[QUOTE=gman003-main;48924094]Paid mods are a good idea. They just didn't do it right.
First, they did it on a game that already had extensive free mods. Even though it was the mod creators deciding to make their mods cost money, it was seen as taking away from the community. People hate it when something that was free becomes not-free, even if they would have paid for it had it never been free. Doing it with a brand-new game would have worked much better.
Second, they dove right in to it. They should have started small - offering invites to the paid-mods program to a select few of the best mods, and vetting them to make sure there wasn't anything shady going on. People taking free mods someone else made, and uploading them to the shop, was completely predictable, but there was no protection against it. And when they did finally open the floodgates, they needed significantly better procedures for removing stolen mods.
Third, they needed a better split of profits. Point fingers at whoever you want, the simple fact is that the people doing the most work were getting the least money. It needs to be 50% minimum to the modders.[/QUOTE]
I think that if there's going to be a set price for mods, there needs to be a strict quality + quantity evaluation system. Whether that's a team at the studio, a team at the distribution company (Valve) or some sort of beta-with-price-voting, I don't know.
If there's going to be a pay-what-you-want system, then a negligible minimum price (like $1) needs to be in there, with at least a 51% cut for the content creators.
The whole 'obligation to maintain mods as game is patched further' issue makes it really difficult to justify this though. With game development it's different - you can put out a game and it can be fine without a patch for years and years, unless the new OS's coming out are ditching compatibility modes. Once the game is stable there's little need for ongoing support. But when you're modding a game, the game's developers can make changes whenever they want/need to, and these changes can break your mod entirely. I'm not sure we can force modders - who are almost always hobbyists who do this stuff in their spare time - to commit to ongoing support. And how would that even be enforced?
the thread title is such bullshit lmao
Paid mods are okay, there just needs to be a pwyw option like before.
Removing paid mods from Skyrim was a mistake
I'm pretty with gman003-main on this one. I like paid mods as a concept, but the execution's been really lacking, not that Valve has a lot of reference cases to go on.
I have to imagine that Valve's ideal here is to basically naturally upscale what they've already done with stuff like TF2 and Dota2, where people got much more invested (and could justify being much more invested) once money was involved and as a result you started seeing more quality submissions rising. And the people that make good money off their hats are from what I gather pretty happy with Valve making all that possible.
Problem was that it didn't naturally upscale and reproduce the same effects, partly because it's a different beast Valve decided to tackle, partly because there was no official quality control that determined what mods were clean and could be sold, which basically tacked on a whole bunch of problems known from Greenlight and Early Access that Valve really should have had on their radar at that point.
So in concept I like opening up the possibility for modders to take their business more seriously and produce higher quality content against compensation more stable than having to hope for donations and pay-what-you-want. But it's a much more complicated situation than TF2 or Dota2 hats. I doubt Valve will come out with a clever solution right out of the box in the second time, but I do hope that at least in typical Valve fashion it'll be shit in the beginning and then after years of iteration people will like it. Even Greenlight/Early Access bullshit's become much more bearable after Valve implemented community-managed quality control (tags, prominent reviews, curators) and simple refund options.
I'm definitely not with the side of the argument that believes in modding being some pure form of art that must not be tainted by the corruption of money. Given the grey area modding's usually practiced in, there simply wasn't a good official way for modders to make money in the past. Devs/publishers would have come crashing down on them with a vengeance and the modders wouldn't really have had much legal or moral ground to stand on.
Valve, despite their time management issues, does tend to iterate things and think them through enough to bring out solid, intelligent systems that work. I think if anybody can find a way to encourage modding and help quality content creators get paid, it's them.
[QUOTE=Cronos Dage;48924542]Paid mods are okay, there just needs to be a pwyw option like before.
Removing paid mods from Skyrim was a mistake[/QUOTE]
pwyw has a minimum of zero
steam pwyw was more "pay me what it is set to cost or up to 100$"
[QUOTE=Maloof?;48924546]Valve, despite their time management issues, does tend to iterate things and think them through enough to bring out solid, intelligent systems that work. I think if anybody can find a way to encourage modding and help quality content creators get paid, it's them.[/QUOTE]
This kind of mindset is the exact reason why Steam, TF2 and other shit are as clunky and nonsensical.
They just admitted for the fourth time that they're support service is ass. They're not going to fix it. Stop giving them excuses.
Steam paid mods should really work in one of two ways (maybe both even.)
1. An optional one time donation system. While yes, most people will just skip it, I'm sure there's a decent amount of people out there who wouldn't mind donating to a mod author if their mod contributes a lot to the game they're playing. The Nexus has a system like this in place, and there are no complaints from anyone.
2. An optional Patreon-esque system where you can choose to pay an amount you specify per month just to support the mod author.
Monetization of mods should be about supporting mods which you enjoy, not about forcing people to pay for them and while also enabling what is essentially money grubbing.
As long as you make paying for mods [B][U]OPTIONAL[/U][/B], nobody will have an issue.
