The latest I've seen is that Valve gets 30%, then the publisher decides what the rest of the split looks like. If they had released the exact same system, but said the modders get 75%, I think this whole ordeal would have been avoided. It's interesting to me that it was apparently better to give modders nothing than to give them 25%.
I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful. They produced the game and made their money on game sales. If they continue to be responsive to bug reports and/or adding new features to the game then perhaps I can see a small amount going to them.
Valve taking a cut I understand as they handle the sales and distribution platform. I'm not sure I think 30% is fair, but that's a different issue.
As a revenue split I'd be much more on board with the modder getting 75% and the rest being to everyone else.
Of course, then you need to consider how mod dependency is handled. And you have to look at how long term mod support is handled. What happens when the modder goes away or Bethesda releases an update that breaks existing mods.
> I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful.
So, you agree that Valve should get some part of the sales, because they are the ones (Steam) actually taking the payment and assuming some of the upfront risks of processing payments (fraud) and, because of the network effect and the customers they bring (read ... marketing)
But Bethesda who developed the actual game that brought the modders and gave them a platform to derive their work on, not to mention creating the actual game and game engine and putting it in the hands of the actual customers; they should just get nothing out of this whole deal?
I agree that the whole thing is a big hairy mess, and as a developer and an underdog myself I agree that the split should be approximately reversed, but I'm not sure there's much else we agree on.
I played GRID a lot and found the "any car any track" mod which was awesome. Codemasters didn't do that for some reason. There are mods that add Ferraris, Codemaster aren't licensed to include those cars. They were even in the trailer for the game and got pulled.
There's mods to include stuff the publisher couldn't even care[1] to sort out. Why should they get any cut of money for that. Would they even be allowed to take a cut? I assume this kind of stuff sits in a grey zone at the moment.
I think this will always be a problem if you couple the distribution and the day-to-day service in the way steam does.
I agree maybe not the best example, but it illustrates about problems than can come up from combining services in the market. Hypothetically if steam was _just_ a package manager and the mods payed to for the convenience of users to install it. It shouldn't matter about the content.
Maybe a better example is Red Alert 2, I still occasionally LAN play that and there's a community patch to replace the IPX stack with TCP/IP so it can still work. as IPX is completely gone from windows 8+ I think.
Well, if Bethesda gave the game away for free and wanted a source of revenue from mod makers, sure. But it's quite established that a strong mod community results in continuing sales for the game beyond a normal product lifespan. In some cases, the price of product remains higher than normal because of the strong sales due to the mod community. Bethesda has already made money on the backs of mod makers.
A proper response to this is to give all the remaining money after Valve's cut to the mod maker as a thank you to the community.
But this doesn't even address the other problems that people have been pointing out.
> But Bethesda who developed the actual game that brought the modders and gave them a platform to derive their work on, not to mention creating the actual game and game engine and putting it in the hands of the actual customers; they should just get nothing out of this whole deal?
Mods represent value added to the game that wasn't provided by the original publisher. Each mod "fixes" a deficiency in the game, adds, changes, or removes something the original developer did not do from the baseline game. The changes add value to the publisher's bottom line by increasing the value of the game, thus stimulating additional sales.
Thus the idea that modders both increase demand for the game, increasing the publisher's sales, AND want the lion's share of the money paid for mods is repugnant.
I don't see how the idea that Steam should get a share approaching 30% is any less repugnant than that. Visa gets less than 4%, and they are the ones that are really processing the charge. Valve eats that much, and whatever they get paid over that is simply for their role in facilitating the transaction
If any of these three parties declined to provide their own involvement, a sale does not happen. So all of them are reasonably entitled to a share. But not necessarily a whole third.
I agree that Half-Life developers should not be the ones getting the majority of the sticker price of CounterStrike, insofar as those people are disparate parties and the popularity of CounterStrike drives sales of HL and even surpasses Half-Life in popularity. But it is impossible to deny that CS does not have a game to sell at all without HL.
They did sell "CS-Only" discs without the ability to play Half-Life in single-player mode, didn't they? And, Valve still got a cut? (What's that? They never did? Hmm...)
Edit: There is obviously some risk for Valve, too. Maybe more than Visa in the long run, but I think they will pass on the risk to those who they pay, just like Visa. They do get to hold the money, and they can decide who gets paid.
I don't know about deserve, but if you want to talk about incentives for behavior, you really can't go wrong with something that provides both "increased sales volume and lifetime" and "an ongoing share of the grosses".
If you want game developers to promote a helpful environment for mod developers, grab some money and pay them something out of it. Definitely!
> I personally found Bethesda getting any split quite distasteful. They produced the game and made their money on game sales.
They produced the game engine, and are letting people develop on it for free. And them getting a cut from people piggybacking on their work and making money from it was distasteful to you?
