started reading what was going on and a friend argued the point with me.There are so many pitfalls of the system and quite frankly the implementation is exploitative in many ways. And like i said earlier mods already are dealing with fractional audiences, the last thing you want as a small time mod maker is to limit your audience further with a paywall, which is why some form of donation or pay what you want 0$-20$ system like bandcamp uses is certainly superior.
By the way, i mentioned space engineers earlier. Apparantly they’re planning on doing paid mods for an early access game where mods fucking break on a weekly basis(theres an update every thursday). Fuck this shit.
I don’t have a problem with paid mods, especially for total conversions. I pay for after market car accessories (that aren’t licensed by the original car manufacturers, at that), and I’m happy to pay for after market software. Even if the original studio/publishers don’t get a cut (if the mod doesn’t ship with 1st party art assets or code).
I have a major, major problem with Steam. Always have. This plan pretty much sums up the reasons why. Steam doesn’t sell games to gamers. Steam sells gamers to publishers.
Yeah, if you read that workshop announcement they maintain that they only had good intentions but admit they didn’t think it through, and that the modding marketplace is very different to the player made hats store and their other business models.
Still. The foul smell of tons of negative emotional reactions stay. Like they always do.
This failed, not because it was inherently bad. But because people didn’t trust anyone when money came into the equation. I read both sides. Including post by people who managed to make a living with their mods by selling them to customers. But the inclusion of a third party, and at that, one that take 75% of the revenue, was rather badly received. And I think the main point why this failed … for now.
And always this call for a donate button. I never use a donate button. It must be an extremely good mod or cause for me to do that. I don’t see anyone living of that.
It was a bold move to try this in the skyrim modding community.
Valve tries to open new markets, they tried to streamline people making money with mods, like it worked for them and others in the past so well. Calling them greedy money bags for that?
What I find sad is that the rest was pretty ok. I strongly believe in self policed systems. And in the open approach valve has with its systems. It’s costly for the customer, but brings also some comfort. If you find Valves business practices lazy and cheap … don’t support them. There are a lot of other markets out there nowadays.
I felt most of the friction with this … experiment … came from different believes what people find moral, their fears and the new and unknown.
Modders have the option to charge people for their work. Some people didn’t like them to have that option. They rather have the modding world stay how it is.
Most money would have flown into third parties. It’s a non attractive business decision. Would there be other platforms with lower percentages and the same service, people would have gravitated to that. The only point I agree with really.
The publisher could force modders into that one system. Yes they already have the power, and they could, but until they do they aren’t evil. Don’t believe Publishers would have allowed open modding when they would have
People don’t trust self policing and say people (someone at valve) need to actively be on the hunt for mods that try to rip you off. Steam is full of lower quality games, I don’t see a problem with that. Policing is boring work, and I think no-one should need to do it if there are other ways.
Mods relying on each other. Possibility of people making profit with other peoples work. That’s something people fear, and I can understand that, but I think just stepping into the deep water and embracing the drama is the way to go in such a situation. I believe that, as long as enough communication channels are available, people will realize where the sources of the mod originate from.
We had similar situations in stand alone games for years now … and it never was a bigger problem then: “Hah, look how they tried to steal that model from BF1942, Ha. Surely not gonna buy this game!”
You may get why I though it is an ok idea now … with all the “I believe” parts.
Hope they try again. Maybe with a percentage comparable to stand alone games.
All those fears also may apply to what I-Novae plan to do. Open systems with open possibilities for a lot of people are exciting … in a lot different ways. You need to be prepared for drama. A lot of drama.
You may not want to read the following if you hold those ideas very close, because I think your position is extremely flawed.
The idea for the donate button is not for modders to “make a living” off it. Its giving them an income stream (and it WILL be worthwhile if it’s presented as pay what you want with zero minumum and a suggested value like bandcamp or humble bundle, people are way more likely to donate in that context) without all the drawbacks of paywalls. Your personal experience with donate buttons is expected, most people won’t donate, but enough do. Your assuming people are always perfectly economically rational. They aren’t. Just look at the rise of crowdfunding and patreon in particular.