[QUOTE=Octopod;48924414]even if paid mods were a thing back in the day i dont think it would change that those mods were made for free out of passion[/QUOTE]
You're also blurring the line between a mod and a game. Team Fortress and Counter-Strike weren't a mod of Half-Life anymore, since it played nothing like Half-Life anymore; it was a game from the GoldSrc engine.
I wrote this during the original paid mod fiasco:
[QUOTE=winsanity;47616630]Personally I think the general idea of paid mods was a good idea, albeit horribly executed by Valve.
[U]Some things I think could have made the idea gone smoother:[/U]
- Creators should get a bigger split of the money. 60/20/20 to Modder/Valve/Game Owner would be much more fair
- Allow teams to share the split of the money. You could even make it so the modder split increases up to a certain percent(+20%?) depending on the size of the team.
- Games with existing large modding communities should be excluded from having paid mods. It causes chaos within the community and doesn't end well as we've seen.
- Games with paid mods need to have proper modding support. A game update should not threaten to break mods.
- Mods need to be able to stand on their own. If they have external dependencies or break in conjunction with certain mods(proper modding support should prevent this being an issue) they shouldn't be sold.
- Paid mods need to be curated. By humans. Nobody is going to buy anything if all they see are pages of low poly models and horse dongs being sold for $99.
- Valve needs to work with the modders to determine a reasonable price. They could have their curators do this. A sword should not cost more than a massive overhaul mod.
- Proper refunds(back to the original payment method).
- Longer refund periods. Edge case bugs may take hour or days of playing before being discovered. Making refunds painless makes it more likely people will try buying a mod again in the future. The benefit of a returning customer outweighs the couple assholes who abuse the system.
- Workshop needs to provide more robust tools/incentives for modders. For example providing version control software like git in workshop would help facilitate collaboration between team members and allow mods to be managed effectively. It also helps justify Valve's cut.
- A proper bug report system. The threaded discussions workshop currently has isn't good enough. Ideally paid mods should be bug free, but realistically edge cases won't be caught until after release. Modders could link a bug report to a commit and be able to keep track of when and where bugs were fixed.
- Abandoned mods should be pulled from the store. A good way to sort through the noise which mods are abandoned and broken would be to start with mods with lots of bug reports that go unanswered and/or unfixed.
- Add a donate feature. Some modders may dislike the idea of forcing people to pay but still allow players to tip them if they seriously want to. Valve could take a small cut to deal with transaction fees(and whats required for tax purposes)
[U]The biggest thing that could have made the idea gone smoother:[/U]
-[B] COMMUNICATION[/B]. None of this would have happened if valve had gone public with the idea before they released it. People would still flip their shit, but Valve would at least have the ability to fix issues before it goes live. They should keep that line of communication open throughout the entire process. Even if they implemented everything the community asked for, they should still keep the community informed of their intentions. I'm 100% sure there will be issues and things people don't like and things missed. If they communicate and listen to our responses, they can fix those too. Valve says it's data-driven. What better way to collect data than asking the data makers themselves?[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=KillerJaguar;48924655]You're also blurring the line between a mod and a game. Team Fortress and Counter-Strike weren't a mod of Half-Life anymore, since it played nothing like Half-Life anymore; it was a game from the GoldSrc engine.[/QUOTE]
Not to mention the developers of said mods were brought into Valve in order to help flesh them out into a full game.
It's not like the mod authors got the blessing from Valve to sell their mods, Valve directly stepped in and made sure the content was spruced up enough in order to justify selling it.
I think the only mod author who got Valve's blessing to sell their mod without being absorbed into Valve was Garry. Even then, Garry still spruced up GMod enough in order to justify paying for that version over using the latest free version.
With the Skyrim mods, there was no time. Someone just flicked a switch, and suddenly, your favorite mods now require money to have. Barely any changes between the free and paid versions.
Who the fuck cares. If they put paid mods in something, just don't buy the mods.
Hell, with the refund system people won't make any money off terrible mods cause you can refund that shit. Mod doesnt work? Refund.
If people want to sell their mods, let them. It will be easier to know who are shits
Fuck off Gaben, asshole.
It sounds like they're going to do something closer to TF2/Dota 2/CSGO where the community votes what mods you can buy.
That's a step in the right direction, not perfect, but a gigantic leap forward from the shit implementation before.
[QUOTE=J!NX;48924548]pwyw has a minimum of zero
steam pwyw was more "pay me what it is set to cost or up to 100$"[/QUOTE]
shit I said "like before"
I meant $0 min, sorry
I think "like before" I meant like donations on nexusmods or some shit
You know you have a problem when a forum that was originally created by people who liked your work decide to shit on you.
[QUOTE=HumanAbyss;48924212]It honestly doesn't matter.
