Skyrim Workshop Now Supports Paid Mods

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Honestly my biggest problem is the cut the modder would get and the fact that Steam is doing it. I really dislike the main place of getting mods would be through Steam. Valve is great and all but shouldn't there be alternatives? Hell I'd rather donate directly to the modder than give a egregious cut to Valve. Maybe if some competition sprouts up in terms of where you can go to get these paid mods I'll consider it.

This all seems half-hazardly put together without considering all the end-cases that could or will occur. I'll reserve judgement until the thing has been out in the wild for awhile but I doubt it will survive in its current state. Things will need to change.
 
Given how many mod are uninstalled in a matter of days, since you need time to judge how it will go with the other mods you have, or will get ( and that is with the ease of use of Mod Organizer ). Given that, yeah, I'm more likely to give money to someone after I was able to use it for free and see that I do we get some use out of it, it did work with my other mods etc.. Than imagining having spend ~150$ ( on a 1$ per mod basis ) on mods in the last 2 month only to have used only a third of them for more than 2 or 3 days ( and 1-3h of actual play/test time ).

This appies to all gaming. You have to pay to try anything out. Surely there will be reviews and word of mouth to help people figure out what is worthy of money. Just like in any industry.

My advice to you would be to use a discerning eye instead of blindly buying everything you see.
 
You keep calling it a culturally accepted norm. The norm is that development is compensated. That is a norm across virtually every sector of society. It is what our economic system is based on.

Being paid for your work is by far more normal than the weird sector that was prohibited montization previously. This is moving towards societal norms, not away.

How about this then.

If you want to be paid for your work you set yourself up as a small business writing mods for games. You pay your taxes, you get yourself a business model , a legal team to write some nice terms and conditions and usage rights. You are legally accountable for the work you produce in the event that it doesn't live up to how you describe it or if it causes problems on peoples games.

instead of..

You're a kid in a bedroom who has discovered how to swap textures on a bow, you sell this new textured bow on the Workshop, but because it's bugged, it breaks peoples save files. You have no idea how to fix it so you vanish taking with you everyone else's money.
 
This speaks of ignorance of the developer process. The vast majority of games start off as unpaid pitches before getting funding. Of course this stuff started off free, that is how development goes.

Once you have a product that has worth, it is natural to take advantage of that worth.

Most of the games I labeled as free were not an unpaid pitch, they were vastly succesful and popular free mods that were developed and maintained for free and were not planned for an upsell. The halflife mods in particular simply got bought up by valve so they could turn it into a paid product using a new engine. Those old free ones are still available and in fact some die hard people still prefer them.


Which brings me to a new point. If this is self employment aren't they required to report and pay taxes on income, and to register as self employed business owner in full conformation of the business laws for the country they reside in etc? Is Valve checking this, at this point this sounds like this could easily be a giant unreported income thing.
 
You keep calling it a culturally accepted norm. The norm is that development is compensated. That is a norm across virtually every sector of society. It is what our economic system is based on.

Being paid for your work is by far more normal than the weird sector that was prohibited montization previously. This is moving towards societal norms, not away.
And yet open source projects that get no compensation at all are thriving. Paying for open source software isn't the norm at all, and if it was the software engineering industry would look very different
 
"I want to make money modding even though the culturally accepted norm is that mods are free."

You don't see the pitfall in this?

There is ZERO expectation of "free" on this planet except for maybe breathing oxygen, and even that is not guaranteed to be pure oxygen.

In reality, "culturally accepted norm" = nobody bothered implementing a highly accessible way to do it, until yesterday.
 
How about this then.

If you want to be paid for your work you set yourself up as a small business writing mods for games. You pay your taxes, you get yourself a business model , a legal team to write some nice terms and conditions and usage rights and you are legally accountable for the work you produce in the event that it doesn't live up to how you describe it or if it causes problems on peoples games.

instead of..

You're a kid in a bedroom who has discovered how to swap textures on a bow, you sell this new textured bow on the Workshop, but because it's bugged, it breaks peoples save files. You have no idea how to fix it so you vanish taking with you everyone else's money.

