Paid Mods for Skyrim.
 

UPDATE: Paid Mods have been removed.

Here's something I really want to hear you guys opinions on. So if you didn't know. Steam now supports paid mods for Steam Workshop games. Valve and Bethesda teamed up to have Skyrim has the first game to support it.

Steam Community Blog: About paid content

Modders can now make money on Steam




The overall reaction is... Not good.




As a huge Skyrim fan and a big user of mods, I'm kinda uneasy about this. For starters. Mods which were free before are being deleted off other sites like Nexus and being put on the workshop behind a pay wall. Or aren't updated on Nexus but instead on Steam.

But that's not what gets me upset. it's the fact Valve and Bethesda get a 75% CUT IN THE MOD'S REVENUE. It's a 75/25 split. That is simply disgusting. Pure and simple greed.

I get the mod is using another game owned by another company but if the mod maker gets significantly less than the Skyrim devs and Valve. That's just plain wrong. Easily the most lazy and greedy thing Valve have ever done.

What's next? Paid updates for TF2, Dota 2? Garry's Mod paid mods? Your Friends list behind a fucking pay wall? "Add a friend for only 25p!"

I don't like it. I'm actually scared of what it will do to the future of modding. Some people will loose the passion and instead go for the greedy option... And modding should be about the passion not the money. Just like YouTube or being an artist.

Now to be fair. This does have some good sides. For one. Modders get income for their work. That's great. Same as people who create items for Team Fortress and Dota 2. Before, modders usually get donations and/or have a Patrion. That's not a livable wage. But now, thanks to this, modders can live off their work. I class Modders as Devs. Even if they don't make games per say, they are very talented and can become devs in the future.

And if the mod is really good. I'd pay for it sure. Big, DLC sized mods like Wyrmtooth and Skywind i'd happy to pay for. But charging 25p for a new sword? What's the fucking point. The mods which can buy at the moment aren't even worth it.

Basically i'm worried the quality will go down overall and people will either make crappy, unfinished mods for profit or steal a mod and then charge for it. (Which has already happened)

I’ve been following this for the past couple of days and I’m really not happy about it.

To clarify some things about the split for the money:

• The full split is: 30% Valve, 45% Bethesda, 25% mod creator
• Valve’s 30% is set in stone, but some of that can be given to certain content creators such as Nexus, SKSE etc.
• The remaining split is determined by the game’s publisher (in this case Bethesda), meaning Bethesda decided they deserved a 45% cut.
• The cash the mod creator makes is only paid out when they earn $100 in profit – which as they get a 25% cut means the mod has to sell $400 worth for them to get paid.
• I’ve also heard but can’t verify that the cash is paid into the mod makers’ Steam wallets, which if true means they aren’t even making actual money, just money to spend within Steam.

The split is one of the biggest arguments against the whole thing. In my opinion, Valve is within their right to take a 30% cut as that’s consistent with how they work with all other content sold on Steam. But for both Valve and Bethesda (Bethesda in particular), both will already have made a profit on every sale of Skyrim and its official DLCs – is it fair for them to then charge again? Even if it is, do they deserve to take such a large cut, as both currently take more than the actual creator of the content being sold? I don’t think so.

I think that mod makers should be allowed to make money from their work. I don’t agree with how this deal has gone about. Alternatives like taking donations, allowing a pay-what-you-want model, running Patreon accounts have all been proposed, but the worrying thing here is that ultimately it’s up to the game publisher whether any of these other channels are even legal. Before now charging money for mods at all would have been against the EULA.

There’s also some really interesting talk about how charging for content is not going to produce a higher quality of mods (as has been argued by Valve and Bethesda here) – in general, it’s more likely to encourage people to put out the most cost-efficient content they think they can profit from, similar to what we’ve seen with DLC and smartphone in-app purchases. Which translates to small, piecemeal mods like armor packs, texture packs etc. It may very well discourage larger-scale mods that require more time and effort to produce.

There’s also the possibility that this would have a significant effect on the overall modding community. Most people are of the opinion that up until now, mod makers have frequently collaborated with one other both to produce larger-scale and higher-quality mods and to create interoperable mods, create patches for each other’s mods, etc. When you introduce profit into the equation there stands a good chance that people will instead try to silo themselves rather than work together.

It’s going to be very interesting to see what will happen. As long as Skyrim (and other games) allow mods from outside the Workshop to be installed it will really come down to the mod community to decide if they’ll support this system, or if they’ll continue to work the way they always have. If they do, then this will fail.

