Skyrim paid mods are gone

[IGetMoreAssThanAToiletSeat]

that was a bit too easy......... They're retaliating. GET THE GUNS READY

[mvitkun]

Quit what? Not accepting that Valve is some fucking saint and a friend to gamers? I'm not the one who takes it up the ass from Valve and follows their decisions blindly, maybe you are? 

 

benefit of the doubt? Valve has consistently had the worst customer service of any company in recent history. They turned their games into F2P clusterfucks just to make more money off skins. They encourage broken Greenlight and Early Access for their own profit without having QA to ensure that games don't actually suck. Every move they've made in the past few years has been to line their pockets and not give a shit about their consumers. 

 

Do me a favour, get your head out of Valves ass and realize they've been on the slope of shitty decisions for years. Stop defending them. 

I love how we chose the same point......

[Misanthrope]

If Valve improved their customer service to "better than Comcast" levels then that'd earn some brownie points with me.

 

This is an improvement: people bitched about it and they back pedaled. Try getting Comcast to remove data caps by just bitching about them for a few days on the internet.

 

I'm not saying they're perfect or that this is magically makes em a good company at all, I'm just saying enough with the fucking nonsense hate: If Valve does something right it should be fucking acknowledged, not denied. There's no need to just find some sort of issue with them completely fixing the problem by completely removing paid mods and refunding all the money. It just makes one look irrational and childish if you keep complaining

 

EDIT: Preemptively made it more obvious because I'm sure you will ignore that part.

[SurvivorNVL]

I'd say Valve had good intent, the department of "we need more money" decided to add in the 25% figure for the modders, and the reaction caused them to not want a schism or to harm the process.  Damage is done, yes, but they at least have un-done their mistake.  It shows the power that is the community.  And that Gabe-N really does look down upon us from his candy room.  I want a candy room...

[Victorious Secret]

I love how we chose the same point......

 

Its the most glaring and embarrassing one. 

 

Valve pulls in nearly a billion a year, they can't afford proper CSR? And people actually defend how their CS? Its pathetic. Amazon serves far more people, yet still gets back to me in 12 hours even when it concerns sales that were made with a  3rd party NOT using the Marketplace. 

Valve has no excuses. Only delusional fans. 

 

This is an improvement: people bitched about it and they back pedaled. Try getting Comcast to remove data caps by just bitching about them for a few days on the internet.

 

I'm not saying they're perfect or that this is magically makes em a good company at all, I'm just saying enough with the fucking nonsense hate: If Valve does something right it should be fucking acknowledged, not denied. 

 

Do you congratulate a thief for not stealing? 

What backwards fucking logic is that? 

 

The right thing would've been NOT IMPLEMENTING THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE. Thats the right thing. 

[Misanthrope]

Do you congratulate a thief for not stealing? 

What backwards fucking logic is that? 

 

The right thing would've been NOT IMPLEMENTING THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE. Thats the right thing.

A couple of things that are somehow not painfully obvious to you because of your rabid hate:

1) I never actually say that they should be congratulated. Stop twisting what I said which was acknowledged

 

2) This was actually not theft: they had consent from every and all modders who briefly participated on this.

 

3) Even if you could consider this theft (which again, only serves your hyperbole since you think being loud, obnoxious and righteous will make us somehow overlook your lack of logic and arguments) this is akin to a Thief that already gotten away with their crime but still turn themselves in voluntarily. No it doesn't undoes the "theft" but that's about the only thing you can do after the fact. 

 

To sum up we just care about different things: You care about your relentless pursue of the evil you see in Valve, while I actually care about the Skyrim modding community first and foremost hence I see this development as positive since it will at least let the healing begin and will stop a lot more mod projects from just disappearing or dying. I want mods to continue, you just want excuses to shit on Valve. You still have plenty of valid reasons to hate Valve, this just isn't one anymore, this problem is past tense.

[Nowak]

Valve pulls in nearly a billion a year, they can't afford proper CSR?

It's probably due to their non-traditional corporate structure. Nobody has a clearly defined role or job description (hell, not even Gabe has one, he's just a co-founder and majority shareholder of the company) and everyone is free to work on their own thing. Nobody - and I mean nobody, regardless of where they work at - wants to work on customer service so we have to suffer in the end from their unwillingness to do customer service.

 

It's not great at all.

