Two weeks ago a large controversy occurred over Steam's
decision to allow for paid mods for Skyrim. If you are not a PC gamer, that
first sentence probably seems like gibberish. And frankly, even after I explain
everything, you still might be asking yourself why you give a damned, and I
don't have a ready response for that. I guess I'll dissect this issue here
because it is relevant to me and this is my blog, and the original purpose of
the blog is to have a place for me to consolidate all my ideas and opinions.
Continue reading at your own peril.
BACKGROUND
Steam is a program and service made by Valve. It is a DRM
for PC games. Unlike consoles like the Playstation or the Xbox, it is very easy
to pirate a video game on the computer and play games for free. Typically the
buck stops at multiplayer games, but at least for single player games, this is
the case. Any single player game can be cracked and pirated. Making a strong
DRM typically just openly challenges the cracking teams to be the first to
crack it. Cracking software is complicated stuff, but installing cracked
material is very easy. This is obviously a problem because not every game needs
or should be multiplayer. How will companies make their profit if people are
getting their games for free? There are ways around it. The head of Steam is
Gabe Newell, affectionately called “Lord Gaben”. He feels that piracy is a
distribution problem. That, by trying to protect their games against the
inevitable, games companies are repelling paid customers through clunky, glitch,
and sometimes crippling DRM protection. To counter this, he has Steam: Where
most PC games are available, accessible in one program, and where people can
chat and see friend’s profiles after buying some games from Steam’s famous ‘Steam
Sales’. It seems to be working.
But nobody is beyond criticism, especially on the Internet.
And when you piss off the Internet, amazing things happen. Skyrim is the fifth
game in the Elder Scrolls series of games, from Bethesda. The Elder Scrolls
games have been extremely successful. They are all open RPG games. They really
do take open to a whole new level. Everything you see, you can go to. There are
no invisible walls. Nowadays there are a little bit more games that do that
sort of thing, notable the yet-to-come Witcher 3, but that is a pretty recent phenomenon.
Another reason why the Elder Scrolls are so successful is due to the mods. The
game on its own (‘vanilla’, as modders call it, in other words, absent of any
player-made-mods) contains easily over a hundred hours of content. While
MMORPGs can contain just as much if not more content, those are not really
comparable and the playing styles are also very different.
With mods, the sky isn’t really the limit, but the limits
are pretty fucking high. Mods can be anything from a new cool looking (or
possibly lame-looking) sword to an entire new continent with places to explore
and things to do. Modding to this extent
would not have been possible without Bethesda’s help. They released modding
kits to the community free of charge. This is of course, just for the PC
because consoles cannot do such a thing. Because of this, the whole controversy
really only directly affected Skyrim players on the PC. Although Skyrim came
out on 11/11/2011 and it’s 2015, a lot of people still play the game. Mods make
the game interesting for a very long time and people want to see what worlds
they could create, or what aspects of the game they could fix or improve upon.
It’s a symbiotic relationship. The players get more to do with the game, and
Bethesda gets happier customers who are more willing to buy their games.
THE ISSUE
Two weeks ago it was announced by Steam that paid mods for
Skyrim are now possible. Modders can now start charging people for their mods.
In the past, donations were possible, but obviously donations won’t get as much
money as actual sales, right? Well, there’s a bit more to this whole situation than
meets the eye.
The Revenue Split
Paid mods was Steam’s idea. They’ve done this with Counter
Strike skin mods in the past. Counter Strike is a popular FPS game. Skins just
deal with cosmetics. Well, anything apart from cosmetic changes would probably
not work for that game because it is an online competitive shooter, and the
most popular shooter for competitive gaming at that. Changing the weapon
balance for example, would break the game. Skyrim’s not like that. Counter Strike
skins worked. Steam got some cash, the modders got some cash, people walked
away with new skins to try out. Since the system seemed benefitial to the
community, it isn’t too far-fetched to say the people at Valve wanted to extend
this to other games, like Skyrim, where modding is really a big thing. Bethesda
allowed for this. Bethesda arranged for the payouts to be as follows: 30% goes
to Valve. 45% to Bethesda. The remaining 25% to the modders themselves. To many
modders, this is a slap in the face. 25% of the cut goes to the people that
actually made the content? In my opinion, the modders should get 75% of the
cut, basically reversing the amounts. Then, 15% to Valve for setting everything
and fixing the legal hurdles to make this possible, and 10% to Bethesda.
