Wednesday, May 6, 2015

The Skyrim Paid Mods Controversy

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.


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