 

As for the whole mod situation, Valve needs to remember their roots sometimes. They were built on mods. Half-Life was based on a heavily-modified Quake engine. Counter-Strike was a mod of Half-Life, Left 4 Dead was a mod of Counter-Strike, Team Fortress was a Quake mod and Dota was a Warcraft III mod. I'm glad they ended their experiment before it had a chance to grow into something even worse, but truth be told it shouldn't have happened at all, at least not how it was implemented anyway. The idea is good and all, but the implementation was deplorable.

 

I did some digging around on Greenlight, and, as terrible as it has been for the storefront, it has integrated Kickstarter support for larger projects. What is keeping Valve from integrating Patreon or Paypal donation support on the Workshop? Sure, Bethesda might not like it as much - I'm sure they loved that 45% cut while it lasted - but the community would be much more likely to get behind that than a paywall. I'm sure we'd all love to chip in some form of support for our favorite mods, right?

[MegaDave91]

That's unfortunate for the creators of these mods. The whole issue that stuck out to me was the ludicrous percentage Valve was keeping for content they have absolutely no association with. 

[mvitkun]

This is an improvement: people bitched about it and they back pedaled. Try getting Comcast to remove data caps by just bitching about them for a few days on the internet.

I'm not saying they're perfect or that this is magically makes em a good company at all, I'm just saying enough with the fucking nonsense hate: If Valve does something right it should be fucking acknowledged, not denied.

Comcast never removed Data Caps in the first place, or at least in most regions they didn't, Data Caps were Suspended indefinitely in most areas.

 

Valve didn't do something right......they corrected an injustice they committed after committing it.

It's less like the example Victorious Secret gave and more like if a thief stole something and then out of fear for the consequences of his actions decided to return it.

And I'm fairly sure the thief example was meant to be used as a general negative act, not that they were literally stealing.

If it makes you feel better then insert any negative act you feel is appropriate.

[IGetMoreAssThanAToiletSeat]

That's unfortunate for the creators of these mods. The whole issue that stuck out to me was the ludicrous percentage Valve was keeping for content they have absolutely no association with. 

To be honest if the mod creators were getting more than a mere 25% of the cut, I would've supported it, something like 50% would've been good. While steam does provide the platform for the mods, they don't spend hours a day making them. Also the fact that there is no way to know if the mod you sold is actually yours or not is a big issue. 

[Misanthrope]

Comcast never removed Data Caps in the first place, or at least in most regions they didn't, Data Caps were Suspended indefinitely in most areas.

http://i.imgur.com/V9uRD3q.png

 

Valve didn't do something right......they corrected an injustice they committed after committing it.

It's less like the example Victorious Secret gave and more like if a thief stole something and then out of fear for the consequences of his actions decided to return it, under the pretext that he didn't steal and that somebody else did.

And I'm fairly sure the thief example was meant to be used as a general negative act, not that they were literally stealing.

 

Disagreed: I honestly thought they wouldn't go back on this at all. There was literally nothing stopping them from continuing to pursue this. Yes there was bad faith but they could have easily continued, nobody had sue them yet and if someone tried they could have easily taken down just individual mods due to DMCA claims.

 

They have not gone back on other extremely anti consumer practices for example the fact that on most markets they offer no refunds at all and on the ones they started offering those it was just to comply with legal obligations, not because they gave a fuck about their customers.  

[GoodBytes]

It is a huge loss.

Good Moders will no longer make kick-ass mods now. A big problem with mods, is that donations are non-existent for them.

Yes, Valve and the studio that made the game gets a cut. So what? Moder gets money too for their hard work, IF THEY CHOOSE TO, and they profit form an established franchise without any concern of copyright and trademark infringement for using materials of the game used in their own game, if they want to make money. Let alone recognition. Indie game developers harddest problem is not making a fun game, but getting the word out, and it is getting harder and harder. The best they can do is make the game free, and talk about it on forums, and hope for donations.

Since this was implemented, look how many modders decided to charge their mods to make money. It was instant!

To me, it shows the problem.

Software isn't free to make, and take a long time. I think people forgot the value of software thanks to smartphone games and apps being 1$ or free, ignoring the fact that 1$ you have nothing more than a silly Flash style game, with no good real story, short game, or if it's "free", filled with micro transactions, ads, takes your personal information, and other methods to get money, hence the term "freemium".

