[gkwelding]

I think Valve/Steam (and Bethesda) really screwed up on this one. Although the idea of modders being fairly compensated for their work is a great idea the execution was poor at best.

Only 25% going to the content creators? Really?

And a poor returns mechanism, getting a refund gets you banned from the steam store for 7 days to stop abuse. That's a poor returns policy when you're buying things like mods that might be of really poor quality once you start to use them.

[stupidcar]

I agree with everything you said, but it seemed like a lot of the more nuanced feedback on this was drowned out by a subset of gamers having a screaming tantrum at the suggestion of paying anything for a mod, regardless of where the money was going.

I'm hopeful that Valve will eventually try this again on a new game with a fairer compensation structure and a better community infrastructure in place. I'm not so hopeful that that same subset of gamers won't have a tantrum all over again.

[bwat48]

It might be something that could work for a new game, but in the case of skyrim, I don't see any kind of paid mod system working.

Skyrim has a very complex modding system, and a lot of skyrim mods have dependencies on other skyrim mods, so when you start putting any mods behind a paywall things get dicey real fast.

It could only see this working in a game where mods are simple and standalone.

[belorn]

I wonder what kind of infrastructure could fix this. Imagine a official phone store where anyone could upload a app, and no platform API that dictate what the software can do.

In the case that a phone got bricked, can the store owner just shrug it off? If malware was injected, who is to blame? When something suddenly breaks because conflicting apps, is that the customers fault? Does it matter if the app was sold 14 days ago, 30 days ago, 1 year?

It would make for a nice reading for a solution to this problem that would handle all of this, while retaining fully compatibility with consumer laws and customers trust in the market.

[mhomde]

I've learned that there's at least two hard rules when it comes to money for digital services

1) It's almost impossible to start charging for something that was free

2) It's almost impossible to go from one time payment to subscription model.

If you want either model you better start out with them or you're going to have a vengeful mob after you. I've seen this repeated time after time with catastrophic results. I was actually surprised that Adobe got away with it.

[mmf]

I wonder what would happen if GitHub placed a clone fee and split it between itself and the repo owner...

[Mtinie]

If that was an option, but not the only option, it could make for an interesting addition to their business model.

  * Public repositories (fork for free)  
  * Premium repositories (fork for a fee)  
  * Private repositories (restricted to content owner who pays the fee)

[mcphage]

So basically, GitHub offering a service where users could charge for software, and get the source code as well? And not just a core dump, but be part of a community building up that source? ...That's a pretty solid idea.

[paulmd]

My understanding is that that's how software distribution used to work back in the mainframe days - you'd get the source to build in your specific environment, and you could modify it to add whatever functionality you needed. Then binary distribution took over as platforms became more intercompatible.

[mcphage]

And you still can do that—supply the source when you sell an app. But to be able to not just give your customers the source, but to give them access to a GitHub project that they can follow, and submit pull requests to, and pull new updates and so on from... plus, to not have to set up your own storefront, and manage the source permissions and whatnot. That would be a very nice feature for GitHub to have.

[Mtinie]

^ this.

If anyone is interested in building it, send me a note, I'd love to be involved (but totally lack the skills to do it myself).

[mcphage]

Heck, me too—I can think of several projects I worked on but eventually gave up on. If there was a way for me to get paid for it, still work on it, and have other people help out as well? Without having to operate my own storefront?

[fallat]

I think the more important thing is they actually responded to their users. Valve is a model company. Live and learn.

[toxican]

Yet people (primarily redditors) were swearing up and down that our complaints meant nothing and that we were wasting our time and that Valve only cared about money.

Like seriously, have those people been paying attention? If anybody is going to listen to their userbase, admit their mistake, and do a 180, it's Valve.

[okasaki]

The sentiment probably comes from experiencing Valve's customer support, which is a lot like Google's - either

- the automated system solve your problem, or

- you have enough influence to generate bad press for them, or

- your problem will most likely be ignored.

[lsaferite]

Gabe has acknowledged how horrible the customer support is and they are, supposedly, working on a solution.

I count myself fortunate to have never needed to interact with the customer support. <knocks on wood>

[suby]

The time for a solution was ten years ago. It has always been quite bad.

[jclos]

I don't to sound like a pessimist but reading the blog post on Steam I can't help but notice:

"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."

Translation: "We'll let it go this time". It wouldn't surprise me if the next Bethesda game had that very same system baked-in right from the start.

