SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
We previously covered Valve offering paid mods in the Steam Workshop. Now, Valve (and Bethesda) have realized that the way they were attempting to implement payment for modders (and themselves) could not stand alongside the current model, at least with the goodwill of the community.
From the article:
We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing. We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different.
We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here.
Hopefully they do get a fully-baked donation system implemented (or some other method that makes sense).
(Score: 5, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday April 29 2015, @01:42PM
Broken is an understatement. The whole system was a complete boondoggle and was so bad that it blew people's minds that Valve could screw up and screw people so badly. Here is why:
You make a mod for Game X and want to sell it for $5.
Out of that $5, you get ... wait for it ... 25%. That's it. A $1.25 is your share.
The other 75%? Most goes to valve and a portion goes to the maker of the game. Free money.
So of all your hard work, Valve graciously allows you to have just 25%. While Valve gets the lion's share and the game creator gets a piece because why not!
Another problem? I make a mod for Game X that adds realistic horse genetailia and sells for $5 (seriously, someone made this for skyrim and was selling it for $99). But in order for my floppy horse weiner to work I need another mod that someone made that enables jiggly things. So I steal that mod and package it up with mine since it is a dependency. Jiggy mod maker is ripped off and then fires off a DMCA against my mod. And this is what happened to a lot of mods. People were ripping off components of mods or entire mods and original authors were using the DMCA to take down those mods. I am sure there were also retaliation DMCA takedowns as well.
Further problems: Someone else makes a mod that adds huge, jiggly breasts to every female character and also sells for $5. My floppy horse weiner mod changes part of the game that the jiggly breast mod also changes. They are now incompatible and cannot be simultaneously used. The player now wasted $10 on mods that can't be used together. So incompatibility between mods was also another big factor. There is no way a player can be sure mods are compatible. It's a total crapshoot. Maybe the mod doesn't work at all! ZERO testing and quality control. Yet valve still gets to keep a huge portion of the profits. No refunds.
This pissed off the community and they protested by flooding the market with crap mods, fake mods and simply stole mods to rename them and flood the marketplace even further. Valve temporarily took down the service, removed the fake mods hoping it would blow over. When they resumed a few days later, the flood of crap mods once again filled the market place. They threw in the towel and pulled the plug.
Supposedly the amount of money spent of the hosting of the fake mod storm combined with the labor of sifting through them was more than the service made. They lost money. And I say they completely deserved it.
(Score: 2) by CoolHand on Wednesday April 29 2015, @01:59PM
Thanks for that nice write-up.. I was going to post a comment on depencency/incompatibility issues, but haven't had time.. Yours is great!
Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job-Douglas Adams
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday April 29 2015, @02:14PM
I was totally unaware until my brother gave me the full spiel the other night. I was just floored. I couldn't believe that Valve would screw their community in such a brazen manner.