Topic: PC Gaming

you can play skyrim on steam for free this weekend. and if you wanna buy it it is only 3,49€ or so. downloaded it yesterday and played the intro. damn that game is gorgeous! running it on highest setting i think. the landscape really looks amazing. i kinda wanna buy it but i have a few other games i wanna play first. like morrowind on xbox

Steam are implementing a system where users can sell mods for games on the workshop. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is the first game to use this system (if I remember correctly, Skyrim was one of the marquee titles for the Workshop when it was first introduced).

Users may choose to offer up their mods for a set price, of which they will receive 25%. I've heard the 75% remainder either goes to Valve or Valve and the publisher of the game in question - in this case, Bethesda.

Purchasers will be able to file for a full refund within 24 hours of purchase. This can protect customers if a mod description was misleading, the mod didn't work as intended or otherwise caused problems with the game.

Payments from Steam to the content creator cannot be split, with only one payee per workshop account. This can open the system up to abuse as one person can profit from a whole team's work (unless the workshop is tied to a shared account, and the funds are otherwise distributed between the contributers).

However, there are fears though that modders are being strong-armed into monetising their mods, lest someone else uploads their mod and starts profiting from it. [edit] It appears that in some mod pages on the workshop, links to donation pages are being forceably removed. Also some people are naturally upset that a feature of PC gaming such as the modding of a game is being un-neccesarily monetised, and that it may set a precedent for other publishers to follow. Having to already pay for the base game (or at least the license to play it), official expansions, various cosmetic items and other pieces of DLC, why do we now need to pay for user created content?

And why does Valve/Valve & the publisher need to take a 75% cut?

Lol wait until you start adding mods to it... It can look way better than it does out of the box. I have close to 50 gb of texture mods

I dont think the "pay for mods" model will be succesful to be fair

asnd by the way, who the F downloads mods from workshop ? i really thought everyone used Nexus for it

While I don't think the "pay for mods" is going to take off, Valve will probably ride it out and there will be some people that make a name for themselves and can make money on it.

there are also a lot of people paying for on-disk dlc or alpha versions of games. people are stupid

@Ryu_Niiyama the resolution of my monitor is only 1280x1024 (4:3). is it worth getting those texture packs for me?

I had a pretty decent PC (certainly not 'top-of-the-line,' but very decent) built in 2011, and, to be honest, it's still serving me well. It only very recently started not being able to play pretty much all games that have come out, but well-optimized games like Wolfenstein: The New Order run well on it. So you certainly don't need a top-of-the-line machine to run most anything that has come out, or even upgrade all that often.

It will be fine for Unreal Tournament. (Don't think the model they will use will make much difference to the fortunes of Epic).

Paid mods have the potential to increase the quality and scope of mods, as well as act as an incentive for people to mod for games. However there are far too many things that valve have overlooked and as a result, i don't think this will ever become a common practice in games with Steam Workshop enabled.

Most people will not pay for mods, and those that do will want to donate directly to the modders, not give a paltry 25% cut that modders will make selling skyrim mods, with the rest going to Valve and the developer. Essentially, paid mods are like 3rd party DLC and you know how a lot of people feel about DLC and microtransactions.

A petition on change has already reached 80,000 signatures in less than 2 days demanding that mods on Steam Workshop should remain free, with a donate button added instead.

I was thinking yesterday, what if Bethesda were pushing for an unreasonable cut to mod revenue, and it turns out, they are claiming 45% of the total revenue, leaving Valve's customary 30% (as seen in Team Fortress 2 and DOTA, I believe).

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/04/24/valves-paid... (paragraph 3, update).

Bethesda may be responsible for the absolute sh#tshow this has turned out to be. One could argue that they are entitled to some kickback (I wouldn't - these people are fixing your broken games), but to take the largest proportion is just sickening.

Browsing the paid items - under review section on steam is looking to be a goldmine of laughs - check these out:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=4320753... (archive)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=4319393... (archive)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=4320732... (archive)
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=4311989... (archive)

make a donation-button like @crazycrazydave suggested and everything is fine

But then Bethesda wouldn't be getting their cut.

Is that even legal? Selling mods I mean. Imagine someone modding in the Master Sword of TLoZ and he wants you to pay 5 € for it. He basically used an item of another game and made money out of it. This is an honest question.

Anyway, as others have said: some of the mods are insanely good. Heck, there are mods that do the housbuilding thing in Skyrim better than the Hearthfire DLC ... for free! I don't mind donating to someone who is really talented at modding. However, this model is just another cash-in for Valve and Bethesda. I won't support that.

They wouldn't be able to sell it. I'm sure it says as much in the workshop agreement.

But this may have a more far reaching efffect. I play a game on steam called Crusader Kings II - it's a historical real time strategy. There is a mod based on the Game of Thrones/Song of Ice & Fire world - it's quite popular (though I haven't tried it yet), much like the books and television series, and when Crusader Kings II's workshop introduces paid mods, content like that will not be paid.

There is a worry that if the copyright holders begrudgingly allowed the mod to be posted on the proviso that it is free, in an environment where, suddenly, there are paid mods, copyright holders may be less tolareable in allowing content based on their intellectual property to be distributed - even if it's free. It would be far too much hassle to evaluate every piece of content. Using the example of this Crusader Kings II mod, the license holders may think to themselves "these people might start charging for this mod - that's unnacceptable [and rightly so]. Shut it down." They'd probably be able to go straight to steam, and they'd be obliged to remove it.

