A free editor missing the import modules from the Morrowind editor. And editor who can only make mods for the PC version.
Now Id like to see a statistic between how many PC gamers bought the horse armor mod vs XBox players. I bet there is a huge discrepancy.
You hit the nail on the head. That is exactly what the reason was. People were not paying money, they were paying live points. Don’t you earn live points for playing some games? Isn’t this, in essence, free? Did Microsoft really fork out 100,000 x 1.89 (or some fraction of) to Bethelsda for those sales? Was it real money or a promotional gimmick? As a gamer, you probably do not feel that live points are money, so if someone says Ill give you some cool new horse armor for 150 live points, you do not sit there think “Hmm what they are really saying to me is spend $1.89!” No, you are thinking, “Cool, those points I got by playing super-tetris 2000 can give me something in another game!”
I don’t know first-hand, but in the other mod thread it came out that the points you earn from playing games are not the same as the points you use to buy things.
Still, I can imagine not having the psychological barrier of having to pull out your credit card, but instead spending pre-paid points, makes the mods more attractive on the xbox 360.
Is there some 360 forum somewhere where people are jazzed about the horse armor?
Irrelevant. These crappy mods have nothing to do with promoting competition or innovation, and that gets less likely the more copies they sell. If the effort to profit ratio is good enough on such trifling stuff, there’s no reason to bother trying harder. Why release a stunning dungeon with new dialogue and shiny art assets, if people will pay the same amount of money for a sword that does extra damage? And why would developer X, probably without Bethesda’s resources, try to break the mould if they know they can get easy money by selling, say, a floss bikini for the heroine to wear?
The only way for this system thing to work like it should is for people to create good content, worth the money. The more people who produce crap, the less likely anyone is to bother.
There are two types of points on XBox Live: Microsoft Points and Gamerpoints. Microsoft Points are used for purchasing content, and so far as I know, the only way to get those is to pay for them, either directly through the XBox Live Marketplace or by getting a gift card. Gamerpoints are the points that you earn from playing games (by unlocking achievements), but they are really only for bragging rights at this point.
They’ve mentioned the possibility of allowing people to earn Microsoft Points through other sorts of promotions in the future, but I don’t think that’s happening yet.
[EDIT]
Or, basically, what Charybdis said in nine words. :)
Sorry, misinterpreted your original post. I agree, the only reason I bought the Orrery mod was because I assumed there would be interesting content. I had thought Bethesda’s vague, teaser-like description was just a way of guarding against spoilers, and that they had something special in store. I won’t be making that mistake again.
The horse armor was rather silly and ringtone-like, but you knew exactly what you were getting. And Bethesda seemed to positioning the Orrery as the anti-horse mod, an addon that - unlike the horse armor - would give you quality content for a reasonable price, and would show that the pay-for-content system could work in a way that added value for both gamers and developers. It’s a shame the final product didn’t live up to this promise.
Perhaps since Bethesda’s content is so lackluster there will be a chance for a 3rd party to sell better content on the PC/XBOX360? Or is that not possible?
Yep. Microsoft Points are the XBox’s currency, you buy them with cash - online via credit card, or in stores as numbers on the back of top-up cards. Gamerpoints are just for bragging rights, you get them by doing certain things in a game - like finishing a level, or finding secret areas. Every game gets to hand out 1000 Gamerpoints as it sees fit.
Not directly, but they are cheap to create and presumably very profitable, so:
Competing company sees Verizon/Bethesda making gobs of money on high-profit add-ons
Competing company also wants to make a platform where they can make gobs of money selling junky add-ons; they can only do so by creating a competitive cell phone/RPG which draws people away from the existing platform
Consumers benefit from the battle for their attention – more and better phones/RPGs
Anyway, I can’t argue that the new mods are disappointing, but neither do I think it makes Bethesda the bad guy who is ripping off people (unless they’re intentionally deceiving people, which I’m not convinced of). Building additional goodwill by creating sweet add-ons would be nice, but releasing an expansive game that people are (mostly) loving is more than enough goodwill for me. I hope they make obscene amounts of money from Oblivion + mods. (And tweak the rubberbanding.)
I don’t have the EULA handy, but I would almost guarantee that it prohibits the commercial sale of add-on works. There’s probably legal precedent to back it up too; I seem to recall some company being blocked from selling collections of StarCraft maps under that kind of argument.
