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This is a repost of my blog from LiquidDota because I thought blogs are shared between sites but apparently not!
Now I'm going to explain this whole situation using Skyrim only but this applies to almost every other game that is going to use this system from now on; and from Valve's description, they are planning to do this on multiple games.
What Valve recently did was decided to monetize the entire modding scene. It gives the option for authors to put up a pay wall and charges people for money to download mods. You can read it up here: http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/aboutpaidcontent
Honestly very very few people in the modding community, including me, think this is a good thing. I'll just share some of my thoughts in this post and the next post will contain the general feedback from various modding communities.
Mods break all the time
If you ever modded Oblivion, or Skyrim you would know this. Mods glitch out and bug out all the time and worst of all they literally break your game and force you to do clean re-installs all the time. Now paying for that seems weird to me.
Bugs bugs bugs bugs bugs
Ok you may know that a lot of games are glitchy as hell; and it's actually up to the users to fix it (looking at you Bethesda). What a lot of mods do is actually fix game breaking/crashing bugs and make the game playable. So pretty much for any Bethesda game, you are expected to pay $50-60 for the full game then slap on 10-20 mods to make the game actually playable. So when people charge money for those mods, might as well pay for overpriced DLCs.
Asset sharing
Ok if you look at this mod: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=429374670&searchtext=
You will notice it uses assets from a lot of other mods. For example the biggest thing it use is SKSE, or Skyrim Script Extender. Infact I would say over 50% of all mods uses this little, but very useful, extension. Pretty much what people are doing is using other people's assets for themselves to make some quick money. If you take a look at the Skyrim Nexus, tons of mods uses assets from other mods to function. One example is the what I call "waifu mods"; Skin textures relies on the custom meshes, breast/butt jiggle physics rely on the custom skeleton. So ya people are using other people's work to make money, even with permission this just seems weird and wrong.
Updates
So if you take a stroll on the workshop, you will find mods that aren't actively being updated anymore. This is a big issue because when patches come out or new mods come out, a lot of older mods need to be updated or they won't work. Now a lot of mod authors put up a mod and just runs away, when it breaks there's no way to track the person down and fix it.
So ya, where did your brains go valve? Modding is more about the community and being able to do whatever the hell you want with your game and never about money. Now it's just a way to rake in cheap money. With Fallout 4 coming, the modding scene will be dead. Pretty much Bethesda signed their own execution on the PC market. If more games follow this sort of path, SEX MODS WILL BE THE LAST BASTION OF FREE PC MODDING, because Valve don't take in 18+ mods.
Now there are definitely modders that do deserve something special. Falskaar was a mod that rivals what Bethesda calls full size DLCs. It adds in a completely new area with fully voiced NPCs and quests. If you want to know how good that mod is, the mod team got hired by Bungie. A good alternative is just add in a donate button instead of putting up a pay wall. There is nothing wrong with donations (believe me, plenty people donate to good modders and help them out with their projects) but putting things behind a pay wall is just wrong and goes against common sense.
Part 2 continued in next post.
 
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Now to explore the flaws of Steam's modding system. A lot of it is very very backwards and just doesn't make sense for any user that is experienced with modding. Thank you /tesg/ and Nexus for helping me write and compile all the points into this incoherent blob of text.
Can we fix it! Yes we CAN'T
The first thing that comes to mind when thinking on how this could wrong should be obvious to anyone who has ever modded a Bethesda game. Mods are not an immutable, one-piece cluster fuck of data. Modders often change their mods as they see fit, and can modify anything they want. This in itself isn't a bad thing; it allows modders to be flexible, and should the mods be uploaded on websites such as the Nexus, people can choose to install updates or keep older versions; modders themselves often give people the option to use older version or the latest one. Of course this has tons of benefits because of mod compatibility.
However, this is where the first problem arises from the Steam Workshop syste. You cannot CHOOSE whether to update or not a mod should you dowload it on the Steam Workshop. You subscribe to it, and whenever an update pops up, you're forced to update the mod. This is more an issue with the Steam Workshop itself rather than with this update (and that in itself already has other problems which I won't be mentioning here); however, now you won't be able to control what you pay for. You, as a customer, can purchase a mod and have it update say, a month later removing/adding things you never paid for, or wanted in your game. What can you do about it? As of right now, absolutely nothing. There is 24h limit to ask for refunds, and that's about it. After that, if it happens to you (which WILL happen), tough shit.
However, the biggest issue itself is with blatantly BROKEN mods. Ranging from mods that cause save bloat or harm your game/your save data. I'm certain that Valve won't test any mods themselves. Without some sort of quality control, what will happen when broken mods start being uploaded on the Workshop under a pay wall? "The same as when it had no pay wall whatsoever, duh! If you dislike the mod, you simply unsubscribe from it!", some of you might be saying/thinking. Well, yeah. Except that you have to PAY for these now, and since there is a limit on when you can get a refund... well, I shouldn't have to write anything else. Modders are also not responsible for what happens to your game. Did a mod break your game? Did more than 24 hours passed? Well, you're out of luck.
24 Hours
I find this to be worth a whole point on its own. Several things come to mind when reading about refunding. You should probably read above before reading this because it's heavily tied in, not to mention the first post has valid points to regarding both of the points.
So, aside from the issues I've already mentioned above (which I will be repeating for emphasis) which are the fact that most mods are constantly updated, and also of the customer having no control whatsoever of the kind of content mods will add/remove from their game, there is something critical (yet very simple) that Valve and Bethesda seem to have missed. A lot of mods take A LOT MORE than 24 hours to fully explore. For instance, a lot of quest mods have minimum level requirements for you to start them. Say it requires you to be level 25 in order to start it, which is reasonable. Say you've just started and/or are rolling a new character. Unless you're rushing it and your sole purpose is to level up, it takes a while in order to get there. Not just quest mods; mods that add new landscapes come to mind as well. Unless you're planning on dedicating a whole day to exploring the mod, you'll most likely not fully develop an opinion about it within 24 hours. Not to mention what if a mod that modifies the game at later stage will break your game, and you will have no way of telling this in the first 24 hours. Please refer to Falskaar in the first post if you want an example of this sort of mod that requires days to finish.
"Quality control? Is that some sort of new snack?" - Gabe Newell
As much as I love Steam and Valve as the next guy, just for the sheer amount of things that they have brought to us players and the gaming community in general, I find it that Steam really needs some quality control when it comes to games. With a 'recent' addition, indie game developers can add their game on Steam without resorting to the approval of the Valve crew, but rather with the approval of the community itself (with obvious exceptions such as games that break Steam's terms of service and uploading rules). This has lead to many precious gems to shine... and also to many garbage bags to stink. Most games have no demos nowadays, so unless you pirate it or read Steam (or even other websites') reviews, there is really no way to know what you're purchasing and if you're to get what you pay for. The free market at its finest, right?
Well, this short little rant has nothing to do with the Workshop or the Workshop update, so you must be wondering why I bothered writing it. It was to draw a comparison... because now one of these things IS like the other. There is absolutely nothing stopping people from uploading crappy, blatantly broken mods to the Workshop and charging from it. And I'm not talking about just random Joes; if you're experienced with modding, you'll know that lots of mods that are currently in the top-rated list of the Workshop are partially broken/bugged, hence why most mods (specially large ones) are constantly updated. There is almost no quality control from Valve when it comes to Greenlight, and I think the same will apply here.
Expect lots of dying dogs, grandmothers passing away, 'real life issues', and others should you ask modders to fix their mods WHICH NOW YOU PAY FOR.
Now this concludes my 2 post rant. Feel free to pm me about what mods to use on Skyrim, I can recommend plenty.
The key point that people that aren't involved in modding communities get is modding is NEVER about money, it's about the community and the ability to constructively building a more enjoyable gaming experience for everyone. I would expect Valve and Bethesda to fully understand this but they don't.
