Wow, is Katie Hopkins a disgusting savage or what
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Wow, is Katie Hopkins a disgusting savage or what
No worse than what's happening in real life.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeeh...save-migrants/
No she's disgusting all on her own
Yes she is. But she's not the only disgusting thing in this world.
http://fox59.com/2015/04/21/woman-pl...or-not-voting/
All obama's fault! :p
Valve has setup a market to charge set prices for mods. The community has gone apeshit.
If you can charge for DLC then why not mods but I'd have thought you'd be on very tricky legal grounds as to who owns the copyright.
Eg CK2 has an incredibly popular Game of Thrones mod. HBO's lawyers investigated this as it's unlicensed but because the mod isn't monetarised and so long as Paradox don't actively push the mod as a reason to buy the game it's considered fair use.
This mod clearly couldn't be monetarised because HBO's lawyers would stop that immediately. But it makes me wonder who then has the rights to make money off a mod. If I write an original CK2 mod that is successful then the copyright for the mod is mine but the copyright for the game is Paradoxes. Can I make money without a license from PDS?
Seems like a legal quagmire to me.
that might explain why the modders only get 25% of the sale. The bigger issue is that the mod market going to see DMCA abuse at or above what youtube suffers from. Modders borrow assets and tools from each other ALL the time. A lot of mods are group efforts too. Already the workshop is getting flooded by mods from people trying to make a quick buck before everyone catches on to the change.
A donation button with a PWYW model would have been a much better solution to this.
Steam has to great monopoly for me to be comfortable with this. I'm calling it now, mod support is going to be DRMed and locked to steam market approved only items now.
I'm kinda split about this. On the one hand, modding costs a lot of time, and I don't think it's unfair that the creators would profit from their efforts. On the other hand there are the issues you guys already mentioned about copyright and collaborative efforts, and most mods use other modders work which is fine if you're not making money and credit them, but if you add money to that...
And there's the issue you're going to be paying for mods which are often unfinished, and there's no guarantee it will be supported, finished, etc., especially a concern when a game updates and mods stop working. Now this us just annoying, but if you paid for it, it will be a bigger problem.
Plus for a game like KSP I'm generally using at least a dozen mods, often many more. But there's no way I'd fork out more than a hundred bucks for a game that was a quarter of that.
And only 25% seems fairly low cut to be honest, especially considering valve will apparently do nothing besides offering the marketplace (no curating etc),plus they only pay out 100$ or more. So you have to sell for at least $400 or they keep everything. Seems more like a cash grab than an improvement, to be honest.
TF2 and DOTA2 have the same rate, and those games at least still have upkeep costs associated with them. How long has it been since Beth gave any support to skyrim? I'd be highly surprised to see anyone deviate from the established norm here.
Well that would be up to the developer or publisher, I suppose. Frankly, as someone who has actually been involved in the modding scene, 25% beats the heck out of 0%, and if a developer chooses to give more of the profits to the modding community I'm sure you'll see mod makers take a greater interest in developing for that game.
Which is why I mentioned the PWYW model that nexus allows. The current method of set prices and Valves history of having no interest in filtering anything outside of stolen content is going to screw over a lot of people. Nothing like paying for a mod only to discover its not compatible with some other mod, or broke with the last update, and the only course of action is a possible refund within that first 24 hours to your steam wallet, regardless of how you initially paid.
I do find it funny that one of the mods they are using to promote this, the fishing mod, has already been pulled thanks to a claim of stolen assets and a DMCA. Guess Valve's original attitude that for profit mods can use resources that can be gotten for free elsewhere didn't stand to well.
I guess I'm confused at what you are trying to say here. Valve also offers a PWYW model. It seems like you are taking the current payment method offered by Bethesda and applying it as some kind of universal and immutable rule that all other developers and publishers are being forced to adopt. I just don't see that in the descriptions I've read of it.
In the Steam Marketplace the seller sets the price range (maybe thats the confusion?) so thats not true PWYW, which is why we were seeing $100 horse cocks. Not that that price is absolute, Valve reserves the right to bundle your work with other mods, set their prices and sales (current bundle doesn't seem to have even a range selection for price), and distribute the funds from those events as they see fit. The publisher of the game generally determines what percentage the modder gets; to a point I assume, Valve WILL get paid so we don't currently have any idea how much give and take is built into the system. Would the publisher reduce their stake of the 75% if it meant less for them but the same for Valve? It could very well be locked at 25% as the upper value for modders, or 30%, I haven't seen anything official from Valve yet.
PWYW is more akin to a donation system, or how humblebundle operates, same minimum everytime, option to donate more after the fact, etc.
Valve could have gone from villian to hero with just a few tweaks of their system. True PWYW, a better cut to the modders, less abusive EULA, maybe even some sort of customer service push to show that they are prepared for the shitstorm of issues this is going to cause. Its like they learned so little from the mess that the greenlight program has become. Its not that Valve is overly evil, a bit greedy perhaps, but not EA levels of evil; but their stance towards scammers and similiar is so...horrible, that its long past time Valve stepped up and did something about the abuse.
Currently seems like all the paid mods have been disabled, including the ones still being used as advertisements on the homepage.
EDIT: Mods have been restored.
Again, I don't think you are describing the reality accurately. From what I have read the publisher/developer can determine the cut the modder will receive. The modder can then set their own price, make it free, or let the customer pay what they want. Sure, Valve has set a standard for their games, but it is not a standard set in stone. Then you have the issue of whether or not the rights holder wants to allow modders to profit from their mods, or to what extent they will allow it, which it seems to me would preclude Valve from setting a universal PWYW, donation system, or whatever it is you are describing. It makes a great soundbite to tell Valve to go all or nothing, but I just don't think that amounts to a realistic or workable business model. If you are arguing that they are setting a bad example with their approach to TF2/DOTA2 items, I suppose an argument can be made to support that, but at the very least you now have modders who have the option of getting some return on what can be a truly enormous investment of time and money whereas before they had none.
I suppose you could choose to get worked up over this, but I'm just not seeing the value in that.
To a point. Valve will take their cut, so the modders will never receive 100%, and we don't yet know what the upper limit is, but I'm highly doubtful that Valve would allow other publishers outshine them on their own service so I suspect 25% is at or close the upper limit for what modders can expect. With the trading cards and other tradeables the publishers/developers get 10% I think.
This is false, at the very least nexus has allowed modders to ask for financial support since at least 2012, Nexus went directly to Bethesda to get permission for that.Quote:
but at the very least you now have modders who have the option of getting some return on what can be a truly enormous investment of time and money whereas before they had none.
I do think the larger concern is how this is going to put the workshop scene into a tailspin, similar to the greenlight process or xbox's indie store attempt, until Valve admits they need to step up and be more active in the community.
I believe Valve was planning on rolling this out for more than just Bethesda products, which means modders for other games who may not have had the support Nexus provides can also receive compensation. More to the point, I have used Nexus several times since 2012 and I had no idea Nexus allowed payments to modders. This is a way to ensure compensation if the mod developer wants it.
I've no objection to this in principle, but Valve's utter refusal to curate their own store is going to render this a clusterfuck in very short order. I've already heard stories about people downloading other people's mods from the Nexus, then putting them on steam for money. I'm sure we can look forward to people downloading others mods, rewording the code, data files slightly or adjusting textures then putting them up on the workshop for slightly cheaper than the originals too.
This is before we even get started on mods using assets from other commercial properties like other games, films, etc.
Oh, this is gonna be a riot.
To quote Nexus' homepage:
Hosting 115,680 files for 173 games from 47,475 authors serving 8,953,958 members with 1,045,171,328 downloads to date
Forbes article:
Valve's Paid 'Skyrim' Mods Are A Legal, Ethical And Creative Disaster
and now it looks like Valve is censoring the 1 star review their current paid bundle has.
http://i.4cdn.org/v/1429952656706.png
Thats the modder for Mida's Magic, one of the mods being rotated through the front page to advertise the new paid mods. Archived proof: https://archive.is/QzAz4
I know on ksp some mods have a donate button, but the creator of one of the most popular mods got a whopping two donations over a year or so (Though he said he didn't mind). And I have personally never donated for mods, even for those that were definitely worth some money.
Going to be interesting how this evolves over the next couple of weeks, Gaben had a horribly shallow mod related AMA on reddit yesterday. The fall from grace in a subreddit like pcmasterrace is comical.
If mods cost money, I just won't use mods. Problem solved.
Yeah, it's like apps for your phone. Never paid for even one of them.
http://steamcommunity.com/games/Stea...32365253244218
Removing Payment Feature From Skyrim Workshop
APRIL 27 - ALDEN
We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we'll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.
We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing. We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different.
To help you understand why we thought this was a good idea, our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid. We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it.
But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop. We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here.
Now that you've backed a dump truck of feedback onto our inboxes, we'll be chewing through that, but if you have any further thoughts let us know.
Now to see how the pieces all come back together. Currently anyone getting a refund is getting locked out of the marketplace for a week, fix is incoming (hopefully not on valve time).
This is a pretty interesting case study - I'm usually all for monetizing things because many people are driven by those types of incentives but I agree this wasn't fully thought out. More controls should be put in place to avoid facilitating IP theft.
Is it being reversed just for Skyrim or for all mods?