What you are suggesting is disgusting. Nobody needs a company to innovate. Palmer luckey started his vr busines in his garage duct taping cellphones to his face. Apple was started at a pc users club. My own company was started in my bedroom.

Fuck off with these barriers to development. Studios can make broken products, and individuals can produce brilliance. What you describe is terrible.
And yet open source projects that get no compensation at all are thriving. Paying for open source software isn't the norm at all, and if it was the software engineering industry would look very different

Open source != no compensation. What lunacy.
 
Look.
I have no problem with the principle behind it all.

Yes, modders that do great work deserve to pursue compensation for their efforts.
I'm alright with that.

But doesn't anyone here see it? This is a standard corporation tactic.

You turn the 99% against one another so that they stop paying attention to what tho;e 1% is attempting to accomplish.

It's just like how every forum thread about minimum wage laws goes to shit.


Valve/Bethesda can paint whatever picture they like, but let's look at it for what it is, a half-baked scheme to make as much money as possible with little to no effort. They're exploiting the talents of others because they're too lazy to create anything worth a damn on their own.

But I'm not worried about the "death of mods" or anything of that sort.
Once the dust settles, the extent of Skyrim's paid mods will be weapons and skins.

Yeah all Bethesda made was shitty ass Skyrim. lazydevs.jpef
 
What you are suggesting is disgusting. Nobody needs a company to innovate. Palmer luckey started his vr busines in his garage duct taping cellphones to his face. Apple was started at a pc users club. My own company was started in my bedroom.

Fuck off with these barriers to development. Studios can make broken products, and individuals can produce brilliance. What you describe is terrible.


Open source != no compensation. What lunacy.

There are licenses to deal with though in open source. As a developer I'm quite familiar with these potential issues, some libraries are explicitly written in a manner that does not permit someone to monetize off the library written. Of course this is but one of the examples of many legal grey-areas that have to be worked out. It honestly seems like Valve neglected to consider a bunch of things.

I'm all aboard paying for modification(s) however I don't think Valve is going to pave the way. Hell they're probably the least likely IMO.

This has to be one of the longest most drawn out GAF meltdowns of all time. Wow.

You think so? I'm only trying to discuss interesting points but hey I guess some people are still freaking out a bit.
 
Open source != no compensation. What lunacy.
I suppose the t shirt ravio sent their engine developer that made them millions could count as compensation.

Unless you're going to argue the majority of open source projects are licensed software, in which case lol

We have something like 100 JavaScript libraries at work. We only were required to purchase like 3 of them
 
What you are suggesting is disgusting. Nobody needs a company to innovate. Palmer luckey started his vr busines in his garage duct taping cellphones to his face. Apple was started at a pc users club. My own company was started in my bedroom.

Yeah, you're correct. Those 40,000 sold DK1s were made with duct tape in his garage. The kickstarter funding to start Oculus as a business is just a figment of my overactive imagination.
 
I suppose the t shirt ravio sent their engine developer that made them millions could count as compensation.

Unless you're going to argue the majority of open source projects are licensed software, in which case lol

We have something like 100 JavaScript libraries at work. We only were required to purchase like 3 of them

You are nuts if you think open source projects are immune to making money or being compensated. There are commercial licenses for these types of projects..you youself just admitted to having to purchase such licenses.
 
This has to be one of the longest most drawn out GAF meltdowns of all time. Wow.

Nah, this is a pretty good discussion.

Check out the comments/discussions under the Paid Mods section on the Skyrim Workshop right now. THOSE are meltdowns!

They even have a cute, grammatically incorrect, middle-finger ASCII-art/protest signature floating around that people are using as a moral platform slogan.

It makes it easier for Valve to tag and ban them though. Not sure if they are aware of that.
 
This appies to all gaming. You have to pay to try anything out. Surely there will be reviews and word of mouth to help people figure out what is worthy of money. Just like in any industry.

My advice to you would be to use a discerning eye instead of blindly buying everything you see.
If it wasn't already from huge filtering than number would be multiplied by 10 if not 100. It's not simply a matter of liking, but how one mod can simply decide not to work ( or simply fit, or kill performance ) well with another you either already have or will buy 2 days latter; we are not speaking of stand alone complete overhauls.

