Paid Bethesda Mods on Steam. Again.

[khumak]

I believe wholeheartedly that a person should be compensated for their work. That does not necessarily mean money.

 

With that said, I note that it is a privately owned highly profitable international corporation that is pushing this. Did you know that Valve's revenue from Steam was $1.5B in 2014 and $3.5B in 2015? They more than doubled their revenue in just one year.

 

I propose something I call The 2% Solution.

 

Steam takes 2% of its profits each year and uses that pool to pay the modders. Popularity of a mod can be rated/measured by the number of unique downloads. The more popular the mod, the bigger the slice of that 2% pie.

 

This is pretty much my view as well.  No clue if 2% is the right number but mods drive increased sales so Valve and Bethesda are already getting paid for mods even though they're free.  The problem with the idea of actually having consumers pay for mods individually is that I really don't see them setting the value at a level that makes any sense for either the consumer or the modder.

 

In my case I paid somewhere between $5-10 each for the legendary edition of Fallout 3, Fallout NV, and Skyrim and $0 for Skyrim SE.  A lot of the posts I see in favor of paid mods are assuming numbers like $1-5 per mod.  So a few mods is worth more than the entire game?  Sorry, I just don't see it.

 

Plus, just between Fallout and Skyrim I've downloaded and tried several hundred mods and have at least 200 active for each game at any given time.  So if you assume the total value of all the mods I'm using is roughly equal to the value of the game itself (which is being pretty generous IMO) that means for me, a mod should be at most worth $10 / 300 mods = 3 cents per mod, and more realistically closer to 1 cent if you assume the total production value of the game itself is more valuable than the mods.  Nobody is going to make a meaningful amount with numbers like that.

 

Or if you do say mods are $1 each, how many of you would be willing to pay $300 for your current list of mods plus an extra $300 or so for all the ones you tried and decided not to use, for each game?  I see modding as more like a hobby that you can share with other people.

 

That doesn't mean modders time isn't valuable, it just means if game publishers really want to monetize it then they should treat modders more like employees or contractors and pay them directly.

[Kendo 2]

Valve could hold the pooled money in a demand account where they get all of the interest and the modders get a flat rate payout, like maybe 3 cents per download after a certain amount of unique downloads is reached.  A modder with 15 downloads wouldn't get anything, but a modder with 1500 downloads would.

But for Valve to do something like that there would have to be quality control.  If Nexus is any indication then lot of downloaders are just plain dumb and they will dive on anything; a retexture that took someone 5 minutes to make isn't worth 3 cents per download...I don't care how many people people click on it.  I just don't see a corporation paying out for the kind of rehashed and slapped together mods being uploaded these days.  There would have to be a vetting process to ensure the modded content wasn't stolen from another modder, ripped from another game and meets a base line standard.  Maybe put a limitation on the types of mods that could receive a stipend; only original meshes and textures or unique scripting, for instance.  Nothing would be stopping people from making or downloading crap mods, there just wouldn't be a payout for them.

[Zor2k13]

^^^^This

 

No way they would allow people to be paid for altered vanilla or ripped content but trying to figure out what was taken from where would require software not people and it wouldn't work right for a while. Would be the same problem youtube has since the beginning with this copyright detection crap either muting the audio or flagging the whole video then you have human nature going on with other modders lying to get something taken down so people focus on their mods instead. Nexus is a good indication of what will happen since it has been around for a while and we can look back on the behavior from there and see it all.

 

 

[emikochan]

I think valve should just stick to valve games. It seems like the donation model is best, maybe they should include the paypal link on workshop mods in a clear place.

 

Also the hubris of Bethesda expect the worlds best modders to fix their broken game is pretty well backed up by how it happens every time they release a game.

[InquisitiveMind]

Asking people to support modders is all well and good. Patreon, PayPal etc etc. People do contribute to them, and modders get the recognition or reward they want, which sometimes ends up with them going on to gain careers in gaming development with quite the hefty portfolio to demonstrate as a result. Some.. not so much.

 

Some modders do it for the cash, sure. Philosophically however a lot of modders do it to either fix broken things in the game, or they do it to add bits and pieces that they felt should have been in the game from the start.

 

Now, putting that content behind a pay wall? Yeah, no.. all that's going to do is force people to either 1) pirate the content, or 2) stop playing. There's a good portion of people who would pay up either in support of the modder, or simply to access the content.. but what about bug-fixes, broken mods, load orders, compatibility issues. I'm sure these arguments have been made countless times here and in other threads on other forums.. but what would Valve and Bethesda do about the paid mods situation whenever they release an official patch or hotfix and it breaks everyones paid content?

 

Bohemia Interactive did this with their official patch release and totally broke their game. The communities who play using 90% of modded content would be totally screwed if they had to pay for all of that, only to end up with something they can't use.

[DocClox]

Meh, I haven't yet read any beth construction kit license where Beth claims the exclusive copyright to what you make with it, only a non-exclusive. They get to copy from you, but they're not the owner of the mod.

That's because the clause in question isn't in the Construction Kit EULA. It's in the EULA for the game itself where you agree to give all rights and title to Bethesda for any work that you create based off "game materials" or create with Bethesda provided modding tools.

 

And since you can't legally obtain the CK without agreeing to the game EULA, you're already bound by that before you even create an account on bethesda.net. The language in the CK licence is just in case you somehow manage to demonstrate that you created something using the Gimp and TES5Edit or some such.

[myuhinny]

Just use stuff that they can't legally own and you won't have to worry about them trying to steal your stuff without having the real owners coming after them.

[Rod Broward]

Braindead valve as usual followed by the braindead greedy modders...

 

 

nice buzzwords

[skyrimsucks]

modding community could and wanted to do what corporate structure could not and/didnt want because community was communistic with no sense of (enforced/actual) ownership/property, hence was not bound by limitations in transfer of content as well as external/internal motivators. monetization of mods will gradually make them behave like electronic arts as they will be tailored by same philosophy; talented modders will abandon scientificly good projects and make economically good ones like pokememon themed mods cause thats what 13 year olds with way too fucking allowance will create demand for.

[windpl]

Valve could hold the pooled money in a demand account where they get all of the interest and the modders get a flat rate payout, like maybe 3 cents per download after a certain amount of unique downloads is reached.  A modder with 15 downloads wouldn't get anything, but a modder with 1500 downloads would.

But for Valve to do something like that there would have to be quality control.  If Nexus is any indication then lot of downloaders are just plain dumb and they will dive on anything; a retexture that took someone 5 minutes to make isn't worth 3 cents per download...I don't care how many people people click on it.  I just don't see a corporation paying out for the kind of rehashed and slapped together mods being uploaded these days.  There would have to be a vetting process to ensure the modded content wasn't stolen from another modder, ripped from another game and meets a base line standard.  Maybe put a limitation on the types of mods that could receive a stipend; only original meshes and textures or unique scripting, for instance.  Nothing would be stopping people from making or downloading crap mods, there just wouldn't be a payout for them.

 

Isn't this pretty much what Youtube is doing?

[slash197]

What does Bethesda have to do with this?  They aren't even mentioned in the article outside of it referencing Skyrim's paid mods backlash.  The only company they talked to in this article was Valve.

[Canaris]

Is Bethesda suicidal ? 
Mods are responsible for 75 % of their sales and much of the excuses made by their fanboys, if they force people to pay for that shit there will be a catastrophe..