People are calling Valvle action as injustice. You think it is Valve that made this? It is Bethesda that CAME to Valve, and said: "We have mods complaining that they have no donations for their work, despite successful, can you setup a store system for them?" But it's Bethesda, so I guess they are immune from fault. And again, it's not Geabox or Valve who pushed anything. The modders decided to sale their mods. Valve just built the platform. I mean of course they get a cut, and of course the dev studio of the game the mod made for will get a cut, they are managing it, they are building and maintaining the mod aspect of the games, plus again, the mods gets something which is SIGNIFICANTLY larger than nothing from the donations that few gives.

[Unlikelyjoker]

Just as I was about to submit my 8K horse genitalia mod.

Thanks guys.

I was about to release Apple 2.0 for 10k

[SirSquid]

This kinda sucks to the mod devs who what to go full time.

[MoonSpot]

This kinda sucks to the mod devs who what to go full time.

It is not the be all and end all.  A better platform and agreement can arise or comeback.  Modders are talking about money now, don't worry about that.

[Misanthrope]

It is a huge loss.

Good Moders will no longer make kick-ass mods now. A big problem with mods, is that donations are non-existent for them.

Yes, Valve and the studio that made the game gets a cut. So what? Moder gets money too for their hard work, IF THEY CHOOSE TO, and they profit form an established franchise without any concern of copyright and trademark infringement for using materials of the game used in their own game, if they want to make money. Let alone recognition. Indie game developers harddest problem is not making a fun game, but getting the word out, and it is getting harder and harder. The best they can do is make the game free, and talk about it on forums, and hope for donations.

Since this was implemented, look how many modders decided to charge their mods to make money. It was instant!

To me, it shows the problem.

Software isn't free to make, and take a long time. I think people forgot the value of software thanks to smartphone games and apps being 1$ or free, ignoring the fact that 1$ you have nothing more than a silly Flash style game, with no good real story, short game, or if it's "free", filled with micro transactions, ads, takes your personal information, and other methods to get money, hence the term "freemium".

People are calling Valvle action as injustice. You think it is Valve that made this? It is Gearbox that CAME to Valve, and said: "We have mods complaining that they have no donations for their work, despite successful, can you setup a store system for them?"

But its Gearbox, so I guess they are immune from fault.

 

Don't you mean Bethesda?

 

Anyway I actually hope they do come up with a proper donation system in the future that encourages people to pay and support modders but there's a lot of variables that need to be carefully considered: Interoperability between mods is a big one, a realistic way to prevent asset theft is another one. The biggest one is the percentage the modders were to get: I think it would have gone a lot better if the modders would get the majority of the profits since it would encourage them to be more reasonable with the pricing, if people know they will get a lower cut they are more likely to overcharge to compensate, etc.

[BoredErica]

With Beths permission my ass. Valve needs to stop spinning this shit as if they were innocent in this. They willingly agreed to this and even had Gabe do PR spinning nonsense on Reddit to get people to get over it. 

Uh....

They did actually contact Bethesda. They even released a new version of the Creation Kit to prep the paid mods before paid mods went live. (The Kit had been getting no updates for freakin' forever up until this point.) They also get a cut. Probably also for legal reasons Valve can't just sell the mods like this, and do you think the 25% cut for Bethesda is just a number Valve made up without any input from Bethesda and decided to send them some checks out of the blue?

[Argent]

Not sure this is actually the great victory people seem to think it is.  Maybe these companies will come back later with the same plan, maybe they will tweak it in favor of the mod authors or maybe abandon any plan to monetize mods; I think it's too early to say. Donations have never really worked in the past, and now mod authors may have lost a good shot at getting something back.  The mod authors who put their new mods up for sale received vitriol and spite from users in a disgusting display of outrage.  

 

I don't believe that Skyrim was the really best place to start this experiment and it seems pretty obvious the both Valve and Bethesda greatly underestimated the task at hand in getting this model to work.  I do hope they can come together and get a system working that everyone is happy with, but that's going to be far more complicated than what Valves done for their own games.

[Lewellyn]

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/news/12464/?

 

I encourage everyone to read this and the last few posts by the owner of nexus if they haven't already.

 

A lot of people continue to forget that most of the best mods out there have been created by teams, not solo modders. Very few excellent mods really are made by one person alone. I'll just quote someone from the YouTube comments section: 

Part of the reason the TES modding scene is so successful is because there was no monetary gain. People freely shared their knowledge and work with one another which lowered the bar for people interested in learning how to create their own mods, and it has lead to many collaborative mods that wouldn't exist under a paywall system. Mods such as Frostfall, SkyUI, USKP, Immersive Armors etc.