But yeah, it's no big deal if it mean make modding less user friendly ( use of mod organizer, easy to try huge quantity of mod and their compatibility and performance result without any financial risk, etc ), since more money being involved should improve the modding scene. Like dlc, things will regulate themselves.

I will also try not to fear the illogical next step of future game's modding being locked to steam workshop ( bye loverslab ).
 
How did richard garriot get his start again?

From Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Garriott

Game design career[edit]
Garriott began writing computer games in 1974. His first games were created on and for teletype terminals. The code was stored on paper tape spools, and the game was displayed as an ongoing print out on the spooles of printer paper the teletypes used. In summer 1979, Garriott worked at a ComputerLand store where he had his first encounter with Apple computers. Inspired by their video monitors with color graphics, he began to add perspective view to his own games. After creating Akalabeth for fun, the owner of the store convinced him it might sell. He spent US$200 getting a manual and a cover sheet drawn by his mother printed out, and put them in Ziploc bags to sell around the store. Although he sold less than a dozen copies at the store, one of them made it to California Pacific, who signed a deal with him. He sold over 30,000 copies, receiving $5 for each game sold.[11][14][15] Akalabeth is considered the first published Computer Role Playing Game. In the fall, he entered the University of Texas at Austin, joined the school's fencing team and later joined the Society for Creative Anachronism.

He created for fun first, then was advised to try to sell it since it was so good and creative.

30K copies X $5 a copy in 1979 is a pretty nice haul.

All these Skyrim modders looking to sell their creations have the same exact incentive.
 
And yet the piece of trash that made Wet and Cold is still raking in the dough even though the author of Winter is Coming has expressly forbade the use of his content in a paid mod.

What a mess.

So much for being paid for your hard work when people can basically just steal what you created and bundle it together in their mod.
 
If people want to create a product to sell then they should be held accountable for their product like every other business.

What part of this don't you agree with ?

The part where you assume an individual cannot be held accountable for their product. The part where you imply that only certain kinds of businesses that meet your arbitrary definition of a business are entitled to make money off of their work.
 
Question - if a modder decides to put up a mod for sale, would they then need to get a commercial license for any software tools they used to make the mod (as opposed to the free/student versions)?

Or would individual modders be too under the radar for that sort of thing? Companies seem to care more about larger studios having proper licenses when creating work for-profit with their tools.
 
Wait, mods are already being taken down on Nexus? Shit, I should've started downloading last night or something.

It's kind sensible, if I had mods up right now I'd be really worried about my content being stolen.
Or I might be looking to monetize my work, I doubt I personally would but other people might be.

The modding community, especially with Bethesda games, is built on mods that use assets from other mods. Many mods are stand-alone and use completely unique or vanilla assets, but many also use assets from other mods. On top of that, many modders release their mods as "modders resources", essentially saying to people "take whatever you want from my mod and use it in yours". The introduction of paid for mods changes that. Some mod authors have already taken their mods down because they're afraid their assets or even their entire mods will be stolen and added to the new Steam Workshop without their permission. Many more have said they are now unsure if they'll ever release another modder's resource again.

We obviously do not want that to happen, and the fact it has happened already leaves a sour taste in my mouth. The taste of one side of what money is bringing to modding. We've even had our first mod taken down from the paywall section of Skyrim Workshop related to this issue, less than 24 hours in. And these were the mods vetted by Valve and Bethesda themselves! Gooooood start. Big sarcastic thumbs up.

While I'm talking about this fear of mods or assets being stolen, I feel I need to point out a massive, glaring issue with this new Workshop implementation, because right now people are focusing on "Oh my god, you mean I might need to pay for some mods?" while I think an even more horrific thing is "Oh my god, you mean I will have to pay to check and make sure if someone has stolen my work!?". Let me explain. The new implementation is set up so that there's a 7-day grace period after an author uploads a file with a pricetag. During these 7 days users can view the file page, look at the pictures and read the description, but they cannot download the file. The idea of this grace period is to get the community to police new uploads before they're added to make sure that nothing bad is added to the paid section of the site. Seems like a good idea. Except if a mod author is using stolen assets from other people's mods.

