[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.