Quoted from a Nexus mod user:
Being a part of the Workshop monetization effort makes you directly complicit in decaying the paradigm of mods that are shared freely by the community to enhance the game experience. By putting your mod behind a pricetag, you affirm the idea that individuals demanding money for a medium that has always been free and based on principles of community and free exchange is acceptable. Whatever your views on the subject, I feel that this is a major first step in corroding the quality of the modding community by first segregating it into paying and non-paying users and, second, sending a message to corporate interests that the "micropayments and DLC" model of gaming should stretch as far as things like minor retextures or mesh alterations for which companies themselves may charge, which would essentially put us back in the territory of Oblivion's Horse Armor DLC again, and likely result in the restriction of modding resources in future iterations of titles like those of The Elder Scrolls.
You, as a mod author, have a responsibility to the community to help shape the future of game modding constructively, and this decision to monetize a previously free work does not seem to do so. I hope that you make the right decision and both pull your mod from the Workshop paylist and encourage Bethesda/Valve and any other involved parties to discontinue this system.
Just one day of this pay wall system being implemented, there are already issues with people stealing other people's mods that are free and selling them on Steam. Another big one that I mentioned could happen, which is asset sharing, is already causing an issue because a lot of mods uses assets from other mods; and the creators of the borrowed assets did not give permission for their work to be used in making money.
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SEX MODS WILL BE THE LAST BASTION OF FREE PC MODDING,
vive la révolution!
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HORSE ARMOUR YO
i always expect capitalism to rear its ugly head in the open modding community eventually but never expected it to be this soon.
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Hong Kong9148 Posts
god forbid people get paid for the shit they do. welcome to the real not-esports world.
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Hong Kong9148 Posts
it's fucking optional hats. if you don't want to pay for it, then don't pay for it. if you don't think it will be maintained in the future, then don't pay for it. this is assuming you've made a dollar in your life and aren't just a freeloader.
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On April 24 2015 15:24 itsjustatank wrote:
it's fucking optional hats. if you don't want to pay for it, then don't pay for it. if you don't think it will be maintained in the future, then don't pay for it. this is assuming you've made a dollar in your life and aren't just a freeloader.
Do you have any idea how the modding community works? Because its pretty apparent you dont.
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Hong Kong9148 Posts
do you need to buy mods to play the video game? no? argument over. full stop.
but im entitled to the fruits of the labor of other people for nothing in exchange! you absolutely aren't. if some want to give it away for free fine, but complaining about the potential for people asking for money in exchange for their hours and days of time making something you clearly see value in is fucking asinine.
if you don't support buying it, don't buy it.
and if you think less people are going to start making mods because suddenly they MIGHT get paid for it now, you are pants on head silly.
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Nobody is saying any of that. Modding has always been labor of love for the many people that put so many hours into their creations. A lot of modders did have a donate button for people who wanted to show their appreciation through financial support.
There is not and never has been a call for monetarisation from the modding community.
Nobody wanted or asked for this. And suddenly valve drops this huge bomb. You think this has anything to do with 'supporting the modders'? Please..
When you bring money into the mix shit starts deteriorating. Now the community isnt built on love for the game, but instead on making a profit. Yay capitalism. Because nothing can be done "for free", right?
There are ready reports of people selling other people's content.
Now instead of making a mod for the game and not having to worry about anything and just posting it, you have to deal with the shitload of money hungry wolves who are more than eager to start making money off of your work.
And community built mods are now down the drain. People cant continue other peoples work when one half is trying to earn money and the rest is doing it for fun.
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This might not be the demise of quality mods but this will definitely hurt the community. And I see another market for the impending Greenlight scandals. There are games like Arma 3 and Mount & Blade that survive on community mods, I don't want to know how this will play out because big games like Arma 3 already charge a lot for DLC.
Already a big shitstorm in the air, see how Valve will handle this.
edit: Almost forgot the big Elder Scrolls modding community on Nexus. Makes things even more interesting and definitely bad PR for Valve because on Nexus you make direct donations to the mod-maker or you support them on platforms like Patreon. While on Steam the developer decides on the share of the payment while Valve keeps the typical micro-transaction fee so that is not a surprise. Of course this is the great for the developers but I feel for those having to pay $300 to get a quality experience on Skyrim. Gone is the honor-code of free fan made mods,welcome capitalism.