But then this is just speculation. Mods that mashup the universe of an established franchise with a popular game (like Total War x The Legend of Zelda) are particularly popular.

But if this were to occur, the workshop for Scribblenauts Unlimited would be absolutely barren.

This system is blowing up in Valve's face. While it isn't inherently wrong that a modder should be paid for their work, having it be a paywall instead of an optional donation opens up too many issues.

1) Copyright - When mods were free, you could usually use something from a copyrighted franchise, and since you weren't making money off of it, there were no repercussions. Now there will be, and it'll be on Valve to deal with it all.

2) Mods based on other Mods - When it comes to games like Skyrim, many of the mods work from the groundwork set by other mods. If those mods claim that people cannot use their mods to profit off of (which some have already), then no one who is selling a mod based on theirs should be able to, but yet somehow they're still doing that.

3) Theft - Already, many mods are being uploaded to the Workshop by people who didn't create them. This will continue to happen as time goes on, and with Valve admitting they and Bethesda wont be curating the system, this is a massive problem.

4) Quality Assurance - Being mods, they could break at any time whether it be through combination with other mods, or simply due to a patch of the game. Since the refund period is only for 24 hours, Valve and the mod creators can in no way guarantee that their products will always work, and that they wont break, say, tomorrow. Refunds for products that are no longer functional like this will be required, but would have to come from Valve, since the mod creator could easily run away with the earnings.

5) Terrible Value - Both for the modder, and the consumer. The modders only get 25% of the cut, and only get this money in increments of $100, meaning that the mod has to have sold $400 worth of copies for the mod creator to get any of the profit. It all goes to Valve if it sells anywhere between $1-399. The consumer meanwhile can usually get these mods for free elsewhere, say, The Nexus.

Do not support this system.

Why is it blowing up ? the assets are the property of the creators of Skyrim.

Valve has to only do the equivalent of what Nintendo did with Meme Run if they find out about some infringement.

I think the Lion's Share going to the creators of the original game is fair as well. (They put the most work into it and without their work then you have nothing).

It also reduced the incentive to switch from a mod to a proper game.

I urge everyone to sign the petition on change.org and to not buy ANY of the mods that are on sale on the Steam Workshop. It has already reached over 110,000 signatures at the time of writing (wow, since last night too!). Monetisation of mods will encourage toerags to upload absolute rubbish like the ones @edhe has shown (although I'm aware those are deliberate joke items) and charge for them. The Steam Workshop worked perfectly well before and injected new life into games like Skyrim that have been out for a while.

What's changed now? Valve and Bethesda thought they could get greedy and make other people's work into microtransactions that they claim most of the money from. That's what's happened. Even if I wanted to support these mods, the mod creators will be very unlikely to make much money from it and resort to donations another way (e.g Nexus) anyway! At least they'll get the full amount!

I'm a big supporter of PC gaming and Steam in general, but this is EA calibre non-sense right here. You just need to refer to @Geonjaha's post and see why.

Just a reminder to anyone who plays PC games; Steam keeps your games locked within its own platform, and while that is helpful for having them all in the same place, they practically have a monopoly on PC game selling. You don't buy games from Steam, you basically rent them for as long as the platform is available. There are many games developers that sell their games DRM free on their own websites as well as giving away Steam keys. I realise that many people like having their games conveniently on Steam, but do yourself a favour and try to buy games on sites like Humble Bundle instead of Steam if the prices are similar, because doing so will still get you your Steam key, but also a DRM free copy of the game should anything bad happen regarding Valves platform in the future. I'm honestly just surprised it took them this long to start making terrible decisions because of their power.

@unrandomsam It's a similar situation with Nintendo receiving a portion of revenue on gameplay videos on Youtube. Just because they are legally entitled to do so does not mean that they should. Besides, not everyone is going to be making high quality total conversion mods or high quality animations, levels, etc. A lot of people will be happy to sell as little as possible for maximum gain, and 75% going to Valve/Bethesda will only encourage inflated prices in order to break even/make a profit. If they were wanting to sell their mod, they could accept donations or release it as a separate product on Steam with the original developer's permission (if it was a total conversion mod). Everyone would make good money and everyone would be happy.

Except it won't be happy. There has been paid mods already been taken down due to using assets or frameworks from other mods. Who should be paid? Many of these mod frameworks were not designed with monetisation in mind.

And then there's the issue of value. Paying £1 for a single weapon or suit of armour has the same terrible value as paying in-game currency for a FTP mobile game in my opinion. I would happily pay for good total conversion mod (and I have), but I will not be paying £1 here and there for random items that were once free. And speaking of which, items can be pretty much be stolen and modified from other modders distributing theirs for free and be sold on Steam Workshop!

People can make their own judgements about this, but for me, it encourages people to become modders, but not to make a mod of the calibre of Team Fortress or Killing Floor, but of microtransactions that they use to rip off the consumer. At the end of the day, it's a money making machine for Valve and Bethesda, and they are the only winners in this scheme. I hope that this never catches on with other developers games using Steam Workshop.

I am thinking about how things could be abused. (A Game based on Skyrim made by a proper team but done as a cost saving measure - the revenue sharing situation seems to make that not likely).

I work on the assumption if something loophole against the spirit of something can be exploited by a corporation it will be.

And what I personally want i.e The Unleashed mod added officially to Sonic Generations (And the bugs in the main game and it fixed). No way that is going to happen without money going to Sega. (And they did make the levels originally).