Let’s be clear here. BETHESDA decided on how the revenue
will be divided, NOT VALVE. Valve consulted with Bethesda but it was Bethesda’s
call. Blame Bethesda for this if you think they deserve it. Bethesda’s blog
piece told us their side of their story. They said that 30% pay cut to Valve is
tradition and is considered a fair cut. Then, they decided that the remaining
45-25 split was fair after consulting with Valve. They decided this was fair
and a division of revenue this was worked for some other games. So, they said
they wanted to try this out. While players all paid the entry price for getting
Skyrim on their computers, I also think it’s fair to charge a percentage of
revenue. Bethesda did make the modding kit for Skyrim. And if money starts
flooding in, then Bethesda knows to spend more time and energy on PC modding
for their next game.
Of course, the more cynical can say that this division is
ridiculous and once applied, will never change. The less cynical will say that
Bethesda is going into uncharted territory and they’re still feeling their way
in, so changes are very possible. Bethesda defended against accusations of
blatant money-grabbing by saying that in the short time the idea was rolled
out, mod sales accounted for less than 1% of their earnings through Steam. How
much value do we give to Bethesda for building the Elder Scrolls franchise, an
open game, and the modding kit and the audience they have built? It is true
that in business, you can’t simply divide up the money based upon who spent
more hours. Sometimes an investor gets most of the cut simply because he
provides financial backing the original guy could not. Or expertise which the
original guy cannot. Whether this justifies what Bethesda came up with is up to
you, but I think it’s important to tell both sides of the story.
Gabe responded in a Reddit Ask Me Anything discussion by
saying that they’ve spent more money dealing with the fallout of paid mods than
they’ve earned. He reasoned that they pulled in $10,000 and spend $1,000,000. I
don’t understand this argument at all. First of all, how did he manage to burn
up a million dollars due to this fiasco? There is no transparency in the
numbers. Also, losing money in the short term doesn’t mean he wasn’t looking to
earn mega-bux in the long term. It also doesn’t mean Gabe wanted to make money
in the short term as well but did not foresee the incredible fallout.
However, Valve did spend quite a long time to get the legal
hurdles out of the way. The original idea was pitched for Bethesda to consider
all the way back in 2012. Obviously not the entirety of Valve was working on
this deal, so make of it what you will.
Payment Threshold
Another aspect of payment plan is about the threshold for
payment. You might be familiar with how Google does this with Youtubers: If you
made $100 or more and it’s sitting in accounts payable, only then can you get
the money you’ve earned. If you made a video on Youtube and garnered $50 in ad
revenue from your cut, you don’t get squat until it hits $100. I know this all
too well because I have a one-hit-wonder that earned me $65 in revenue… which
is the same as nothing since I’ll never hit $100.
Valve has done a similar thing here: The payment threshold
is also $100 but in this case, the situation is much more egregious. If only
25% of revenue is given to the modders, the modders have to sell $400 before
they earn anything. Some might argue that this is a way of preventing little
kiddies from trying to profit off of mods without providing long term support
and the like and that has some validity, but the problems still exist. $400 in
sales is a very large number.
The PC Gaming Climate
and Lack of Day One Curation
We’re talking about enabling paid mods in a climate hostile
to micro-transactions and DLCs. PC gamers especially have been bombarded with
microtransactions and DLC after DLC, and day one DLCs. DLC stands for ‘download
content’, and were originally large expansions people paid for. They were
supposed to be extra content made after the game was done to give the players
something more in exchange for some money. Instead, some companies charge
ridiculous amounts of money for skins and add-on packs and shortcuts (like
unlocking all weapons in Battlefield) and day one DLCs. If you’re releasing
DLCs on day one, clearly you didn’t spent all the time you could’ve to make the
original game better. People are fed up with everybody trying to milk them for
money everywhere they turn.
