Oh shit... Steam Workshop now allows mod authors to charge for them

My main concern is that this will shift the effort of modders from complex gameplay enhancing mods to ‘cheap’ mods like individually textured and modeled characters or new skins, not unlike what publishers are already selling as DLCs for their games. It’s very low effort (not much testing required) and generally doesn’t conflict with other mods. It’s also not much of an enhancement to the base game.

Once people start getting paid for mod DLC watch all the copyright issues flood in. Liked having Star Trek stuff in your Stellaris? If modders get paid, it goes bye-bye.

In addition to what happened with Skyrim, where a modder who intended to get paid for his work took the work of modders who gave it for free, stuck it in his mod and saw no problem with it at all.

A strong modding community will often support or build on what other modders are doing. You throw money into that mix and suddenly have you frenemies, competitors and not just an open source sort of let’s see what we can do. If a modder wants to make a living working on games, it seems like a better entry for them is to go work on games which I think has happened for a few.

I’d love to have a way to throw a few bucks now and then at my favorite mod or a modder community in general but this 9.99 for better fishing stuff… I don’t k now that Valve fully understood the push back, and I’m not sure what kind of relationship they envision between the developer and the modders in this either.

I may have missed the rationale given. But did Valve say what they were trying to fix? The mod scene is working wonderfully I would think currently.

They feel that “value creators” should receive fair financial compensation for the value they create. And presumably, that this is not currently happening.

Well, Valve getting 30% of some value added is not happening.

If they’re so interested in “mod authors” getting paid, how about they pay them instead of trying to sell the mods to us.

That is what Curse gaming does with the mods on their site for WOW and others. Based on the popularity (i.e. downloads) of your mod, you get “points” and once you have attained enough points you can trade them into Amazon (and steam) money vouchers.

And the best part of it, the users of the mods do not have to pay a thing.

Funny, it was comes down to the users paying nothing.

I have no problem with paying for quality mods that are supported. When mods are just a side hobby that gets dropped as soon as the modder finds a more interesting game or the developer decides they really want to sell a better option so they break it… it gets dicey.

Ostensibly, this expense could be built into the price of the game up front.

Agreed. I would have less problems with the idea if the actual game developer/publisher curates and assumes support for paid mods.

For example, there is a great mod for fallout 4 called “Don’t call me Settler”. It added random names to generic settlers along with a host of other settlement related functionality. You can get it here.

Actually you can’t. At some point there were reports of the mod breaking the settlement scripts, and the author took it down and put up a “under construction” sign. He never came back, and I don’t blame him. The bug never happened to me, there’s no clear steps to reproduce, and it could very well be an engine problem (or weird script/engine interaction.) I’m happy to continue using this since it’s a free mod, but this would not fly it if was paid. Will modders be happy to provide lifetime support for complex scripting mods for a couple of bucks per head? When it’s likely that the issue reported stems from another mod or recent official patch?

I guess Steam thinks that it’s actually money that motivates modders instead of love and enthusiam for a game.

That probably explains why there is such a lack of mods…

This experiment will probably end up with a billion mods that do exactly the same things packaged differently, probably with code and ideas copied off each other. Kind of like the Google Playstore. Because well money motivates… the wrong kind of modders…

I think that’s overly cynical. Obviously passion drives it, since mods are happening now. But modders in a lot of cases add a ton of content/features that really make a game better, which in turn make a game more attractive. Being able to provide income to mod makers has the potential to encourage more and better mods (extra incentive and for the really big ones, maybe the person can quit their day job and work on the mod full time). And of course, Steam is a business, not a charity, so I’m sure they’d be more than happy to get a cut of that.

That’s not to say I think paid mods will work out, for all the reason that have been mentioned in this thread.

Not just does the same thing but uses the same assets. This was part of their problem in the first go around. Some of those mods took assets from free mods and bundled them into a paid mod.

I wish there were paid mods for WOW so we could get some good stuff there, the stuff we have is just utter shite.

The thing about QT3 is that there are such nice peeps like you. =) [I mean it, nice guys tend to give the benefit of doubt to other.]

I may be a cynical about this mainly because I see it as just purely supply-side driven. Maybe they want to create an independent DLC market? But the odds are stacked against success, for the reasons stated in this thread.

The using of assets thing is going to be the major problem. Modders use one another’s assets and textures and models as a matter of course. They use free versions or “not allowed for commercial use” versions of third-party software to create art assets and models.

Or…they unintentionally copy other mods. Bubba gets the cool idea to sharpen textures to a higher res by applying a sharpening filter, while employing a methodology to save on VRAM. Chuck, totally independently, notices the same thing, and does the same process. Both guys release their mods, and then both guys accuse one another of stealing.

There are mods within some game communities that seem to be an easy thing to check for this kind of stuff. CSGO gun skins, for instance. But how would you like to be the person at Steam who does quality control for the Enderal mod, looking for any borrowed assets?

Ark: Survival devs agree that modders should get paid.

[quote]
“The hope is that with this kind of stipend, these authors, who really are hobbyists and have day jobs so they can’t really afford to spend as much time as they’d like on modding, that this will let them spend more time on modding, and ideally, hopefully, take some of these mods to completion.”[/quote]

How will they handle disputes between modders?

[quote]
“We ultimately feel that at the end of the day the modders that enter this program are kind of, you might say they’re making a commitment, I guess, to handle that, to some extent,” said Stieglitz. “When they sign up for this we do have them represent that they have the rights to all the work. They don’t have to be closed source, but they have at least open source rights to the work. So, if there’s some dispute, technically it’s up to the modder to deal with that, at that point.”[/quote]

What about support after a mod launches?

[quote]
“We don’t expect anything of them after that, if they are no longer in the program, or if they quit, they have no obligation to us, it really is no strings attached. We’re not looking to run their lives or anything like that,” said Stieglitz. “But we do have an insurance policy.”

That policy: when entering the sponsored mod program, modders will have to upload their source assets to the Ark devs. So, if the mod needs to be updated in the future to be compatible with a new version of Ark, and the modder is unavailable to do the work (or is uninterested in doing so), the developers at Studio Wildcard will be able to make fixes themselves and push out a patch for the mod.

“We hope to not have to do that,” Stieglitz said. “That’s kind of a safety net.”[/quote]

That policy: when entering the sponsored mod program, modders will have to upload their source assets to the Ark devs. So, if the mod needs to be updated in the future to be compatible with a new version of Ark, and the modder is unavailable to do the work (or is uninterested in doing so), the developers at Studio Wildcard will be able to make fixes themselves and push out a patch for the mod.

Well at least they are addressing the concern of support, putting their dollars where their mouth is… just wish it came from a group that didn’t release paid DLC on an EA title… but hey, they could come up with a viable idea. It’s better than getting a bunch of end-users that could literally be abandoned the next day.

This thread was only sleeping.

Blizzard enters the fray: