If it was some kind of patron system I would feel different, its not perfect by any means but I feel the spirit of this whole paid mods thing -should- be directed at rewarding those who put out effort into creating something worth paying extra for. So why, and this is just my warped perception. Why does it seem like to me that the actual workers, the ones who hammer their virtual nails, draw their digital blueprints , and make their vision come true are the ones getting cheated while the people who previously, and openly are fine with mods (valve, etc.) feel they deserve 75% of the cut. Sure you could argue costs of servers, fees for uploading, advertisement etc. etc., but 75%? Say you make a mod completely from scratch, 100% all your own made models, textures, scripts, etc. it goes on sale for 4 dollers and earns 400,000 total. Does the middle man in this case valve but not limited to them really need 300,000 to offset the upkeep? If so then why hasn't the workshop for games like skyrim driven valve and the nexus out of business as they haven't been generating this 75% fee from upkeep as up until now has been a completely free service to anyone who wanted something extra in their game that they didn't make, and wasn't in the game when they bought it. I see it as a "first bid" marketing trick, You want to have 50% but instead of saying that, you offer 75%. Making your original 50% seem more reasonable. It should be a flat fee for uploading or even more fair charge based on the data size of the mod, with a very small % of the actual Profits going to the middleman. What Valve is asking for will backfire on them, they want to put a price tag on a system based off free trade so they can tax it. but with a rate too high will see the market dry up all together, as people won't be buying overpriced mods and developers will stop making mods for a price that isn't selling. In a dramatic case, we could see less mods in general after the whole thing unfolds and people get fed up and leave entirely. A story like Chesko's may soon be a frequent news article as the whole thing gets so complicated modders cease to bother. Dang it this comment was intended to be a few sentences long... and I feel like just the surface has been touched on this topic. Long story short, I'm in favor of paid mods when the proceeds go to the ones who did the work. From what I have read this is not the case in what has been stated so far. On a personal opinion level it makes me want to continue to not publicly release anything. With over 1,500 hours on the Skyrim creation kit alone worth of content that will never see beyond a few close friends as long as ideas like these are floating around.