Bethesda said in the blog that they wanted no content
curation, because they felt this allowed for the most open environment. This is
obviously true, but is it for the best, at least in the short term? The day
piad mods were announced, it was dropped like a bombshell on the PC modding
community. People thought they had something, and now it was being taken away
from them. Nobody wants to pay for anything. And then what mods were available?
Some modders were contacted, most of which weren’t even big name modders, given
45 days to come up with something new. They weren’t allowed to take an old mod
and make it paid-only, but they were allowed to make an update and start
charging for the new versions. This helps to dispel the feeling that players
were having things taken away from them.
But what mods were available? Most of them were junk and not
worth the asking price. Nobody wants to spend money to buy a fucking sword.
This is what happens when you have no curation on day one. Long term, curation
could be a problem, but at least in the start, can’t you at least TRY to make
the paid mods not look gimmicky and a money grab? Bethesda reasoned that there
will be problems, just like how in the past their own DLCs created problems with
the community, and Bethesda learned from the feedback. True, but Bethesda is a
company. There are many modders creating all sorts of crap that can flood the
market. There is less accountability here. One may argue that I’m then arguing
against the free market. Nothing is perfect, but Bethesda and Valve could have
made the transition much smoother by giving the modders more time to create a
compelling mod. Or assembling a paid mod team – it takes money to make money.
Or simply making sure the mods covering the main page aren't $5 sword add-ons. The
way the whole thing was announced and dropped is just an epic fail. You can’t
just add this system and expect everything to be OK. The first week will be
vital. The original set of mods set up for monetization needs to be a shining
example for how awesome a paid mod system can be. You fuck up the first day,
and you will have an amazing amount of people with pitchforks outside. 45 days
to come up with a very good idea and have it working properly is too short of a
time frame.
I feel that with such a change, the public perception during
the first week is pivotal. Bethesda should have posted their blog post
defending their decision at the same time as the launch of paid mods, and this
whole thing should have been delayed until their next major mod-able game,
Fallout 4 before gradual rollout to their old games. Of course, hindsight is
20/20. J
DLCs vs Mods
And funnily enough, this is why I accuse Bethesda, the
creator of Skyrim, of being out of touch with the modders of their own game. 45
days is not enough time. We don’t want fucking sword DLCs. And it’s true… The
official DLCs from Bethesda has a lot of dirty edits and deleted references
that work just fine on a vanilla game but may cause problems in a modded game.
And Steam? Their Workshop was never as developed as the Nexus.
This is where I think being a Skyrim mod creator (on a very
small scale, mind you) and a major Skyrim player/modding whore can bring some
unique insight into this. Many people talking about this issue don’t play the
game. Skyrim modding is indeed complex. Some may argue that this means we need
paid professionals that are lured only by paid mod systems. I argue that this
actually opens up a larger can of worms. Mods are not the same as official
DLCs. Official DLCs have all the patches made to work around them. This is not
the same with mods. When you have so many mods made independent of each other
you will have conflicts and crashes. The game itself has limits on what you can
do in total. Individually each mod works flawlessly, but in conjunction with
another 100 mods, you may have a stuttering, crashy mess.
With DLCs, everybody’s eyes are on it and we know we are
getting good stuff, and if not, we’ll read about it. You will never have crashy
problems with a DLC, especially after official patches which solve problems the
Unofficial fan-made ones cannot. Mods on the other hand, are different. No
curation? There’s a difference between mods that suck and mods that don’t
deliver what they advertise or are simply not functional. Is it really the best
in the long run to let the free market sort through every mod? Modding is very
complex. Once a mod is installed and the player saves a game with the mod on,
the mod is forever linked to the save file. It can never be fully uninstalled.
You can have scripts that work on their own, but in conjunction with other
scripts from other modders that are written differently or with inefficiencies
in the code very few are able to understand, cause problems many hours down the
line but no problems are the start. But you already paid for the mod ages ago!
Steam’s 24 hour refund policy only include mods that do not do what they
advertise or do not function, and it’s only 24 hours. Even a 24 hour satisfied-or-your-money-back
is a problem because most game issues pop up later, not immediately after you
installed the mod. Some people are worried that story-driven mods get the worst
of a no-questions-asked-refund policy because a person can buy a mod, play it,
and return it for a refund within 24 hours.