 

A good example of this system destroying a mod is Wet & Cold. The Workshop version has been absolutely neutered because Isoku was monetizing nivea's Winter is Coming cloaks mod without their permission, and nivea demanded they be removed. We have actually entered a situation where the paid for version of a mod is worse than the free version, and word is he's going to have to possibly remove scripted features because they belong to other authors. If you need more proof, Chesko's Art of Fishing was removed from the Workshop because it used Fores New Idles in Skyrim, and Fore has outright stated you cannot monetize his mod and it should always be used for free.

 

As soon as money is introduced as an entry point, nobody is willing to share their ideas and creations because you're gaining from their hard labour, especially if they release their mod for free.

[GoodBytes]

Don't you mean Bethesda?

Heuu, yes thanks! Fixed.

[Nowak]

It is a huge loss.

Good Moders will no longer make kick-ass mods now. A big problem with mods, is that donations are non-existent for them.

You mean... like they have been doing for the past... I dunno, 22 years now? (going by Doom's release year as that was one of the first major games to actively support user modifications.) And how can you be so sure that donations are non-existent for mod developers? Sure, there have been many a mod that have ended development because of a lack of funding, but that doesn't mean that every mod that needs funding to develop has stopped development because of a lack of funding.

[Pomfinator]

Not sure this is actually the great victory people seem to think it is. 

I think getting Valve to backpedal on a system they put in place is a great achievement in of itself.  Greenlight, Early Access, User Reviews, User Tags, all of these got heat but never resulted in so much damage control from Valve.

[Scrubbah]

What bothers me is that a lot of people will now start treating valve/steam nicely after this.

As many redditors pointed out people flipped their opinion very quickly about MS with the Xbone DRM model switch.

 

Good that they changed their minds and have the decency to admin a mistake, but they should still be watched with a warry eye because this might happen again.

 

Think the issue was that the skyrim modding was well established before they stuck a price tag on things, if they did this out of the gate on a future game... well at least people enjoy their hats... /s

[kpreg]

its like the 970 but with refunds

[ACatWithThumbs]

It is a huge loss.

Good Moders will no longer make kick-ass mods now. A big problem with mods, is that donations are non-existent for them.

Yes, Valve and the studio that made the game gets a cut. So what? Moder gets money too for their hard work, IF THEY CHOOSE TO, and they profit form an established franchise without any concern of copyright and trademark infringement for using materials of the game used in their own game, if they want to make money. Let alone recognition. Indie game developers harddest problem is not making a fun game, but getting the word out, and it is getting harder and harder. The best they can do is make the game free, and talk about it on forums, and hope for donations.

Since this was implemented, look how many modders decided to charge their mods to make money. It was instant!

To me, it shows the problem.

Software isn't free to make, and take a long time. I think people forgot the value of software thanks to smartphone games and apps being 1$ or free, ignoring the fact that 1$ you have nothing more than a silly Flash style game, with no good real story, short game, or if it's "free", filled with micro transactions, ads, takes your personal information, and other methods to get money, hence the term "freemium".

People are calling Valvle action as injustice. You think it is Valve that made this? It is Gearbox that CAME to Valve, and said: "We have mods complaining that they have no donations for their work, despite successful, can you setup a store system for them?" But it's Gearbox, so I guess they are immune from fault. And again, it's not Geabox or Valve who pushed anything. The modders decided to sale their mods. Valve just built the platform. I mean of course they get a cut, and of course the dev studio of the game the mod made for will get a cut, they are managing it, they are building and maintaining the mod aspect of the games, plus again, the mods gets something which is SIGNIFICANTLY larger than nothing from the donations that few gives.

What you're missing is that everything changes for the modder as soon as he makes an official product.

He won't be able to use free version of the software anymore he'll need an actual licences for commercial use which is extremely expensive.(1 year licence for 3Ds Max costs $3,900)

Not to mention that you have to get $400 first to even see a cent which means smaller mods that costs like 50 cent will probably never see any money but there would still be the new higher upfront cost for modder and consumer.

And this doesn't even touch on the thousands of small details that are very anti consumer in that model like the lack of long term support, the guarantee if it will work with future patches or other mods, and quality control in general.

Paid mods could work if they do it like in Team Fortress 2 or CS: GO but that will hardly restrict modders.

So honestly I don't see it happening ever unless the developer as an example gets permission to sell the mod as DLC and gives the modder a 50% cut per sale or something in that direction.