By the way, who the fuck ever thought making a living would be viable through mod sales(besides valve, before taking down the mod shop they actually changed their own wording from make a living to make an extra buck funnily enough)? Like, lets think about this “living”, one where your completely dependent on a company’s games who you have zero line of communication to and are also very likely to get one hit wonder mods rather than widespread success You release your ultimate texture pack that gets tons of sales and then what, you texture some custom swords and nobody ever cares because all they wanted was this one feature which you provided and now it’s done. Your the texture pack guy, what are you supposed to do, wait till the next game? mod 30 different games at the same time? That’s inefficient as far as familiarization with each game goes and obviously a modder wants to mod the game he likes not the ones everyone else does (though i suppose that would change if it became a job).
Mods transcend the concept of a low quality game quite literally. In a low quality game, the developer is solely responsible for the end product, they can fix the pugs, they ship a standalone product. With a mod, the original game can patch and make unfixable a mod at any moment. Mods conflict, mods don’t work, mods are free of guarantees. And they expect to take a cut for not doing anything to mitigate that. They are incomparable.
What? How? Do you expect there to be some kind of content ID system that matches mod files? What if two mods contain the same script which is essentially the same? What if you just take scripts and change the spacing and ordering and pretend you just came up with the same code? Actual game developers have done this before, just imagine how bad it would be in mods. Its to costly for valve start issuing chargebacks and rerouting funding between modders, and they wouldnt have, dmca only means you need to take it down, not pay what you earned beforehand. This is already a problem with youtube videos and other websites freebooting, like facebook, even if you get something taken down the damage is already done and the person keeps their profits. DMCA is the system that is “self policing” here and it is widely known that the DMCA is an incredibly flawed piece of legislature.
There are massive drawbacks to an economy of paywalls which you seem to be unaware of. First of all is competition, contrary to popular belief it is not a positive force in every situation, especially if something is already working through an egalitarian system. For competition to increase the quality of the end result collaboration has to be either be low barrier viable option or not beneficial to the end result. In mods case, collaboration is extremely beneficial but not very viable financially because modders are scattered across the globe and have very low userbases as is, plus the issues of quality control, mod compatibility and patchbreaking. The moment people start putting a price tag on their mods, it’s not so easy to send an email to the modder asking if you can use their sword texture in your new quest. it will lead to debates about how what % of royalties should be paid to each modder and less of these collaborations will occur due to the additional organizational and financial barriers. The atmosphere of modding would also change, especially if people are trying to make livelihoods expect aggression, shit talking, and any underhanded methods that work (see stealing mod content). One example of an extremely likely underhanded method is to structure your mod to be less compatible with other modder’s work intentionally, or in the case of games which have shit compatibility by default, just never actually getting your mod up to compatibility standards. All the drama and examples i’ve listed already happens with mods that are free, it would happen far more.
The modders time is taken up by dealing with this crap that has nothing to do with their mod, probably not even making enough to pay for the time dealing with the money aspect. Also making things extremely annoying for end users who dont have the time to build their own game with 100 mods, not everyone enjoys that aspect and prefers pre built mod packs, which would cease to exist. And then there’s time taken by internal mod team drama. The people who actually make it to the team stage have to deal with the usual mod team drama except now with money, expecting modders accross the globe to evaluate their team’s contributions as percentages, let alone with continued support of those mods with no formal company structure. it’s possible but VERY difficult and overall means less capable mod teams. And of course, these mods teams are suddenly absent of all the other work the community has done which is now also behind paywalls. Script extenders, textures, other things they would otherwise have ready to go to extend their mod off of now becomes either an investment cost or something that wasnt made in the first place due to the other barriers put in place. And even if you can buy the mod rights there’s no guarantee the other people will let you use it to begin with, bad for competition and all that. “The terms “Scope” and “Scale” come to mind when you start saying you have to reinvent the wheel for everything you’re doing.”
Then there’s the idea that modders would spend more time on mods if it became their jobs. It would, but not as much as some people make it out to be There’s a reason most people dont just do one thing all day, humans need variety. If it became a job, you’d get more hours but also turn the practice stressful, and then the person needs recreation, you cant expect people just to do it all day. Furthermore you’d get modders under pressure to produce if they abandoned their job for this new one, meaning uninspired shovelware that nobody wants and nobody will buy and oh no he has to get a real job again. 99% of the ideas people come up with for mods are crap, it’s best if they only spend time working on the good ideas, and those rare good ideas are suitable for full time employment. In other words, their “paid work hours” are worth less than a free hour.