Unless the thief is pants on head stupid they're not going to talk about stealing assets from other mods or put up pictures that would suggest assets have been stolen. The only way the authors of the assets that have been stolen will know it's happened is if someone buys the mod and then tells the author. At which point the author is either going to have to engage in the new world of mod piracy (which began yesterday in earnest) or they're going to have to buy the mod for themselves. So you want to say, "But Dark0ne, the author can buy the mod, investigate, then ask for a refund, as there's a refund system!". Yes, there's a refund system. A refund system that refunds you in Steam Wallet money that you can never take out of Steam. So once you've bought that mod, that money will always be Valve's from that point on. Refund or not. That, I'm sorry to say, is batshit. Freaking. Crazy. Add to that the fact that the mod may have made substantial sums of money before it's spotted, some of which may have already been paid to the thief, or alternatively has been removed from the thief's account before they could get the payout and, guess where the money goes then? That's right. Valve's coffers.
 
I didn't say some, I said most.

How can most mods be free but most mod makers work on mods to make money? The majority of mods are not made with the intention to sell it.

Then this changes literally nothing and the several majority of mods will continue to be free. So I don't see what you are complaining about exactly.
 
But this doesn't affect the game. It's mostly cosmetic and it has a different process then a mod.

They've done this with maps, so those affect the game pretty significantly. Of course these things all exist normally with mods, but they were the first to actually pay for that content / share some of a sale. The dubious part is working out what the profit share should be both accounting for the work of the original developers being used, work of the content creator and any service fees (payment to the content creators involves fees and taxes the service provider will have to deal with).
 
I didn't say some, I said most.

How can most mods be free but most mod makers work on mods to make money? The majority of mods are not made with the intention to sell it.

selling your mod is not the only way to make money. I posit that most people don't sell them off because they're not allowed to. That many people get in the mud making explicitly looking for an avenue to get into game development as a profession is evidence that people have money in mind with her making the mod. had licensing restrictions always been this relaxed and it had been this easy to make money off of mods I suspect that so most would have begun selling their mods long ago
 
So, I'll admit to not following Valve that closely all the time, but are they always this awful at communication? Because they really screwed the pooch on this one, it's amazingly bad.

I mean, people get upset when something that was free yesterday suddenly costs money today. That's easily predictable, and DLC in general has a poor reputation in gaming, so making some mod/DLC hybrid crossover (The price of DLC with none of the inhouse QA or support!) and just springing it on people out of the blue is bound to cause a lot of friction, yelling, and drama. Other games have had this debate, and Skyrim is rather big, so this is really something they should have seen coming. And yet, here we are. Something like this needs to be eased in, because 90% of your audience will see it as bad news. Valve really, really should have tipped their hand a bit with this a couple of weeks ago to burn off some outrage and answer some of the questions that the FAQ does not cover, not to mention allow the community and mod tool creators to make their stances clear before the first mod gets a price tag.

But instead, let's just dump it all at the same time, and hope for the best, ignoring all previous experiences.

I'm disappointed. Valve should be better at this, but really. They aren't. They may have a good game store, but they sorely need someone to be the face of Valve's customer communications. Been needing that for a long time. Drama like this costs money long term due to loss of goodwill. And, it's quite easy to see this will flare up several times in the future when mods break something, someone steals content, or someone deliberately breaks a mod out of spite. It's gonna happen, it always does. Who's ready to handle that firestorm? Bethesda?
 
It's kind sensible, if I had mods up right now I'd be really worried about my content being stolen.
Or I might be looking to monetize my work, I doubt I personally would but other people might be.

The modding community, especially with Bethesda games, is built on mods that use assets from other mods. Many mods are stand-alone and use completely unique or vanilla assets, but many also use assets from other mods. On top of that, many modders release their mods as "modders resources", essentially saying to people "take whatever you want from my mod and use it in yours". The introduction of paid for mods changes that. Some mod authors have already taken their mods down because they're afraid their assets or even their entire mods will be stolen and added to the new Steam Workshop without their permission. Many more have said they are now unsure if they'll ever release another modder's resource again.