[Joona]

Yeah, they ONLY removed it from Skyrim. Other games will be getting it (although probably modified).

[blakeyrat]

If Bethesda/Steam know this feature is coming, they can create tools to help make it actually successful.

For example, they can require mod makers to explicitly assign a license to their work before publishing the mod. Even allow encryption/signing of mods. That alone would have vastly reduced the "this jerkwad stole my free mod and is charging for it!" problem.

[scott_s]

Why would that be bad?

[jclos]

It's probably mainly a matter of personal opinion, but while I agree we should find a way to encourage better and more professional modding, I think that this particular implementation would create a technical/legal/ethical mess out of something which has worked well for the past decades. In short, they half-assed it, and it being one of the first implementations of this kind of system (and thus setting a huge precedent for other games) it should absolutely not be half-assed.

The particular problems I have are:

* Developers are already shipping less and less finished games knowing that they can pile on some more content afterwards in DLCs, for a steep fee. Knowing that they can just provide modding tools and let the users create the content themselves and still get a huge part (45% in the case of Bethesda) will just encourage the release of even more broken games.

* That's not even considering the fact that it encourages modding to go from a relatively open thing (you can open any mod in the mod editor software which you can get for free and add stuff to it yourself, and even redistribute it with the permission of the author) to a closed thing: there would be a big incentive to tack on some DRM to stop other people from "stealing content" from paid mods and create their own.

* Finally, it would turn the Steam workshop marketplace, which is already a mess, into the same thing that different app stores have become: a complete mess filled with garbage copycats trying to con people into giving them a few bucks.

I do not have a solution, but I think there should be more thought put into it. For the moment, patronage style remuneration and crowdfunding are the best solutions we have.

[gkwelding]

Exactly. People don't mind if companies screw up like this just as long as they know when to admit they were wrong.

[M8]

Too afraid to lose users to proceed with their vision.

[mhuffman]

They still think that "the problem" was that they were asking for mods to be compensated(and that the exiting mod community doesn't like commercialism), not that they were keeping 3/4 of it.

[tormeh]

Valve kept 30%, Bethesda kept 45% and modders got the rest. It's not just Valve's fault.

[M8]

Wow, Bethesda is sure greedy in a self-punishing way. I mean you have to buy the game before buying mods. Surely 5-10% would be enough.

[jonlucc]

I'm sure from Bethesda's perspective, they own the IP and built all of the tools for the modders. It made sense in their meetings, but failed in the community.

[Aoyagi]

They said something along the lines if "25% is an 'industry standard". I think they referenced to the hats, knives and whatnot being sold on TF2/CS:GO marketplaces.

[nailer]

Ditto. I'd quite happily pay for mods - they add value, there's more a chance of bugs being fixed, Steam would make installation less of a hassle. But 25% going to the authors is awful. The game's original creators - who already benefit from increased sales - additionally get more of the revenue than the actual mod creator.

[madez]

It's an example for the perfectly accepted greed in the corporate world.

Valve claims that 30% share is fair while having one of the highest income per employee of any company. That means that their share is too high.

It's more than what the government demands from you, while the government is _much_ more important than Valve is for any business.

The CEO of Valve argues that money steers the community. That's true, and it leads to slavery, drug trafficking criminal organizations and war if the government doesn't regulate. Commercialization does not only have good consequences. Though being able to extort more money out of the masses might skew your vision on that.

Just because it sells doesn't mean people like it. It might be lack of alternatives.

I'm not in principle against money. If you really think that you should, offering a service to make payments to the authors easy might be good. But among many things, DON'T BE RIDICULOUSLY GREEDY.

Let's suppose now that to develop the infrastructure for your service was really expensive and the market volume is not big enough to get the investment back with small percentages.

This is an interesting situation because even if you are "forced" to offer it with 25% share for the author some authors will use it due to lack of alternatives.

Right now I don't have a good solution to this problem. Maybe lower your cut according with the return you already got until you arrived at a fair share? Maybe the best would be if you didn't offer your service at all...

[Tenhundfeld]

Apple takes 30% of app store purchases, in-app purchases, and iAd revenue. Google takes 30% of Google Play purchases and in-app products. 30% is a reasonable share for the maintainer of a network to take.

As for the 25% to the author of the mod, that does seem unfair, but I don't think that was Valve's decision. I think they left that up to the game producer, Bethesda in this case. Bethesda chose how to split the remaining 70%.