Many people still do not understand that some of the most
downloaded mods contain bad scripting. In a game like Skyrim, too many scripts
can screw up your game in the long term in ways that cannot be solved simply by
having a better computer. Even if script overload can be solved with a faster
processor, Intel is currently dominating AMD and increases in single-core
improvements are very slim from generation to generation. Half the time the
modders don’t even understand what they’re doing is harmful for the longevity
of a save file. What happens when you have 100 mods and you start crashing out
of the blue one day? How do you know which mod caused it? You don’t. The effects
are felt too late, cause and effect is not very specifically defined. I took
great pains to research every mod I use to avoid problems and even then I have
problems.
And a lot of the problems are engrained in the game engine
itself, which cannot be fixed by modders. If Bethesda were looking to profit
off of mods over the long term, they need to put in much more time making the
engine friendly to a huge amount of modifications, which seems like a daunting
task. And if we take Bethesda on face value, they said they weren’t looking for
profit off of paid mods, so they have less of an incentive to work hard to get
the engine perfected. But without a great engine that is much less crashy with
modifications, paid mods becomes more of a clusterfuck of unknowns.
Modding began long before paid mods was even a thing.
Modders and people who use mods alike have made a thriving ecosystem without
payments entering the picture. Without a doubt, the Skyrim modding community is
the largest and best that exists in the world. The guy hosting the main modding
site, the Nexus, frequently asks for donations to keep all the servers afloat
from the massive data. Money changes everything. When you add money into the
mix, problems occur which nobody ever thought about. The modding community
partially grew as large as it is because it was free. When everything is free,
people share freely and use other people’s works without charge. People borrow
other people’s ideas and edit other people’s mods freely. Add money into the
picture, and now plagiarizing and stealing of work becomes a problem. I doubt
thieves will get justice because the market is too vast, too many mods, not
enough scrutiny. If people are making money off of your work, are you more or
less inclined to be so generous with your work, giving it out for free? Once
money enters the picture, everybody becomes a vulture.
Official DLCs are created by Bethesda. Do you think mod authors
will start recruiting and paying voice actors, buying the same microphone for
their voice actors so their voice acting doesn’t sound inconsistent? Do you
think those broke mod authors are able to afford expensive programs to sell
their mods? Once you start selling mods for profit, the terms of service takes
a turn on you as the creator. You all of a sudden have to buy your modeling
software. What was feasible free was feasible because it was free.
Gopher suggested a way of adding value to paid mods.
Installing many mods takes some level of know how and management. What if many
mods banded together to form one mod that is unified, without any conflicts,
and an easy to install and update package? You can take Frostfall, Wet &
Cold, Climates of Tamriel, and Footprints and make it the ‘Cold Weather Package’.
It’s like pre-cut veggies or pre-cooked meats. Some people are willing to pay
for convenience. Now you are offering something without taking away anything.
Modders Want to Get
Paid
People often take out their wrath on the modders in the paid
Workshop and Valve when in fact the real people behind this situation are
Bethesda and Valve. The modders are just reacting to what they have set up.
Modders barely get anything, and anybody talking about donations are high
because let’s face it, who actually bothers donating to a mod author? They’ll
be lucky to even get an endorsement.
For many, many years though, the system has worked. Modders
made something either to get endorsements, to get famous, to fix a game for
themselves, or simply to help others. Those wants are all satisfied in the old
system. I see and hear the arguments posed by Brumbek, a Skyrim modder, who
noted that modding takes a long time, and over time people lose interest. He
says that getting some money, which is not enough to survive on by the way,
helps motivate the mod author to continue spending more time to maintain the
mod. And this is valid. The ultimate in motivation though, would be to charge
for updates as well, which is something that opens up another can of worms.
I do feel that people who attack mod authors, calling them
greedy, are out of line. There was way too much yelling on the Nexus against
Isoku. Isoku made Wet and Cold, probably the only mod I would’ve considered
paying for that was released in the initial wave of paid mods. The yelling and
anger got so bad, many people got banned and the comments section had to be
locked for multiple days. Isoku can be charged for lack of communication, but
the guy was simply experimenting with the new paid mods system.