We obviously do not want that to happen, and the fact it has happened already leaves a sour taste in my mouth. The taste of one side of what money is bringing to modding. We've even had our first mod taken down from the paywall section of Skyrim Workshop related to this issue, less than 24 hours in. And these were the mods vetted by Valve and Bethesda themselves! Gooooood start. Big sarcastic thumbs up.

While I'm talking about this fear of mods or assets being stolen, I feel I need to point out a massive, glaring issue with this new Workshop implementation, because right now people are focusing on "Oh my god, you mean I might need to pay for some mods?" while I think an even more horrific thing is "Oh my god, you mean I will have to pay to check and make sure if someone has stolen my work!?". Let me explain. The new implementation is set up so that there's a 7-day grace period after an author uploads a file with a pricetag. During these 7 days users can view the file page, look at the pictures and read the description, but they cannot download the file. The idea of this grace period is to get the community to police new uploads before they're added to make sure that nothing bad is added to the paid section of the site. Seems like a good idea. Except if a mod author is using stolen assets from other people's mods.

Unless the thief is pants on head stupid they're not going to talk about stealing assets from other mods or put up pictures that would suggest assets have been stolen. The only way the authors of the assets that have been stolen will know it's happened is if someone buys the mod and then tells the author. At which point the author is either going to have to engage in the new world of mod piracy (which began yesterday in earnest) or they're going to have to buy the mod for themselves. So you want to say, "But Dark0ne, the author can buy the mod, investigate, then ask for a refund, as there's a refund system!". Yes, there's a refund system. A refund system that refunds you in Steam Wallet money that you can never take out of Steam. So once you've bought that mod, that money will always be Valve's from that point on. Refund or not. That, I'm sorry to say, is batshit. Freaking. Crazy. Add to that the fact that the mod may have made substantial sums of money before it's spotted, some of which may have already been paid to the thief, or alternatively has been removed from the thief's account before they could get the payout and, guess where the money goes then? That's right. Valve's coffers.

Oh, I didn't think about that at all. Some of these workshop modders won't even need to say if they've used other mods in the description at all, and the only way to find out if they have stolen or modified other existing mods is to buy the actual workshop mod...

Nice.
 
It's kind sensible, if I had mods up right now I'd be really worried about my content being stolen.
Or I might be looking to monetize my work, I doubt I personally would but other people might be.

The modding community, especially with Bethesda games, is built on mods that use assets from other mods. Many mods are stand-alone and use completely unique or vanilla assets, but many also use assets from other mods. On top of that, many modders release their mods as "modders resources", essentially saying to people "take whatever you want from my mod and use it in yours". The introduction of paid for mods changes that. Some mod authors have already taken their mods down because they're afraid their assets or even their entire mods will be stolen and added to the new Steam Workshop without their permission. Many more have said they are now unsure if they'll ever release another modder's resource again.

We obviously do not want that to happen, and the fact it has happened already leaves a sour taste in my mouth. The taste of one side of what money is bringing to modding. We've even had our first mod taken down from the paywall section of Skyrim Workshop related to this issue, less than 24 hours in. And these were the mods vetted by Valve and Bethesda themselves! Gooooood start. Big sarcastic thumbs up.

While I'm talking about this fear of mods or assets being stolen, I feel I need to point out a massive, glaring issue with this new Workshop implementation, because right now people are focusing on "Oh my god, you mean I might need to pay for some mods?" while I think an even more horrific thing is "Oh my god, you mean I will have to pay to check and make sure if someone has stolen my work!?". Let me explain. The new implementation is set up so that there's a 7-day grace period after an author uploads a file with a pricetag. During these 7 days users can view the file page, look at the pictures and read the description, but they cannot download the file. The idea of this grace period is to get the community to police new uploads before they're added to make sure that nothing bad is added to the paid section of the site. Seems like a good idea. Except if a mod author is using stolen assets from other people's mods.