As an aside, Valve's income per employee is totally irrelevant. Their 30% fee is set by market forces. If they lost billions of dollars this year or if they hired 10,000 people to handle support calls, the "fairness" of a 30% fee is not affected. It wouldn't become more fair just because their income per employee ratio changed.

That 30% is set by market forces. It's what we've all generally agreed a marketplace can charge for operating the infrastructure. In this case, Valve has a challenge, because there are multiple parties splitting the remaining 70%. So they might need to lower their fee to let the game producers and the modders take larger slices of the pie.

[mxfh]

Apple, Google and Valve all only get away with taking 30% because they managed to establish more or less of a monopoly on stores in each of their respective ecosystems.

Steam is arguably still the most permissive of all of those since it allows redeeming keys purchased directly from the developer or places like Humble Bundle Store which are reported to take a smaller cut.

[madez]

You say a share is fair when it's what the market currently offers.

That's obviously a remarkably stupid definition of fair.

[Tenhundfeld]

Read my comment again. I never said that a share is fair when it's what the market currently offers. You're simply inferring something I didn't say.

I explained why the 30% is a reasonable rate as compared to other marketplaces.

And as an aside, I argued that income per employee is not a good metric of fairness. I never argued that 30% is fair or unfair, as I think that is frankly a pointless debate.

But I did say that, to me, 25% going to the modder feels unfair. So, I get why you might think I was arguing 30% is fair – though that was not my intention.

[madez]

In general reasonable implies fair.

Yes, there might be situation where you can only decide between two unfair solutions and one is less unfair, and one could argue that that one is the reasonable choice. This is because reason-ability and fairness are not binary. Still, the tendency remains: if you say X is reasonable you imply X is fair.

Income per employee is not a good metric, you are right. However, if your profits are very high you must raise salaries if they are not already too high, lower your prices or invest to be fair.

[nailer]

Generally on HN we like to say why we think something is bad, rather than merely labelling it as stupid.

Free market value is a common measure of fairness. You might disagree (eg, you could argue Steam has a monopoly on PC gaming, likewise non-official app stores are rare on cell phones, so it's not a free market), but you should state why.

[madez]

And I like HN for demanding explanation. Shout-out to all the skeptics!

I focused the problem with his argument into one sentence that made it intuitively understandable. Then I stated my opinion. I thought that'd be enough explanation.

Free market value is often obviously unfair.

For example, in many companies the highest managers receive a hundred times the average salary in the company. Nobody works for one hundred persons. They just get so much because they can take it.

Prices in the market are heavily distorted by - among many things - incomplete information, time delay, entry barriers, racism, stereotypes and criminality.

That digital distributors agreed on taking 30% doesn't make it necessarily fair. It is fair if it includes so much work such that so much money is necessary. However, I doubt they have so much cost to make their income per employee fair.

Why is it not fair if they earn so much? Because they don't do so much more for the society than for example the average firefighter and therefore shouldn't earn so much more money.

[crdoconnor]

>Free market value is a common measure of fairness.

Free market value is a fantasy. No market is really free. No value is set by a free market.

If what you are saying is that in theory under certain completely fantastical assumptions that market value is fair and otherwise it's not, then yea, I agree.

[vinceguidry]

> while the government is _much_ more important than Valve is for any business.

Hah. If only that were true. The government's only positive role in commerce is ensuring political stability. Lots of times, they fail hard at that one job.

Once you have political stability, then the government becomes a power broker. The tax system is really an elaborate financial instrument for big business, has been ever since the dawn of mercantilism. The value you gain from the government is proportional to how close you are to the giant sums of money being funneled through it.

Sure, there are things like welfare programs that ensure an adequate baseline of minimum prosperity, (i.e. the homeless in the US won't starve to death, and might get a bed to sleep on a couple times a week) but you only really benefit from them if you really need them, and relying on them is no fun. And we only have those because those of us close to the poor, who can't just shut them out, threw enough of a fit to force the elites to.

The rest of us, lower and middle classes, small and medium businesses, including entities like Valve, don't get squat from the government. We have to earn our own keep, we can't rely on the government to bail us out.

The government is entirely too small to help out the rest of society in any meaningful way. They can try to pass laws, but laws breed loopholes and suck for the same reason Valve's lofty initiative failed, it's impossible to consider the incentive structure of the new world you're creating with a law until you actually enact it and see what's going on, and there's only so far hiring experts will get you. Legislation is a long, slow slog towards a saner world on the aggregate, and a vehicle for pork in the particular.