This definitely will affect my support for future games like Total War because as a veteran it is another game that is broken without community based fixes and modding. And with the recent release of GTA V on PC, there goes another one of my hopefuls though the base game already has enough content for me. Although it is a easy choice for me in terms of financial reasons, I just will not purchase the game.
But the most worrying is this definitely adds another platform for abuse.
So Valve actually takes 75% of the money, what the fuck.
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Well, we might reach a point in history at which modders act upon infringements of their copy right to protect the idea of free software. A weird turn of events 
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On April 24 2015 15:53 itsjustatank wrote:
do you need to buy mods to play the video game? no? argument over. full stop.
but im entitled to the fruits of the labor of other people for nothing in exchange! you absolutely aren't. if some want to give it away for free fine, but complaining about the potential for people asking for money in exchange for their hours and days of time making something you clearly see value in is fucking asinine.
if you don't support buying it, don't buy it.
and if you think less people are going to start making mods because suddenly they MIGHT get paid for it now, you are pants on head silly.
Haha this so clueless it's hilarious. for many games with an active modding community the game is close to be unplayable without mods (TW games, Bethesda ones) and at the very least you get a worst experience by a huge margin if you're playing the non-modded version.
But yeah Valve needs to get its share of the business instead of it happening on other plateforms they're not able to get a grip on.
Haha Valve is getting a 75% share hahahahaha
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United Kingdom10443 Posts
I think the most important question here is
are you mod?
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There is a debate on mods that contain content from other mods. It's quickly escalating.
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what about copyright issues? if you make a my little pony mod for skyrim and charge for it, it's completely illegal without involving hasbro's legal team and gaining copyright approval.. or like a halo mod for sins of the solar empire, how can valve possibly charge money without directly involving relevant parties? like TB mentioned, it's a massive legal can of worms, I'm honestly surprised valve decided to go so haphazardly down this route (although it probably has all of its bases covered considering its a big company)
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On April 24 2015 22:13 Endymion wrote:
what about copyright issues? if you make a my little pony mod for skyrim and charge for it, it's completely illegal without involving hasbro's legal team and gaining copyright approval.. or like a halo mod for sins of the solar empire, how can valve possibly charge money without directly involving relevant parties? like TB mentioned, it's a massive legal can of worms, I'm honestly surprised valve decided to go so haphazardly down this route (although it probably has all of its bases covered considering its a big company)
Well it's easy. Valve will unleash legal action on some 16yo kid that made a mod and the said kid will never get to a lawsuit because he doesn't know what to do. Because no kid will fight valve in legal even if valve is completly wrong (not saying they are. Just saying if they are, it won't matter since a lot of modders are underage or students).
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Just leaving it here:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/KYP3Rhk.jpg)
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On April 24 2015 10:10 G3CKO wrote:This is a repost of my blog from LiquidDota because I thought blogs are shared between sites but apparently not!Now I'm going to explain this whole situation using Skyrim only but this applies to almost every other game that is going to use this system from now on; and from Valve's description, they are planning to do this on multiple games. What Valve recently did was decided to monetize the entire modding scene. It gives the option for authors to put up a pay wall and charges people for money to download mods. You can read it up here: http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/aboutpaidcontentHonestly very very few people in the modding community, including me, think this is a good thing. I'll just share some of my thoughts in this post and the next post will contain the general feedback from various modding communities.
Mods break all the timeIf you ever modded Oblivion, or Skyrim you would know this. Mods glitch out and bug out all the time and worst of all they literally break your game and force you to do clean re-installs all the time. Now paying for that seems weird to me.
Bugs bugs bugs bugs bugsOk you may know that a lot of games are glitchy as hell; and it's actually up to the users to fix it (looking at you Bethesda). What a lot of mods do is actually fix game breaking/crashing bugs and make the game playable. So pretty much for any Bethesda game, you are expected to pay $50-60 for the full game then slap on 10-20 mods to make the game actually playable. So when people charge money for those mods, might as well pay for overpriced DLCs.Asset sharingOk if you look at this mod: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=429374670&searchtext=
You will notice it uses assets from a lot of other mods. For example the biggest thing it use is SKSE, or Skyrim Script Extender. Infact I would say over 50% of all mods uses this little, but very useful, extension. Pretty much what people are doing is using other people's assets for themselves to make some quick money. If you take a look at the Skyrim Nexus, tons of mods uses assets from other mods to function. One example is the what I call "waifu mods"; Skin textures relies on the custom meshes, breast/butt jiggle physics rely on the custom skeleton. So ya people are using other people's work to make money, even with permission this just seems weird and wrong.UpdatesSo if you take a stroll on the workshop, you will find mods that aren't actively being updated anymore. This is a big issue because when patches come out or new mods come out, a lot of older mods need to be updated or they won't work. Now a lot of mod authors put up a mod and just runs away, when it breaks there's no way to track the person down and fix it.So ya, where did your brains go valve? Modding is more about the community and being able to do whatever the hell you want with your game and never about money. Now it's just a way to rake in cheap money. With Fallout 4 coming, the modding scene will be dead. Pretty much Bethesda signed their own execution on the PC market. If more games follow this sort of path, SEX MODS WILL BE THE LAST BASTION OF FREE PC MODDING, because Valve don't take in 18+ mods. Now there are definitely modders that do deserve something special. Falskaar was a mod that rivals what Bethesda calls full size DLCs. It adds in a completely new area with fully voiced NPCs and quests. If you want to know how good that mod is, the mod team got hired by Bungie. A good alternative is just add in a donate button instead of putting up a pay wall. There is nothing wrong with donations (believe me, plenty people donate to good modders and help them out with their projects) but putting things behind a pay wall is just wrong and goes against common sense. Part 2 continued in next post.
Ok man I am gonna stop you right there. A. I do love my free mods, but your telling me if someone spends a massive ammount of time making some badass mod like I don't know Skywind, which is a complete remake of Morrowind in the skyrim engine, they shouldn't be able to be payed for there work. Addressing the point of broken and abandoned mods, you need to understand the process of making any decent mod to really be able to understand this. While some modders are teens with a lot of time, the majority are adults. You know the time with 8 hour or longer jobs a week, 5 to 6 days a week, with spouses who deserve their attention, friends, children, and - one of the most important points - the need to live. YOU NEED MONEY TO LIVE, and if the project takes to much time and they aren't making money on it, it doesn't matter how much you want to do it, you can't do it. Now, I will admit a 75% cut of the mods are kinda bullshit. That need to be lowered. And, if it stays that Valve needs to release documents showing why they need almost all of the profit. And saying valve killed modding is kind of silly. Yes while some games only have mods on the Workshop, the vast majority are on other websites, such as Nexus. Its cool that you want to make sure modding is still a thing at the end of the day, and it is good you are to voice your opinion, but you are sorely miss guided my friends.And sex mods... what the fuck.... most people don't use those anyways. By the way, the whole resource sharing thing I don't think will be a problem. IF, and its a big if, the owners of these assets want to charge, they can do what Unity and Unreal does and just have a licensing system, but something tell me they won't be charging anyone for it. AND WHO IN THERE RIGHT FUCKING MIND WOULD CHARGE SOMEONE $60 FOR A FUCKING MOD! Come on man use your head, while some of these mods are really large they couldn't possibly charge more than $20 dollars for it. And honestly, I don't mind that. Since we are talking about Skyrim let's use that as a perfect example. There are so many DLC sized mods that I have played that are much better than the DLC. And, you have to understand many will still have the mind set of, this is a mod and I am not gonna pay a shitload of money for something possibly smaller than a DLC that I only payed $15 to $20 bucks for. If people charge $50 or $60 dollars like you suggest they will, no one will touch it with a 10 foot fucking pool. Not to mention Valve is implementing this is an optional thing. They could set up pay what you want or donation system or make it free. The end result it, this isn't going to hurt modding, it will fund the modders to be able to pay for there other things so maybe they can start doing this full time, and you won't have the badass mods abandoned, maybe you won't have mods being so buggy because they have pay people or just allocate more time to it, because money makes the world go round, and we will get even better add on content. And to end this I will just say one thing.. Fallout 3 on PC.. nuff said.
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EPT
