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.
Paid Mods for Skyrim.