The only thing worthwhile the government provides US businesses is in just being there. Great that we have one, but extremely hard to point out specific things it does that aren't already being far better done by other commercial entities.

[meddlepal]

Unfortunately, I think this concern will be lost in the noise. The most noise on this issue seems to have been that gamers do not want to pay for mods and not that modders feel they are being unfairly compensated.

I really don't have an issue with paying for good mods and in fact I was really excited by the initial announcement because I would have totally gotten into game modding if I could earn some significant supplemental income doing it.

[gkwelding]

This is true, and if you read into it you'll find that it wasn't anything to do with Valve, but actually Bethesda who defined the 25%, they've already profited immensely from the game and I found it quite hard to swallow that they were not stiffing dedicated content creators.

[toxican]

I struggle to see why Bethesda has any say at all. They need Valve/Steam more than Valve/Steam need Bethesda. What, are they going to launch their own paid mod system? Who would waste their time with that? Seems to me like Valve holds all the cards...

edit: And maybe Bethesda would've taken their ball and gone home for any less, but I'm sure Valve could've found another developer. They probably should have ,given Bethesda's bad reputation for making games that need bug-fixing mods, terrible DLC, and the vastness of the FREE modding community.

[Jolijn]

In business terms, you could consider giving a cut to the modders a marketing expense (you might sell more because the mods increase the value of your game, perhaps?). But you can also consider it as providing a platform that modders exploit commercially, and you can squeeze them as much as is sensible in any commercial relationship.

I think the number of people buying a game because of a mod is rather small, so business people will see things more from the second viewpoint.

[nailer]

Really? I'd never buy Half Life 1, since late 90s graphics looks pretty poor these days, but I'd happily pay for it to use Black Mesa.

Better yet - from another post here:

> "How many copies of Arma 2 were sold explicitly because of DayZ? How many copies of Half-life were sold because of Counter Strike? Warcraft 3 and Dota? etc."

[giancarlostoro]

I don't understand, Steam hosts mods for free, so why would they want such a huge chunk? Then Bethesda just needs a minor incentive for developing the mod tools, which were already funded for the creation of the game (I imagine they use the same tools, if not something more advanced, correct me if I'm wrong?). In fact the mod tools don't get updated all that often after being released as far as I'm aware.

[duaneb]

I dunno, a mod store could raise the support necessary for running a store by an order of magnitude or two. Plus, to their credit, it seems like they were spitballing and ready to revise.

EDIT: Actually, they will get a favorable reaction to a much more reasonable compensation (say 25%) to content creators now that the community has gotten the worst of its reaction out. It might even be calculated.

[aethr]

When Steam is hosting mods for free, then they are effectively just hosting files. They transfer so much data, I can imagine this would be effectively zero cost for them.

Once they start charging for something, the entire payment infrastructure is now part of the picture. They need to pay merchant fees, assume risk for disputed transactions, arrange for the money to be split up and transfered to stakeholders, etc. This may not account for 30% (who knows) but it does make sense to charge something.

[malka]

The biggest issue for me was 'library' mods. ie mods that sole purpose is being used by other mods. SKSE for instance. They were virtually unable to profit of this system. However, if Steam handled mods dependy, they could retribute mods like this. That could actually be very good for AppStore, and free libraries : each sale in the appstore could also profit to the ones that created the basic build block.

[TheHypnotist]

So you would willingly pay full price for your standard game, whether it's half-life 3, skyrim 2 or whatever, and on top of that pay for mods just because it makes your UI nicer and you like that sweet axe skin?

[giancarlostoro]

The whole EA getting off Steam fiasco is something similar, except a new policy in Steam wants 30% of anyone's revenue for DLC even if you setup your own payment system, and distribution system. So Steam would be getting money for doing absolutely nothing.

[bcoates]

As a user, I'm totally fine with that. PC game distribution was so braindead that third parties (Steam, etc.) could strong-arm their way into un-bundling. Having chosen a payment and download system I'm not inclined to let game publishers try to force me into a different one, and whatever financial incentives Valve can apply to make that painful is great.

[johnchristopher]

Doesn't Valve bring in the users and the channel to them ?

[giancarlostoro]

Used to, I imagine EA is going to sell games regardless of Steam, they have quite a "portfolio" of games that just "sell themselves". The only reason I ever got on Steam was because of Counter-Strike, I imagine the only reason others hear of Origin is because of games from BioWare and DICE.

