WE WON STEAM REMOVES PAY FOR MODS

[Psijonica]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements/detail/208632365253244218

 

BUT IF YOU READ CLOSELY, IT oops caps sry... it will be back in some other form for FO4 and future games. We must not ever stop fighting and keep modding free!

Edited April 28, 2015 by Psijonica

[BlueWarlord]

Did you read the beth blog? They sorta say the same thing, that paid mods may be offered by other dev's in the future. I have no illwill to those who want to put up paid mods though. Just not something i could afford, not at a dollar for every mod x 300 mods... not to mention the other 200 mods i've tried and passed on.

 

http://www.bethblog.com/2015/04/27/why-were-trying-paid-skyrim-mods-on-steam/

 

What shocked me the most is how in this blog Beth talks about how in one weekend, the money a modder made was so much, and i was like "Seriously?" And how potentially, a modder could make more than the people working in the studio on the game!

[Tar]

yup and that was good. With this farce Valve and Bethesda have shown that they only care about money, nothing wrong with that, but please dont act like it is about anything else. And to push that policy down on a community based on free sharing is just stupid. I really hope some people will be kicked for this farce. And from now please follow common curtsey and use communication and transparency to win trust and maybe something good can come from this..

 

The subject about paid mods and opportunity for good modders to make a living is not dead and should not be, but Valve and Bethesda have shown us all that they have no clue about modding or how to approach a modding community. Also the workshop have never been a great platform for mods, and the way it works with auto-updates really kill modding. Downloading files right into data folder is not optimal either and overwriting and conflicts will happen. For the workshop to be a good palttform for modding auto-updates should be turned off or made optional and the files should be downloaded to a separate directory to be used in mod organizers or manually.

 

Now lets unite the community again and reach out to those that got a lot of heat during this farce.

[Psijonica]

Did you read the beth blog? They sorta say the same thing, that paid mods may be offered by other dev's in the future. I have no illwill to those who want to put up paid mods though. Just not something i could afford, not at a dollar for every mod x 300 mods... not to mention the other 200 mods i've tried and passed on.

 

http://www.bethblog.com/2015/04/27/why-were-trying-paid-skyrim-mods-on-steam/

 

What shocked me the most is how in this blog Beth talks about how in one weekend, the money a modder made was so much, and i was like "Seriously?" And how potentially, a modder could make more than the people working in the studio on the game!

 

 

yup and that was good. With this farce Valve and Bethesda have shown that they only care about money, nothing wrong with that, but please dont act like it is about anything else. And to push that policy down on a community based on free sharing is just stupid. I really hope some people will be kicked for this farce. And from now please follow common curtsey and use communication and transparency to win trust and maybe something good can come from this..

 

The subject about paid mods and opportunity for good modders to make a living is not dead and should not be, but Valve and Bethesda have shown us all that they have no clue about modding or how to approach a modding community. Also the workshop have never been a great platform for mods, and the way it works with auto-updates really kill modding. Downloading files right into data folder is not optimal either and overwriting and conflicts will happen. For the workshop to be a good palttform for modding auto-updates should be turned off or made optional and the files should be downloaded to a separate directory to be used in mod organizers or manually.

 

Now lets unite the community again and reach out to those that got a lot of heat during this farce.

 

let us remember that only a few modders would ever be successfully selling mods. 99% of the mods released are crap. It is like poker, we all play it but we all lose in Vegas too. Not everybody becomes a poker star, not everybody becomes a basketball star, not everybody becomes a doctor...

 

Yes re must come back together as a community. We must stop pestering the modders who tried to sell mods. It is over. I still love you guys! Please come back! To the people who are trolling them; I feel you and I understand but it has to stop.

 

The fight is not over. The next battle will be for the right to mod Fallout 4. YES this is not just about free mods but also free modding. They will try and take that away from us. This was all planned 3 years so all this was just to test things but they will be back.