Unless the thief is pants on head stupid they're not going to talk about stealing assets from other mods or put up pictures that would suggest assets have been stolen. The only way the authors of the assets that have been stolen will know it's happened is if someone buys the mod and then tells the author. At which point the author is either going to have to engage in the new world of mod piracy (which began yesterday in earnest) or they're going to have to buy the mod for themselves. So you want to say, "But Dark0ne, the author can buy the mod, investigate, then ask for a refund, as there's a refund system!". Yes, there's a refund system. A refund system that refunds you in Steam Wallet money that you can never take out of Steam. So once you've bought that mod, that money will always be Valve's from that point on. Refund or not. That, I'm sorry to say, is batshit. Freaking. Crazy. Add to that the fact that the mod may have made substantial sums of money before it's spotted, some of which may have already been paid to the thief, or alternatively has been removed from the thief's account before they could get the payout and, guess where the money goes then? That's right. Valve's coffers.

I think for Skyrim, this is a lost cause. (and in some ways, a beta test)

But for Fallout 4, or any future moddable Bethesda PC games, I expect Paid Mods to be:

1. Locked into the Skyrim Workshop.
2. DRM'd into your Steam account.
3. Have encrypted credentials to protect intellectual rights owners. (e-certificates of some sort maybe?)

There is no security for these Skyrim mods ATM. It's way too open-ended and doesn't protect anyone involved, neither the modder or their customers.

I also expect the base/API-modders to stop "open-sourcing" their work and to lock it down for themselves only, since there is no system in place to compensate them for partial contribution to "add-on" mods. It's just too complicated to keep track of in that sense.
 
So, I'll admit to not following Valve that closely all the time, but are they always this awful at communication? Because they really screwed the pooch on this one, it's amazingly bad.

Pretty much. Probably since the late 2000s', the approach they have is they will talk when it suits them.

For market things like this where the price is community driven, they have a hands off approach and watch the chaos unfold, possibly in the hopes it resolves itself as they "plan" or they fiddle with a few things and remove or edit content and rules till things go a way they like. This has happened with various community market systems and other community controlled events such such as the Winter Sale auction thing, and several Dota things
 
So, I'll admit to not following Valve that closely all the time, but are they always this awful at communication? Because they really screwed the pooch on this one, it's amazingly bad.

I mean, people get upset when something that was free yesterday suddenly costs money today. That's easily predictable, and DLC in general has a poor reputation in gaming, so making some mod/DLC hybrid crossover (The price of DLC with none of the inhouse QA or support!) and just springing it on people out of the blue is bound to cause a lot of friction, yelling, and drama. Other games have had this debate, and Skyrim is rather big, so this is really something they should have seen coming. And yet, here we are. Something like this needs to be eased in, because 90% of your audience will see it as bad news. Valve really, really should have tipped their hand a bit with this a couple of weeks ago to burn off some outrage and answer some of the questions that the FAQ does not cover, not to mention allow the community and mod tool creators to make their stances clear before the first mod gets a price tag.

But instead, let's just dump it all at the same time, and hope for the best, ignoring all previous experiences.

I'm disappointed. Valve should be better at this, but really. They aren't. They may have a good game store, but they sorely need someone to be the face of Valve's customer communications. Been needing that for a long time. Drama like this costs money long term due to loss of goodwill. And, it's quite easy to see this will flare up several times in the future when mods break something, someone steals content, or someone deliberately breaks a mod out of spite. It's gonna happen, it always does. Who's ready to handle that firestorm? Bethesda?

most companies are bad at communicating if you don't listen.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SRyUpR4qOxU
there's a 45 minute long lecture on why they were doing this and why it's a good thing from over a year ago.
 
Paid mods...
Wouldn't surprise me if the initiative for this came from Bethesda.. yes we are doing it for the modders!! While taking 75% of the money. Just lovely.

Anyway, if I ignore this thing like I'm going to do, will it die off?


I don't even want to think of this but..
Do you know the text that most modders put on their mods in Nexus description?
It says something like "Please feel free to use my mod content in your own mods, just give credit where due"
And do you really think that text will stay there if shit like this paid modding would take off?
 
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