Chesko, who made Frostfall, a hypothermia survival mod,
original decided to go for a different system. New updates are paid, but
released for free 2 months after its inception. This is an interesting model.
Personally? I’ve spent a long time creating a save file “mod”
because I had specific gripes with existing solutions. I spent many hours
working on it. I did it for myself. I released it for others that may find it
useful. I do not expect or want anything from it except from some compliments
or endorsements. I wrote my book on religion not to make profit. It is my
decision to never charge for it. But I can empathize with the modders that do
want to get paid. Free money is nice.
Endorsements are nice and all, argues a modder, but kids and
food and real life is more important, and if one wants the modder to continue
modding, he needs to get those things sorted out somehow. And I can appreciate
that viewpoint as well. But some people make a reference to paid Youtubers like
these two are the same thing. In that case, I totally disagree. Paid Youtubers
get money from sponsors and ads. How the hell are you going to add sponsors and
ads to a game mod? (One guy did, and let’s just say, it was a huge backlash
against the mod, the author, and the whole idea of paid mods in general.)
Again, I want to drive home the point that game mods for Skyrim are a totally
different beast than skins for Counter Strike. The mods can be taken to a whole
new level, but the problems the consumers can get also extend to a whole new
level. You’re not guaranteed a good experience simply because you paid for a
mod if you have multiple mods. And there are near infinite combinations of mods
and things a person can do to break a game.
Some people say that if paid mods come to pass, then the
modders are now required to address customer concerns where they wouldn’t have
to in the past. This is true, and it helps somewhat, but I don’t think enough
considering the incredible amount of problems that can occur when it comes to a
large mod load order. Pricing is another factor. A 2 dollar cost for each mod
over a 100 mod load order would be $200 for mods alone. Set the price too low,
and you’ll never get paid and the money earned goes to Valve and Bethesda only.
Set it too high, and people get pissed at you and you never make any buyers in
the first place. A team of over 50 people made Skyrim and asked for $60 on
launch day. How much do we value the time of a single-man operation making a
game that may or may not crash your game later down the line?
Donation buttons work independent of paid mods. You can have
both or one or the other. I think finding a way to make the donation button
more prominent will help out the modders. Because really. Most of the time, I
don’t even notice that a donation option exists. But let’s not kid ourselves.
What percentage of people will donate if they don’t have to? A VERY small
percentage. A lot of top-level modders have stopped modding because they get
burned out and they move on. This is actually a pretty serious problem. Nobody
makes mods with the intent of getting rich because it’s a very slow and painful
way of making money. Anybody that tries will get a wakeup call soon enough.
Nobody is entitled to free mods. If somebody is being too
greedy, and one feels the free market knows best, they should boycott the mod.
Most mod users don’t understand the amount of time it requires to make a mod. I
can appreciate it somewhat because I’ve tried. Hell, I even host a Wolf3d
forum, and I made more than one mapset for the Wolf3d game. Some people were
too lazy to play a game. It takes less than half an hour to finish a level, but
5 or more hours to make the level with a significant level of creative
exhaustion. With Skyrim, the ratio of time it takes to play the mod and the
time it takes to make the mod is even worse and standards for a good or decent
dungeon mod is getting higher than ever.
I do believe that for the very best modders, getting paid
for their work means better mods, I really do. I’m just not sure if paid mods
are good as a whole. Is wanting to get paid for mods really greedy though? It’s
something we do because it’s a fun hobby, but what about the people that want
you to continue even though you’re burnt out? Shouldn’t they get a chance to
pay for something to convince somebody to stay? What about getting a job apart
from modding born out of a passion? That’s not greedy, that’s called finding a
job you want to do. Arguably it’s less greedy than getting a job because you’re
doing it less for the money because you know the chances of earning good money
is far lower. There is a certain irony in that people reviewing mods get far
more money than people who make mods. I know they are different things. But it
doesn’t make a lot of sense when you look at it. How about ads a modder can
place in their Steam Workshop page or something of that sort? I understand that’s
another can of worms with legality and so forth.
Some people also need to calm the fuck down. Death threats
over paid mods? SERIOUSLY? The flood of trolololo mods like having an NPC named
“Beth” sitting on a valve asking for free money is all fun and dandy, but some
kids push it too far. It was pretty amusing to see that mod nearly hit Mod of
the Month in votes, by the way. Hilarious stuff.
More Stuff
Now here’s the biggie: Paid mods have been REMOVED from
Steam. This leads to some awkward situations. Some people are calling this a
win for the players. Some are pissed at the angry responses they’ve received
for monetizing their mods, and one guy suggested a boycott against the players. No money, no mods! Isoku’s Wet and Cold is now
in an awkward position where his latest version, which was available only for
purchase, is now removed. How does Isoku feel about the non-paying community
now his income has been stripped, he put in the hours for the new version, and
he turns around to find a giant freak show of hatred? Is he even motivated to
release his new update for free, or to just sit on it as a FUCK YOU to the
angry mob? You see, this is what happens when you approach these issues without
a cool head. Now the Skyrim modding community is more fractured and tense than
it has ever been. And I am sad that this is happening.
So, I fault the people responding hastily to the situation
moreso than I fault Bethesda or Valve. People try to shorten arguments and
problems into things that can be written off in neat little one-liners on
Facebook. Things are never that simple.
I’ve looked around for some more ideas on how to solve the
paid mods problem. Some of them were interesting.
/u/DavidJCobb:
All mods must have a seven day return policy, no questions asked and no
consequences.
/u/BullZEye22:
Mods should gather a certain amount of approval before they can be sold.
/u/fadingsignal:
Behind the scenes, there should be a partially dedicated faster-response
support team for mod authors. If a mod is having trouble because the Steam
downloader is screwing it up, or there is abuse or stolen assets being used,
someone who is a verified author should have a slightly elevated support level,
so they can in turn better support their customers who purchase their mods.
For Paid Mods:
Modders need to get at
least 50% of the sale. Valve and the publisher can work out how to split the
other 50% on their own. There are more than enough differences between mods and
other “industry practices” to allow this.
/u/fadingsignal:
Option to set the minimum price to $0
/u/sleepystudy:
Humble Bundle esqe slider when checking out, or perhaps a manual entry.
For Unpaid Mods:
/u/NeuroticNyx:
A donation button for unpaid mods on the Steam Workshop. No profit form
Bethesda can be made from this, as it is not endorsed.
/u/MaryMudpie: A
system of Pay-What-You-Want for all mods. (Probably not going to happen.)
/u/EggheadDash:
A pop for a donation once the game is closed, with Yes/Remind me Later/No
options.
Perhaps the real tragedy of it all is that the paid mods
system was removed too soon. If nothing changes, we will never know whether
paid mods will do more good than harm. Now, people are mad, the community is
split, Bethesda is annoyed, Valve is annoyed, I’m annoyed, and no change was
ever even made.
A mod requires time to make. No matter how you slice it,
time is a commodity and it is up to the author whether he wants to sell it or
give it away for free. But at the same time, I also know too well the pitfalls
of paid mods for a game like Skyrim. People keep talking about how modding should
be a pastime, and it’s like editing a movie. No, pastimes turn into work when
the work a person does in their pastime is high enough quality. Many things are
pastimes that turn into a business. You can’t just arbitrarily say that “DLCs
being paid are ok, but mods must be free works!” for no actual reason.
For the record, the two places to get mods are basically the
Nexus and the Steam Workshop, in that order. Dark0ne hosts the Nexus and he
says the Nexus will remain free no matter what. Some more cynical people
believe that the Nexus will eventually be bought out by some huge company for
mega millions, after which everything will go to shit. From what I can read
about Dark0ne though, he’s probably crazy enough to resist mega millions
because he is stubborn enough to do things his way no matter what money comes
his way.
And perhaps this is the future of modding and there is
nothing we can do to stop it. Who knows?
Am I for or against Paid Mods?
…I don’t know. But it’s not like anybody important ever gave
a damned about my opinions anyways.
