[yebyen]

> 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.

[Already__Taken]

What about mods that the publisher can't do?

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.

[1]:http://www.moddb.com/mods/8-ball-prestige-packs-dlc-pc

[yebyen]

If you think about it, those mods probably wouldn't be able to be sold either (forget anyone taking a cut)

Unless a deal could have been worked out with Ferrari. But good on you for asking something different!

[Already__Taken]

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.

[yebyen]

That's a great example of a mod that just plainly repairs a deficiency in the original game! I was in fact struggling to think of one.

It's clear that this game is abandoned and there's no further support coming from Westwood Studios for it, not to mention that it won't be coming available on Steam any time soon. As troubled as this analogy is, ...

I think it's still clear that in a hypothetical scenario where Steam gets the rights to distribute RA2 and Westwood (EA? who owns the rights to C&C series now?) has still washed their hands of support for it long ago, it would make sense for Steam to give the mod authors the option of sending back some percent of the gross (1-10%) to the rights holders for the game. Sort of a "vote with your dollars" kind of thing.

Of course if we are really talking about sending "extra money" to EA to say thanks, as a mod author or gamer I'm probably going to need to vomit right away, but replace EA with some other hypothetical not-shitty company (the ghost of Westwood) and I think you've got a deal.

This whole scenario just makes me reflect on the relatively recent development of Apple deciding that they can't allow any apps in their phone store that mention support for any products competing with Apple Watch (misfit, fitbit, etc)

The way this played out just goes to show who really owns the greatest share of the attention of Valve and Steam (it's the game companies, not the mods or the community.)

[talmand]

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.

[random28345]

> 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.

[yebyen]

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.

[random28345]

> I don't see how the idea that Steam should get a share approaching 30% is any less repugnant than that.

If you don't understand they 30% is reasonable, then you haven't tried to sell a game in the last 5 years.

That 30% you're paying increases your sales by a factor of 50x, and game developers are quite happy to take 70% of a much larger pie.

[yebyen]

> to take 70%

We were talking about the mod sales. Nobody is taking 70%, unless you counted the original game sale as part of the pie. Maybe we should.

The split as I understood it to be defined was: Valve takes 30% (arguably OK, but I'd argue for less), Game dev gets 45% (passive income hacker, woo!) and the Mod dev gets 25%.

I think it would be perfectly reasonable for Mod devs to get 45% of the sales of their own mods, but Valve asked Bethesda to define the split. What self-respecting PIH is going to give themselves or their own company less than 50%, really, if they are unilaterally the one making the decision about who gets paid and how much?

You are also right about one more thing, I don't have the first idea about selling games. But I would argue it's more work to build EITHER or BOTH a game engine and a mod than it is to sell it. In other words, Bethesda's cut should not be less than Valve's, in my humble opinion, and those mods would NOT have been for sale (or for free) without Bethesda and their game engine.

(Or at least, we would have entirely some other developer and game to thank for their share in this controversy.)

[lsaferite]

Bethesda did get something. They got my purchase of the original game plus all of the DLCs. All at initial sale prices to boot.

Do they deserve more than that?

[yebyen]

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!