[yaeger]

A lot of the backfire could have been avoided if they they had this info prominently displayed on the homepage.

I can't tell you how many times I read about these knee jerk reactions from people with their self imposed boycotts of the entire Steam platform. The reason most given? "Because Valve takes 75% and only leaves 25 for the mod maker".

These people were so quick with their math they never even got to the fact that a) Bethesda takes a cut, the highest one at that and b) this split came from Bethesda and did not originate at Valve.

But, as these things go, have one of these people spew out this misinformation, get enough people to echo this and many others will take it as fact. You can then try to tell them as often as you like how that is wrong and they will just downvote you because "you're just a valve shill" resulting in nobody seeing the actual facts and the echo chamber happily moves down the wrong way getting more and more worked up.

In the end, it was just an option to treat mods like DLC and games. Make em either free or charge for em. Nothing more. If mod makers want to make their work free, literally nothing changed. If they want to they could have started chargin for them. And if people didn't like it, they just didn't have to buy them. If there was a mod that was once free and was then moved to the pay side, people could have let the maker know that was a dick move. And if a paid mod breaks because of a game update, people could have let the maker know to better fix that asap or they'll demand a refund. Only with free mods you could say "yeah, it broke with the newest update. don't have time to fix. working on other stuff". If you sell it, you have to support it. But that is up to the mod maker, not the owner of the distribution platform.