You won't be able to make use of "Fair Use" in 3 months so it doesn't fucking matter.[/QUOTE]
Not really, America will dictate what is fair use to the rest of the contries in the TPP, why people are kinda freaking out th IP chapter about is this will basically place 'Muricah's Copyright system into the other countries that have progressive copyright standards
[QUOTE=kattolil;48924164]Yeah let's completely ignore how it would turn modding into a cut-throat business.[/QUOTE]
The quality of some of the paid mods was demonstrably worse due to this. The paid Wet and Cold used low quality art for the clothing items, because the ones in the old version were made by someone else. Chesko shouldn't have used FNIS for his fishing mod, and it would have looked even more boring without any animations. On top of that a few creators of free art assets considered leaving entirely because of the feared shift in the community.
[QUOTE=OmniConsUme;48924871]Not really, America will dictate what is fair use to the rest of the contries in the TPP, why people are kinda freaking out th IP chapter about is this will basically place 'Muricah's Copyright system into the other countries that have progressive copyright standards[/QUOTE]
Incorrect.
The problem I have with paid mods, along with another myriad of problems, is that it's fucking over the consumer over even more, and it would drive the community apart. In an industry where we're already nickle and dimed the fuck out of DLC, paid mods are literally DLC without any of the quality control that comes from the studios themselves. Not to mention the adding of money turns the community from a very cooperative group to a very competitive group causing shit tons of problems.
[url=http://facepunch.com/showthread.php?t=1476771&p=48246713&viewfull=1#post48246713]I actually wrote a relatively coherent rant on this on a whole back during the actual paid mods being released.[/url]
[editline]17th October 2015[/editline]
[QUOTE=OmniConsUme;48924871]Not really, America will dictate what is fair use to the rest of the contries in the TPP, why people are kinda freaking out th IP chapter about is this will basically place 'Muricah's Copyright system into the other countries that have progressive copyright standards[/QUOTE]
Just don't forget that it will take the already pretty bad copyright system in America and make it even worse.
I don't think valve are doing this because they are scummy or greedy, they might be trying to encourage the productivity of their costumer base.
However the way they are going about it is completely fucking idiotic. They are creating yet another fucking publicly run marketplace that they don't have the manpower to supervise for scammers. It took them years to even approach getting a handle on Greenlight, what the fuck makes them think this wont be just another shitty goldrush of absolutely terrible developers who overload the system with shit?
[QUOTE=pentium;48924084]Given how Valve is already rolling in cash from other channels but have completely neglected their game development, user support and pretty much anything else this is not a game that Valve should be getting into at all if they want to stop looking like lazy fucks.
Rixxz2 knows what I'm referring to.[/QUOTE]
Right, thats the point. Valve just has to set up infrastructure and then it is free money (just like steam).
Capitalism kind of dictates making as much money as possible for as little work as possible.
i'd be ok if the mod developers cut was atleast 75%
[QUOTE=winsanity;48924657]- Mods need to be able to stand on their own. If they have external dependencies or break in conjunction with certain mods(proper modding support should prevent this being an issue) they shouldn't be sold.[/QUOTE]
And this is fundamentally why paid mods will never work. Great mods are built on the work of others.
[QUOTE=Sprockethead;48925084]I don't think valve are doing this because they are scummy or greedy, they might be trying to encourage the productivity of their costumer base.[/QUOTE]
Then that just tells me that Valve has gotten so blinded with money that they forget people produce mods from their own drive.
it truly does encourage more effort to go into mods and if they push steam refunds onto this then it has a lot of potential
No. Just No. You should [B]NEVER[/B] have to pay just to download a simple mod. There should just be a "Donate" Button that allows players to support a mod author.
I'm for (not exclusively) paid mods, but i hope they give 50% or more to the modders this time around.
[editline]17th October 2015[/editline]
[QUOTE=Breezeep;48925418]No. Just No. You should [B]NEVER[/B] have to pay just to download a simple mod.[/QUOTE]
Then don't :vs: Mods won't have DRM.
Tbh paid 'mods' might be cool in some iteration if that's the cost of making sure mods get finished, polished etc.
I mean look at the mount and blade modding scene, a lot of promising ideas but all of them dropped after a month of work. Maybe if cash got into the mix people would approach this differently? Then again, it could just backfire like early access did.
I can't believe there are people saying they shouldn't have removed paid mods from Skyrim. It was a fucking shitshow. We had early access mods, stolen mods, nagware in free versions of mods, $3 swords, models stripped out of DOTA 2, and mods that didn't work as advertised, all in the span of two fucking days. And for mods that were large the paid version was almost universally inferior because the large mods used other people's work, so that all had to be removed.
Also, pointing to Counter Strike and Team Fortress is a disingenuous thing to do and you fucking know it. There's a difference between a stand alone mod that's basically a full game and a fucking armour set for $5 that doesn't even display properly in the menu. And let's not forget that paid mods caused a number of resource creators to pull their resources for fear that someone else would take their work and sell it.
Modding is something done out of passion and is a cooperative venture. A market is something done for profit and is a competitive venture. Those two things are incompatible and a mod market will (and did) quickly devolve into nothing but the cheapest, most effortless content being pushed out.
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