[TheHypnotist]

Modders should be able to ask for donations, nothing more. They should see this as an opportunity to create great content based off of a much larger and more established game. If they want to get compensated, perhaps their great content will take off and one day they can make their own standalone, but until then, donations only. See Counter-Strike, DayZ, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Insurgency, et al.

[blakeyrat]

Two comments:

1) Valve half-assed the implementation (of course) so that existing mods couldn't be changed to "pay what you want" (a.k.a. donations) unless you deleted and re-uploaded the mod (thus breaking auto-updates for anybody who had the old version).

2) The real tragedy here is that Valve's also turned off the "pay what you want" option in addition to the listed price options. So if I do want to accept donations for my mods, even understanding my "cut" is only 25%, I can no longer do that.

[Aoyagi]

Where were you with your rational thinking when the witch-hunt was going on on Reddit? It was so disappointing to watch.

[pekk]

The original content creators are the people who made the base game and own the IP of which mods are derivative.

[pbhjpbhj]

>Only 25% going to the content creators? Really? //

What percentage do the actual content creators get usually in a blockbuster game release? That probably provided a floor for what Valve/Steam consider reasonable.

Is that 25% of gross or net of sales taxes or ...

[edem]

It should be the other way around: Steam keeps 25% brokerage.

[castell]

Bethesda introduced DLCs to the PC gaming world in 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion#...

  The first update came as a set of specialized armor for 
  Oblivion‍ '​s ridable horses; released on April 3, 2006. 
  Although gamers generally displayed enthusiasm for the 
  concept of micropayments for downloadable in-game content,
  many expressed their dissatisfaction at the price they 
  had to pay for the relatively minor horse-armor package 
  on the Internet and elsewhere.[85] Hines assured the 
  press that Bethesda was not going to respond rashly to 
  customer criticism.

Valve introduced DRM to the PC gaming world in late 2004: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software)#History

  Valve's Half-Life 2 was the first game to require 
  installation of the Steam client to play, even for retail 
  copies. This decision was met with concerns about 
  software ownership, software requirements, and issues 
  with overloaded servers demonstrated previously by the 
  Counter-Strike rollout. During this time users faced 
  multiple issues attempting to play the game.

There are alternatives like GoG, that are DRM/DLC-free.

[vacri]

Valve introduced DRM to the PC gaming world in late 2004

Utter nonsense. Have you never played an abandonware game from the late 80s and early 90s? "Enter the first letter of the third word on page 14 of the manual"? I used to get pirated Amiga 500 floppies with the copy protection stripped out and a little boot animation from the pirates inserted.

Valve introduced Steam to the PC gaming world... but then again, it's their product. And when all is said and done, Steam has been a significant net benefit.

[castell]

You are wrong. DRM != copy protection

You can own the DVD with a copy protection and even legally create a backup-copy. You simply cannot own a DRM product, as its bound to a server side check. DRM products may suddenly vanish from your PC, or change its content. Valve already wiped some games and changed the regional settings (removing games from certain parts of the world in retrospect) and Rockstar released an automatic patch for GTA San Andreas (2005) over Steam which altered the game (broke several features like widescreen support, removed several songs from radio stations)

[vacri]

Copy protection is a form of DRM. It is used to manage rights to digital content. You're redefining DRM to mean "the trend of selling licenses rather than software", which is only one form of DRM.

[castell]

It's the other way around! DRM is a specific form of copy protection. Read the DRM article on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management

  "The term [DRM] is also sometimes referred to as copy 
  protection, copy prevention, and copy control, although 
  the correctness of doing so is disputed."

And read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection

[pearle]

Bioware was doing DLC before it was called DLC and long before Bethesda.

Google Neverwinter Nights premium modules.

[blakeyrat]

We used to call them "expansion packs". They were the same thing as DLC, just without the DL. (Nobody had enough bandwidth to do large game asset downloads.)

The concept's old as dirt.

[frik]

Expansion packs or Addons came with a lot more high quality content with many more hours of actual gameplay content on a separate CD/DVD. The CD/DVD can be sold later.

Since 2006, a DLC is usually a minor content like a horse decoration, a car, a few short missions worth 1-2 hours gameplay, etc. DLCs come also with DRM, you cannot sell it later. (Also used in conjunction as pre-order bonus on e.g. Amazon or Steam) (Some still release Addons, some call Addons DLCs, but generally it is the way as described above.)