And again, there’s massive conflicts of interest created for the game studio when they’re making a profit off that HD texture pack mod they could have just included themselves. It’s dlc they have no production cost for, you dont think that’s the least bit exploitable? Im not saying companies are evil, im saying they’re businesses and will do whatever they can to turn a profit (a lot of companies bend the law for this purpose, you cant expect video game companies to not bend a not law for money?!?!). The only thing stopping them in the “foul smell of tons of negative emotional reactions” as you put it, is what’s called consumer power in action. So business carrying out their prime directive is fine but when people do it it’s smelly. im not going to wade into the political implications of that.
Cool response matt. I hold my ideas very close, but embrace the opinion of others, no matter what they think of my ideas.
First of all let me say what I address by saying: “The foul smell of tons of negative emotional reactions stay.”
I find it’s ok to react emotionally to something, emotional reaction is a lot faster and can see flaws in complex systems, like the one we discuss, even without deeper understanding of all its parts. And that’s good. What needs to follow up though is the identification of the precise reason why an idea or situation is flawed or bad.
If that “background check” isn’t done by every single person, those people fall prone easily to concious or subconscious influence of past experiences that, on the surface, seem similar, but are actually compromised of another structure then the thing they feel that feeling to. That also works with positive opinions. When people post short responses like: “Valve you greedy moneybags!”. Or: “This is the end of modding!”. I just don’t see them having made that “background check”.
Yes, those are good systems and work well and I don’t oppose them. I’m just saying that they don’t address the problem. Which is the Pretoria of morality and coexistence questions that this brought up. Just saying: “Just put a donate button there, and that’s that.” Is diverting from the actual discussion if payment in itself is good or bad, throwing the third party out of the equation totally (which is a good thing for most and I’m ok with that), but as said, doesn’t bring us closer to coexisting.
That’s also a good point. (And the whole paragraph below that). You are probably right that no one should expect people to reach something as stable as a fixed job, especially with those demand and motivational changes such a situation can create.
But creating a platform that allows one hit wonders and maybe some extra cash for good creators to maybe Kickstart a stand alone game project is something that could be possible.
We need to try to at least pull as much comparison as possible if we try to predict the future. I think there are enough situations and systems out there to compare to the system Valve proposed.
Yes. And you already mentioned more then enough places where the “drama” as I call it is ongoing. This isn’t new. And it would have happened.
The only difference here is that money is like … a fire accelerate. If I create my cool Stargate Mod and distribute it for free. The probability of who owns the Copyright DMCAing me is pretty low. If I take donations … a little higher maybe. If I sell it for huge profits (everyone wants it) … nope not anymore. Same for mod to mod compability and such.
I say lets dive into that fire. It’s a kind of extremism I’m aware of and I see its flaws. I support as many options as possible. Even if some of them lead into hell-holes of fire and demise. As long as no one is forced into that fire … everyone needs to learn that this is a danger.
What we have on our hands here is the attempt of a compromise. Trying to bring in money into modding by cooperating with the people owning the copyright. Something bound to be extremely difficult with how money, copyright and open source work nowadays.
I don’t know if this is a good or bad thing. I only know that I think: The added option will create situations to learn from. The mod creators will learn, the copyright owners will learn, the mod users will learn. Learn if and how to work together and if it is beneficial to modding or not.
I’m not a strong believer of the free market. Competition works in some places, but I prefer cooperation. I agree that most probably all of your mentioned problems will arise if there is a paywall … making mods more similar to DLC.
But, as I said. Give them the option to do so. Let them pick a fixed price. They will learn that selling ones content has drawbacks, not only for you but also for others. Maybe they accept that, maybe they can agree, maybe not and all ends in thousands of words of drama. But the possibility of people getting along with money outweighs that in my opinion.
Yes I agree. Because money is a big drama increaser due to a lot of people taking money far to personal and serious. Still, it only increases the drama. The problem is inherent in any colaborative project. How do you split the benefits, be it money or credit.
No. It is and was not ok for Valve/Bethesda to team up and propose this “feature” to take most of the credit generated by mods that choose to sell trough the mod store for themselves … and I’m glad they now have to think about it. Hopefully comming to the conclusion to decrease their part to about 10%.
Similar it isn’t ok for me to take models from BF4 without giving DICE credit.
But is it ok for me to take models from BF1942? But that’s another topic.
I just hope that the more we interact, the more we learn to coexist. My ultimate hope being a more open and free world where there is more possibilities for the mod creators.
A few things worry me about their recent statement though,
“…stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating.”
and
“…we believe there’s a useful feature somewhere here.”
That could be interpreted to mean a lot of things, you can decide what you think, but it leaves a some doubt in my mind. Hopefully that just means that they might try again, however using optional donations like it seems most people actually want.
This thread is turning into one of the old discussion threads with posts this long. It’s really nice to be able to discuss this in such detail.
You’re very right, but at the same time not every individual has either time nor willingness to gain that deeper understanding and make the right judgement call, at least not without a community that’s already been as outraged as this one. This is the main reason im opposed to the system, because of the likely statistics of the situation, the very implication of the system results in it being a constant reminder for people. every time they go to the workshop they see the ability to sell their tiny mods, depending on how prominently it is positioned will determine how many people end up going with it, which may end up in that situation where that one mod someone wanted for their supermod is behind a paywall and we’re back to the drawbacks of paywalls again. I don’t think it’s viable for every single person to do such checks on whether or not a paid mods system can work for them or not, especially when its just so easy to throw a mod up on a workshop while its still dependant on another game and patches, and quite frankly we already HAVE a paid mods system. Many mods that are successful enough become their own games, most of valve’s lineup is mods that became good enough to become their own game, plus third party stuff like garrys mod, natural selection, Napoleonic Wars and Pirates for mount and blade games. These are mods that got big enough to receive continual support to make sure they work and also support from the original developers who also make sure that mod work.
We don’t need this experiment, we already have mods that are good enough to turn into their own game and in those cases agreements are worked out between the original developer which is far better than a catch all % solution. And sometimes they just go with the mod sequel model like with natural selection II which results in a 0% cut for the original dev. What i think it boils down to for me is that i dont think its fair for a mod to ever be paywalled unless theres a guarantee of continued support and compatibility. Mods that want to go further can already do so.
Only thing i want to add to your points here is that DMCA was also expected to be used by modders to take down their own stolen mods, more time potentially taken now protecting your own mod from reupload sales and playing lawyer and police on the workshop. its not just big third parties you need to worry about.
Fair, i do think the other example is missing a lot of the components that make modding unique however.
It turned out valve took 30% and beth took 45%, personally i would give valve maybe 15% for hosting and workshop support(though valve support is probably never improving) and beth 0%. But you need to give beth a legal payoff as they wouldnt otherwise agree to the system, the legality of mods and whether or not they are defined as derivative works or standalone products that can then be applied is a whole other question and regardless of what i personally think should or shouldnt be legal to do, right now they need a cut just to placate them. So say valve 15% and the developer 10%, on top of a donations system, basically turning the service into twitch.tv in terms of payment model with donated “subscriptions”. Or like the code bounty system employed by many open source projects, which mirrors the mod community quite well in terms of structure and how a donation scheme might work.
I would be fine with that percentage as part of a pay what you want/donation scheme. I would prefer if paywall didnt even exist as an option for unless the mod wanted to go gold and give support.
There’s a lot of talk about copyright in this thread, and I think everyone here should know that literally every mod ever created for any game has belonged to the IP holder, not the creator. In this very particular instance, even in the EULA it is explicitly stated that all mods created for Skyrim belong to Bethesda, so honestly Bethesda don’t have to pay any of these modders anything, so 1%, 2%, 3%, they ought to feel lucky for getting anything to be honest, and in fact they could turn around and sell the mods as their own products totally legally.
Mods are by definition modifications of an intellectual property. That intellectual property is owned by the IP rights holder, and therefore owns all and any derivations of said IP, including mods.