'Piggyback' is a loaded word. Its something we all do when we use a compiler or desktop machine. Yet those folks don't stick their hands into our revenue stream.
Microsoft doesn't get a cut of Jetbrains' IDE "mod" revenue, though, despite the fact that Reshaper and similar products "piggyback" (what a loaded term) onto Visual Studio and other Microsoft products. Microsoft already got their cut up front.
Same thing for Bethesda - it's not their value-add and they don't have a moral right to take a cut. On the other hand Steam is providing a value-add here - a market and financial transaction services.
I paid full price for the game and all of the DLC.
Part of the reason I did this was due to the ability of the game to be easily modded. I knew with modding the lifetime of the game was much greater.
Why should they get 40% of mod sales for doing nothing? They already got paid for making the game.
Now, if they are still providing good customer support with timely bug fixes around the mod system, then perhaps I can see a small portion going to them. Otherwise, why do you think they are entitled to a share of the mod revenue?
> I paid full price for the game and all of the DLC.
> Part of the reason I did this was due to the ability of the game to be easily modded. I knew with modding the lifetime of the game was much greater.
So you paid full price for the game because you knew people would spend their time and effort making things for you for free... and now that there was an option for them to get paid for their work, you get pissy?
The part where they also got to sell the game engine to customers, the developers, and then take a cut of the developers profits too?
You don't buy the mod, and get the game to run it. You have to buy the game, then buy the mod. If they want more money for the game, they can increase the price.
Also, I wasn't aware that Bethesda had released their game engine for free. Care to give a link as to where they've done so? As far as I'm aware you still need to pay for a copy of it.
> It's interesting to me that it was apparently better to give modders nothing than to give them 25%.
It's due to perceived "fairness"
This 75/25 split by Valve reminds me of the psychology experiment the Ultimatum Game: "'Inequity aversion' is so strong that people are willing to sacrifice personal gain in order to prevent another person from receiving an inequitably better outcome."
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-brain-work/200911/...
Inequity Aversion only exists in America and other Westernized countries btw. We're WEIRD like that.
Different cultures respond differently to the Ultimatum Game. Be wary of those studies that only use "Anglo-Saxon American College Kids" as test subjects, which is a group of people that isn't even representative of America in general.
>>> The revelation that rural Peruvians handle the ultimatum game so differently from American respondents led Henrich on a MacArthur Foundation-funded research trip to more than a dozen more locales around the world, where he found wide variation in the average offers of player #1 and this curious result: “in some societies — ones where gift-giving is heavily used to curry favor or gain allegiance — the first player would often make overly generous offers in excess of 60 percent, and the second player would often reject them, behaviors almost never observed among Americans.”
That's not quite the same. That game involves two people trying to figure out who gets what from a pot of money they did nothing to deserve receiving. Mod makers did work that may deserve compensation. One example is a possible bonus for the people involved, the other is a possible shafting for the people involved.
Yes they wanted 45% so Valve slapped on another 30% while not providing any or minimal QA from Valve or Bethesda for that other 75%?.
As with the Store or Greenlight before outsourcing tasks to the community (reviews/greenlight votes) doesn't mean Valve isn't responsible for the stuff they offer in their store. A 24h hour refund policy is simply laughable when non-waiveable EU consumer rights regulations require 14 days.
The other thing is the quite astronomic payout cap at $100 which means any hobbyist has to sell $400 ore more, depending on taxes before he see any of his efforts compensated. This further shows that Valve was not interested in amateurs but this was all about professionalizing the modding scene to a few contributors.
> so Valve slapped on another 30% while not providing any or minimal QA from Valve
Valve was charging 30% for operating the storefront, handling payment, the value of having spent years building a site where people are willing to come and pay for things, the value of having built a service that would allow modders to make money building off of another company's work, and so on. Valve's 30% was well deserved.
Heaving dealt with Valve customer service a few times, the 30% is definitely not going into training, hiring more or providing responsive and helpful customer service. Valve only get's away with it because they run a de facto monopoly.
> non-waiveable EU consumer rights regulations require 14 days
I don't think this is true in the case of purely digital products. As far as I am aware of the german implementation of this regulation it explicitly allows to waive the rights before the first download. Like many companies steam does this during checkout ("I agree..").
«In the case of digital content, the cooling-off period expires when the downloading or streaming starts.»
Says you can't waive it; for digital downloads the 14 day period get's annulled once you start downloading/streaming, not at checkout. Since many more things can go wrong with software(games) then compared to linear media (books/music/video) that implementation is still questionable.
Untouched by this, at least in Germany every product sold (including Software) comes with two years of warranty ("Gewährleistung") which is established between the consumer an the reseller (at point of final sale, in this case Valve SARL) which first requires the reseller to provide a working product ("Nacherfüllung") if that's not possible the customer is entitled to a refund. Not that that this is found in many online shops in Germany, but those are the regulations that Valve has to follow by when selling software (games) to German customers.