But if they don’t? If this becomes profitable and sustainable, what could the implications on that be? Perhaps Skyrim will become Workshop-only; maybe future Bethesda games will only allow Workshop mods to be installed; perhaps we’ll see fewer large-scale mods in general.

It would be a shame to lose what has been around for a good long while now, but it depends almost entirely on what the community do.

tl;dr I wrote a lot of words about videogame mods, sue me.

No one is forcing people to buy anything, nor are they forcing content creators to sign up to this. I really don't see what the fuss is.

One of the reasons that mods have always been free is that it is not appropriate or ethical to make money off of someone else's IP. I expect that crossover mods that do not involve only Bethesda (and perhaps Valve) properties will not appear. Bethesda is being more generous than they need to be by accepting only half of the profits made on their IP. That said, it may be exactly as generous as they need to be to be able to make anything off of it at all, since modders have to be encouraged to change their hobby model into a side business model.

But it does look pretty messy at this point. Officially selling user-made mods is a new thing, it will have kinks and issues and may not work out. We'll see what they do.

As an experiment, it may prove that all the underhanded money-grabbing tactics used by big business that we all complain about will be freely used by their consumers when given half a chance. The long term goal of this enterprise may be to split the consumer base down the middle and rob us of our right to bitch, which must get annoying for developers and publishers after a while. In which case, once again someone must utter the words "Well fucking played, Valve."

An interesting point to note is that a mod called SkyUI is going to have its next version released as a paid update. SkyUI is a mod which a huge number of other mods have dependencies on in one way or another. In this sense, there’s a possibility that mods which others rely upon to work in this way could effectively force people to buy them if they want to continue to run mods.

The fuss is in the long-term implications. What if the majority of mods do become paid, what if the companies involved continue to take such a large split of the money, what if in the future games are built so only paid mods can even be installed? This could result in huge shifts for an ecosystem where money has never been involved before.


Bear in mind that Bethesda is not the intellectual owner of any of the content created for mods, and that the have already made a profit from every copy of Skyrim that people are now using to both make and play mods. And any income Bethesda makes from this comes at zero cost to them, as they didn’t have to do anything for it.

OK, so maybe I do see what the fuss is, I just think it's too early to go down the route of decrying it as foul play and forming an angry mob. I'm not saying you or Crash are doing that, by the by, I'm saying half of Steam is.

I'm glad the creator of SKSE has out right said the mod won't be ever be paid for. If SKSE was buyable. That would of royally killed the modding scene.

Perhaps. But things which were free and let's be honest SHOULD be free are suddenly behind a paywall. I think that's enough of a reason to get angry. Some people can't afford to buy the game and then buy the mods they want.

Also it's change. People don't like change. And Skyrim modding was perfect fine before this.

Why not? If they just sit around and let it happen then it’s tantamount to acceptance. The more noise they make the bigger the chance the right people will hear.

Right, but there are so many avenues this thing could go down. Steam could, for instance, limit the percentage share 3rd parties take from the content creator. They could set a price ceiling in terms of how much a mod can sell for, even limit the number of mods that are buyable depending on popularity or some other mechanic.

The whole thing is in its very early infancy, I'm happy to just sit and watch for a few months, see how it goes. At the end of the day you and I know Steam aren't going to make a U-turn on this, and very few people will leave Steam because of it. I'm not saying it's right but there's really not much to be done.

Talk about being a defeatist.

Realist.

Seriously though, it's a bad idea and will take a big chunk out of the modding communities that we know and love. Not kill them, but shit man.

Optional encouraged donation

Actually they own anything built using their property, which includes anything designed to work with their game. Actually most end-user agreements legally forbid the extraction and modification of game assets (without which it would be extremely difficult for them to protect their IP). They allow mods anyway, but this cuts very close to legal problems for them, because copyright can only be legally enforced if the owners take steps to protect it. This means that if you don't sue and/or send cease or desist letters in every instance of breach of copyright then you set a precedent that will prevent you from making such efforts in the future. Allowing the modding community to mod their games is a liberty they allow for good customer relations and as a matter of practicality, but if someone was to profit from mods without their permission they absolutely would have to crack down on it or their copyright would become legally unenforceable and anyone could profit from their IP while they are left out of the loop. Essentially, for-profit piracy of their product would become legal.

ffs if this offends everyone so much, just pirate your mods

This would fix most things.