That might work on paper, but in practice, it doesn’t tend to go that well. Look at MMOs - improved tech and smoothness, sure, but all the cash floating around hasn’t exactly seen them tear away from the standard mould. What’s known to sell is the most decisive decision, with a few tweaks to the formula as time and market differentiation permit.
If anything, with single-player titles, it opens up the problem of the company trying to grab as much money as possible within a window after launch, encouraging them to leave a whole lot of cool stuff out and milk the fans. Most people are going to move onto new games after a while - even with new content, there’s only so long you can play Oblivion before wanting something different - giving every new game the chance to milk the glitz for all it’s worth. Which isn’t a particularly good thing if you’re hoping for interesting content, instead of new costumes and a few bits of plug-in architecture.
Actual fighting between the games, and thus competition promoting improvement, is only likely when there’s more than one in direct competition, which isn’t usually a life and death battle for the big AAA games that are likely to make the most out of this kind of thing.
Could Beth package developed PC mods and sell them onto XBox?
If they pay “fair” royalties and acknowledge credit, who’s going to complain?
It could then make sense for Beth to release free PC resource mods.
A new dialog pack with associated contest? No intellectial issues then, but could prove restrictive.
Yeah, that’s a pitfall people were worrying about in the other thread.
It could happen, and the pre-orderers would definitely be screwed, but a game that comes gimped in the box will get the bad reviews it deserves and end up with a bad rep and a smaller base of people to sell the add-ons to.
In principle, derivative works are the property of the original proprietor (NOT the creator of the derivative work) at the moment of creation. Derivative work is in violation even if the copyright or trademark proprietor condones it. All fan art is illegal by the letter of the law unless produced under license.
In practice, if the proprietor doesn’t Cease-And-Decist or openly complain about the derivative work (e.g. Ursula k. le Guin) or make fans attach licensing disclaimers to their work (e.g. Wendy and Richard Pini), it means it’s treated like unpaid work-for-hire. This is a potential nightmare for the IP owner.
This sounds odd, but it’s how it plays out:
a) When the original proprietor uses derivative work, they can be sued and have been sued, successfully, by the fan-artist, for work-for-hire earnings.
b) Accordingly, proprietors often refuse to even look at fan-art or fan-fiction, because if ever they produce something similar they can then become a target.
So, my guess is, Bethsoft are relying on the idea that agreeing to a EULA can be taken to be equivalent to what the Elfquest people and others do: allows the expression but explictly has fans stamp their work with “This does not belong to me.”
I would expect that it works out like the big entertainment companies, who let copyright infringement go unchecked most of the time but trademark every little detail so that they can crush anything they don’t like on whim without having to be consistent in copyright enforcement (and have enough money to let marks lapse if they don’t feel like defending one)
The bottom line is that you have to make a great game in order to get people to even consider buying this extra stuff. If you don’t want the extra stuff because it seems valueless to you, then you simply don’t buy it. All the bitching in the world really makes no difference in the end because you got a fully developed great game to start with (depending on your opinion of vanilla Obivion that is…)
There’s really no value in a company selling half a product to start with because consumers usually see through that. You need the solid base before you can charge for the extras. You might be able to fool people once with half a game on initial release, but that’s only going to cause you to lose sales the next game you put out there.
I think the bigger issue underlying all of this is that gamer entitlement is as strong as ever. “YOU OWE US THIS!” or at the least “YOU OWE US MORE THAN THIS!” is how so many people sound in this thread and all over the web when it comes to for-pay content outside the initial game release. Personally, I think developers built that expectation over the last ten years. It starts with the likes of Epic and their free Unreal Tournament map packs and whatnot years ago.
Publishers especially saw this day coming. When you think back to how Activision would often tell developers to bag patches they were working on because there weren’t enough sales to support them, that was an obvious sign. Developers often want to support their games because they love them and the games are their “babies”. I’m sure a bunch of people want to give this stuff away at Bethesda, but the bottom line is there’s a market there that will pay, so why should the give it away? In fact, they know now that a lot of folks will pay for relatively tiny bits of stuff. You can either fill that market and make money or you can give the stuff away for free and be a “hero”. However, those heroes of big game changing patches and free after-release content often end up poor and out of business… respected maybe, but broke.
Eh? That much testing for a MODEL swap? It doesnt even fit on the horse, it replaces it with an armored one, doesnt need any more testing than a q3 fan made player model.
