[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.

[Tenhundfeld]

I hear what you're saying. People use the words interchangeably, but in this context, I think there's an important distinction between fair and reasonable:

- Fairness is a moral judgment.

- Reasonableness is a logical argument.

That's why I argued that Valve's taking 30% is reasonable but not necessarily 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.

[nailer]

> For example, in many companies the highest managers receive a hundred times the average salary in the company. Nobody works for one hundred persons.

I don't think anyone's actually making that argument. Rather they'd say the highest managers may be providing 100x or more value to the company.

[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.

[nailer]

I certainly agree that freedom isn't absolute: there are more of less degrees of competition in a market. However that doesn't preclude supply/demand setting values for things.

[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?