Im okay with it. some people put more time into their mods than some devs put into their games and dont get a cent for it. Some games are still relevant because of the mods on the game. But I do think its fair for valve and bethesda to take a cut. Steam deserves a cut because people wouldnt be buying the game nor the mod if it wasnt on steam, and bethesda deserves a cut because theyre using their assests to make the mod. I think it should be less though. Maybe 50/50 between bethesda and the modder since bethesda isnt actually doing any work towards the mod.

No, the law is more complex than that. Fan-created content is a notable quagmire for IP law, because while the original IP owner has full rights to the characters, concepts etc the creator of the fan-made content also has full rights to everything they created. This is why IP owners are not legally entitled to just take and use fan-made content as they see fit, and why in the past creators of content like fanart have had to contact companies that they found unlawfully using their creation.

This would pertain more to extracting assets and using them outside of the original game; does it also apply to using those assets within content created with the mod creation tools Bethesda themselves released?

This is a myth – no one has to enforce their copyright claim and you can’t lose copyright unless you willingly give it away. You are legally obliged to enforce trademarks, not copyright. Whether or not mods infringe on trademarks is another matter entirely.

As above – while it would indeed be illegal for others to profit on their IP without permission, you are conflating copyright with trademark. Bethesda would not be legally obligated to pursue unless they were selling work that infringed on their trademarks.

Passion is rad, but you can't pay the bills with it.
People who wanna get paid should be able to get paid.
Betheda's and Valve's cuts are both fairly reasonable individually, it just sucks that they had to be stacked on top of each other.

The only part of this I object to is formerly free mods being switched to paid entry, and even then there's nothing actually unethical about it. It's just a sure-fire way to piss people off.

I will now leave you with the words of Garry Newman, a man who knows a thing or two about paid modding.

Here’s a few criticisms on his stance with no forethought:

• Modders cannot build a viable career out of the deal they have right now. 25% is far too low a margin and the restriction of only receiving your payout when you earn $100 is restrictive.
• It’s not much of a choice. For modders who want to sell their work they have no alternative but to sign up to Steam Workshop. It has no competition and there’s no other avenues they can go down to accept payment without Bethesda cease-and-desisting their asses. Even the legality of accepting donations is questionable.
• He criticises the greediness of the people demanding too much but assumes that this is a problem that will go away. There’s no reason that it will for as long as there’s no alternative revenue streams for modders.
• Finally, the argument that paid mods = more good mods made is an oversimplification. Many critics have pointed out that the likelihood here is that we’ll see more mods, but in the form of smaller, low effort mods designed to maximize the mod-makers’ income for as little work as possible.

Woah. Paid mods.

...who would ever *buy mods*? And I don't mean Garry's Mod or similar, but the small mods, like weapon mods or skin mods.

Also, how would the law act when somebody pirated a mod? Man. "Pirate a mod", it sounds so silly

Valve already recognized the insane clusterfuck and pulled the entire idea. Good for them. Not many companies these days who will admit to a mistake, let alone this quickly, and listen to their user base.

I’m sure the feature will be coming back in some form soon, the genie’s out the bottle now.

As a side note, I’ve heard that apparently the modders who had published paid mods had absolutely no communication from Valve before they pulled the plug. How nice of them.

Because they worked so hard commercially on those mods commercially through those whole two days

Well. Paid mods are gone. That was a bit of a mess. Still. At least Valve listen to the community unlike other companies.

Also Valve are adding a donation button instead. I think that would be much better.

Ok so here's the real problem. Content theft. Several people have been taking mods from NexusMods and putting them on the skyrim steam store with a price tag on them that they did not create. This is the biiiig problem here. Valve needs to shape up and work on reviewing each upload in depth before allowing it, because from what I've heard LOTS of modders are really pissed about this right now.

Crash literally just said they'd been removed in the post above you.

We'll see them return in one way or another. Hopefully implemented a lot better this time around.

Wow, I literally didn't see that...I is no smarts

One problem with the original agreement was the 75% of the sale going directly to Steam which is absurd. They picked the wrong game and failed to communicate with the modding community and the people that use mods on a day to day basis. While Counter Strike is an example of when a paid mod makes sense, there are other cases where it falls on it's face. Mods should definitely be brand new content or a significant change, not just adjusting a few numbers or doing a palette swap and expecting a quick cash grab.