 

This battle will be like SOPA and a free internet so we must organize! The next fallout may not include a CS/CK or it will be very limited or even sold as a pay per use service online like Microsoft Office Suite. This is what they are trying to do. The potential profits are huge for them and they will not give them up so easily.

 

I hope people will fight for Fallout as they did Skyrim but the next battle will be 100 time harder.

 

 

 

[Xenoshi]

Honestly, what did you win? You attacked modders because they were given the chance to make money for their product and you relentlessly hounded a system that gave them an *option* to be paid for the countless hours of work they pour into creating mods, all because you do not want to pay. Instead of letting modders decide for themselves whether or not they would charge for their mods, you took the choice away from them all together.

 

I wouldn't be surprised of the modding community is irrevocably damaged because of this. I know I wouldn't continue producing mods for you lots.

The entire fiasco of yours is predicated on a logical fallacy -- argumentum ad antiquitatem.

 

"Appeal to tradition (also known as: proof from tradition, appeal to common practice, argumentum ad antiquitatem, a kind of false induction) is a common logical fallacy that occurs when it is assumed that something is better or correct simply because it is older, traditional, or “always has been done.”"

Edited April 28, 2015 by Xenoshi

[Vagrant0]

Honestly, what did you win? You attacked modders because they were given the chance to make money for their product and you relentlessly hounded a system that gave them an *option* to be paid for the countless hours of work they pour into creating mods, all because you do not want to pay. Instead of letting modders decide for themselves whether or not they would charge for their mods, you took the choice away from them all together.

 

I wouldn't be surprised of the modding community is irrevocably damaged because of this. I know I wouldn't continue producing mods for you lots.

The entire fiasco of yours is predicated on a logical fallacy -- argumentum ad antiquitatem.

The worst part of all this has really been seeing the way in which people have been so eager to go at eachothers throats over the matter. Having people completely deny the choices of others simply because it doesn't adhere to their own sense of what "modding" is about is very disheartening when you try to even think of it as a community. Moral or immoral lies with the person committing the act, not the most vocal members of the audience. I may not have agreed with the actions taken by modders or the choices they made regarding how they wished to monetize, but I can't see how having one part of a group decide for everyone is ultimately "winning" anything... No matter how vocal that part of that group might have been.

 

Paid mods are not actually a new thing if you really stop to look around. The Sims community has had a paid mod service for quite some time now, almost for as long as it has existed. It has had sites that restricted downloads to premium memberships, it has also had a store where people would pay for individual pieces of content. These services also co-existed with free resources, and content. Sure, there were also those cases where people profited from other people's works, pulled their content from one to cash in, or cases of people outright condemning anyone who uses the premium or paid services, but this is the age of the internet where things like that are going to happen no matter what. This may not be the best example since the vast majority of modding for The Sims is now forced through EA integration with a shop page... But it is an example to show that none of what we've seen here has been anything new.

 

But, the damage has been done, the community split, battered and bruised. The only question is where things go from here.

[oldbrokenlink]

Mostly due to the sheer disrespect shown modders I removed all my mods from Steam Workshop and I have no future plans to do any more modding. I hope other modders will consider doing other things with their talents that will not be so taken advantage of.

[Xenoshi]

I also understand some people were angry about modders only getting 25% of their profits. I just want to take a moment to address that as someone who knows what dealing with a distributor and a publisher can be like. The only thing I disagree with is the fact that modders got their payment in the form of steamwallet cash.

 

Modders were offered a very good deal. That's really all I have to say on the matter. For derivative content, they were offered a really good deal which is essentially industry standard. Do you want proof? Here was the breakdown.

 

30% to Valve as Distributor, this is the standard fee.

45% to Bethesda as Publisher.

25% to the modder.

 

As an author, my revenues are split thusly:

 

30% to Amazon, my distributor.

If I had a publisher, a book publisher will typically take 40-45% of your revenue.

That would leave me with 25-30% of the revenue as profit.

 

However, since I know enough to publish myself I only have to worry about the 30% to Amazon.

 

If I wrote Fanfiction for Kindle Worlds, which people do, a % of my revenue would go to the licensing of the material I was writing fanfiction of. People who sell their fanfiction on Kindle Worlds make between 20%-35% of their revenue as profit. The rest is sacrificed to the holder of the licensed content and to Amazon as the distributor.

 

 

This isn't greed on Valve and Bethesda's part. This is literally how business is conducted.

 

Also: This is the community people are creating mods for -- from YouTube

 

"jack darrell 12 minutes ago (edited)

Everything jv209 said is 100% spot on.

Majority of mods are NOT worth paying for.

Modding is NOT a job.

If you want money for your mods, accept donations.

No one wants to pay you losers money for some glitchy half assed mod that barely adds anything to the game.

Show less"

Edited April 29, 2015 by Xenoshi

[rickerhk]

@Xenoshi

Actually mod makers would get paid cash directly to their bank account.

Refunds were steam wallet cash.

So yeah all my Skyrim mods are now hidden. I have not decided yet whether to just delete them or not - or cool off and wait I'm done with Project Brazil - in about 6 or 8 months. But at the moment I just really want to wash my hands of the Skyrim 'community'.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Jupp, pretty much that's the message that came across to authors from their potential users through the last few days.

 

We "owe" them all mods we ever create and should be "thankful" they even consider giving them a try, then come back and shred into pieces everything we were so proud of having created ourselves, because it wasn't the way "they" wanted it.

 

The time and effort we put into our works is "worth sh**" in their eyes, and we're a traitor to the "community" when we even so much as consider asking for something in return, and if it's only a "thanks?".

They put us on Black Lists, call in mob squads to everywhere we hang around, remove all anyways-completely-worthless Endorsements from our mods, steal our mods, upload them to pirate sites and link to these from every place they find suitable.

 

There's apparently also an unlimited number of us and an abundance of talent was thrown around at birth, for as everybody is at least just as much, if not way more, talented than we are in their eyes.

And it's definitely no loss when a few of us quit and take their mods with them, as there'll always be others, and they will always create the same kind of mods in similar or better quality than we did.

 

Staff was even asked to outright "ban" all authors from Nexus who only had a single mod for pay on Steam but several "dozens" for free still on Nexus. I honestly wonder how this "please return" thing would work now, if we indeed listened to these demands.

 

 

Honestly, I can totally understand everybody who decides for himself this isn't the thing they'd like to have to put up with on a regular basis and instead opts not to share any mods with this community.

 

I for one was reassured it wasn't so bad a thing after all I so far didn't get around to create and share mods for Skyrim like I did in the past for Oblivion. I was planning to at a point, and was only always held back by a total lack of free time and way too much workload from my job for years, but now I'm not so sure this was so good an idea after all anymore. At least I learned me not having been able to share my mods so far was no loss at all "for them" in their eyes, which of course helps making it feel like less a bad thing for me as well.

 

Don't get me wrong, my mods for Oblivion are here to stay, as is my regular checking back in the comments and helping people with any and all issues they might have. I won't ever ask for any money for my hobby creations, or even accept donations, as I was only able to even create them due to the amount of help and support I received from other authors (and also some users the names of which I'll always have in mind) also totally "for free", so the least thing I can do in return is give back myself "for free" as well, and this will never change.

 

But moving on to Skyrim to share my mods also with this bunch?... I don't know. As of right now, no, thanks. That's definitely a no. Of course still due to other reasons as well, but the "things" I witnessed the last few days seriously haven't helped convincing me of the opposite. And the worst thing I see even now still, are the people trying to convince others it never happened, or wasn't as severe as they might think. I can still see it all, and so can others, thanks to the internet being a place that never forgets for those who know where to search for it. Sorry, but I'm not stupid. Thank you very much.

 

 

You got a whole lot of damage control and repairs on your hands now, and there's still some bridges so severely burned it's unlikely you can ever rebuild them again.

 

If you consider "this" a WIN... then so be it. But I for one can only see losses everywhere right now, from a "community" perspective. :ermm: