Carbon14

So your answer to that is to say that workers who have produced the actual products being sold and being able to earn money based on the number of people interested in paying for that product is... "completely unfair"... riiight. Surely you should be encouraging the world to work in a way that those that produce the value actually benefit from it. If Bethesda's workers don't see bonuses or huge pay increases from the success of the games, and instead a bunch of ceo's, publishers and other leeches do, then that is the problem. Not other workers getting fair recompense for the value they produce. If Bethesda has to compete with people selling individual work and making lots of money, maybe they would have to... I don't know.. pay their employees more to keep them working there? Perhaps they would actually have to spend some of the millions of dollars they make on paying their workers more, the ones who actually built the game? That would be more "fair" would it not? Instead we see a world where businesses are turning record profits and workers are seeing nothing of it... In your analogy of McDonalds, why should the workers not get paid more if the store has a busy week? They worked harder right? We already have rudimentary systems like this, where if you work overtime you are paid more. Unfortunately most of our economic systems are from a time before the internet, before easy communication, organization and micro payments. You're suggesting the shitty method we currently do things, where bosses and middle men who barely produce anything can exploit the workers who actually produce the value is a good thing, and we should force that system to stay even though we are finding ways to automate away the middle men.

They will hardly be "making money". You won't be paying the mod authors, you will be paying Bethesda, who will have given a tiny portion to the modder. It's like saying I want Bethesda's "workers" to make money, while knowing that they are hiring workers from around the planet probably working well below reasonable industry rates. They are paying up front payments to the modders, and not giving a percent cut. I don't think anyone would ever say "I want to support Chinese sweatshop workers by buying Nike shoes". Nobody will be making major mods under this scheme I think. Nobody is going to go to all the work of organizing, building and working on what amounts to a small game for a single payment and no profit share.

It appears it will be fairly low effort armor mods etc. Their aim appears to be outsourcing content development to the world. Rather than paying contractors or their own workers american wages, they can have students and people from the third world coming to them with content. They can then pay that person a few thousand dollars at set milestones to ensure they are producing something worth selling, then sell that item 200,000 times for $2.50 netting a glorious half million dollars. Effectively meaning the modder gets 1 to 2 percent of the revenue. Meanwhile they potentially get huge amounts of content made by desperate workers around the world living in countries with massively high youth unemployment, while not having to pay for all the annoying stuff like the software they use, health insurance, overtime etc. Maybe in the future they can even release the games with fewer armor sets and weapons allowing them to cut staff. Then offer additional content made for far less than they would have paid their own staff, while nickle and diming their customers. Outsourcing in order to reduce cost of staff is not an uncommon thing with companies in the US. Not talking about BGS/Todd this time around, but their parent company Zenimax. We don't know the situation of the employment with Bethesda(though they have hired so many folks from their forums in the last few years..) or how they are being treated by the executives. I get it that they want to see modders paid for the work, while ALSO Zenimax themselves getting a piece of the pie, but I feel as though there are additional things behind the scenes that we all simply can't know about. I know it's not uncommon, but it still looks like abhorrent business practice from where I am sitting. They have basically made a situation where they attempt to ban users from making money from content THEY made, then left the only option if you want to earn money being the shittiest deal possible. It's more of the "gig economy" in practice. I mean can you imagine if a car manufacturer decided to legally pursue anyone making after market mods for their cars? Or how about the obvious example of Apple attempting to disallow you from doing anything to your phone and then charging you for their overpriced options, pretty sure they have had court rulings against them because of that. In a world without corporations constantly flexing their legal muscle to try and create monopolies and stifle competition the nexus should be able to offer a paid mods system where the creator gets 90% of whatever they make and the nexus gets 10% for hosting and handling (provided the mods aren't using any copyrighted names etc).

It appears it will be fairly low effort armor mods etc. Their aim appears to be outsourcing content development to the world. Rather than paying contractors or their own workers american wages, they can have students and people from the third world coming to them with content. They can then pay that person a few thousand dollars at set milestones to ensure they are producing something worth selling, then sell that item 200,000 times for $2.50 netting a glorious half million dollars. Effectively meaning the modder gets 1 to 2 percent of the revenue. Meanwhile they potentially get huge amounts of content made by desperate workers around the world living in countries with massively high youth unemployment, while not having to pay for all the annoying stuff like the software they use, health insurance, overtime etc. Maybe in the future they can even release the games with fewer armor sets and weapons allowing them to cut staff. Then offer additional content made for far less than they would have paid their own staff, while nickle and diming their customers.

Currently playing a more or less unmodded game. Added USLEEP after ~100h (because I didn't want 4 different versions of Drain Vitality in my shoutlist anymore), had 6-7 CTDs so far. 2 of them after I installed USLEEP. I didn't even know there were any memory patches to the game, I've never had to install one. The game really isn't unplayable vanilla, and especially not nowadays. I am genuinely surprised someone could be optimistic about this. You are going to be competing with uni students, people living in the 3rd world in a curated system controlled by Bethesda. Percentage share of the profit was a far better option, there were people standing to make thousands in the first days of the previous system. It's like all the downsides of the dota2 workshop with no guarantee the work you start will be accepted, no job stability etc, with none of the good sides like actually making money from sales of your product. The result of this will be Bethesda paying people maybe a few thousand dollars for hundreds of hours of work, meaning they are working far below any minimum wage and then selling millions of copies for millions of dollars. It's disgraceful "gig economy" tactics. I mean in all seriousness, do you think Bethesda is going to pay someone a few thousand if they don't think it will sell? Of course not. The only way this works is if they know they are coming out ahead, so basically you are participating in a system where at minimum you are losing out a bit because your mod doesn't sell that well and you got paid anyway (and goodbye to future work), or losing out a lot because you got paid a pittance and the mod sold millions of copies. Seriously screw Bethesda and their corporate greed. They know they can exploit people around the world, skirting any kind of minimum wage and labor laws to produce micro-transaction content for their games.