[skizm]

You can't charge based on the modder's intent. If a mod was made out of love vs. money grab is irrelevant. If people want to pay for it the question is how much money should the modder get?

You're saying the 25% is a raw deal. Maybe it is, but that's the mass-market deal. If you're mod is awesome, then maybe the publisher is willing to buy it or pay for it. Counter Strike was a mod that Valve bought and made into a standalone game. If it is shitty, well then you get the mass-market deal or nothing. Everything is a negotiation. If you think the company is treating you like shit, then don't do free work for them that they didn't ask for.

[Raphmedia]

How would you do it? Be glad the that some of the money is send to the modder when you purchase a mod and have modders abandon games that take too big a cut?

From my point of view, if this happens, it would simply hurt the modding community as a whole. Big games like Skyrim will get a big quantity of low quality mods that sells for lower and lower, driving the market down, making the modder already small cut even smaller.

Damn, this situation is complicated. I understand why Steam pulled the plug while they think about it more.

[skizm]

Bethesda/Valve will do some A/B testing with different games to see what the optimal pricing/payout scheme is, but right now modders get absolutely nothing (donations are near 0 even for top modders) so I just don't see how adding the option to get paid (even a small amount) is a bad thing for the community.

As an aside, I actually think the way the payout scheme was pretty fair. I mean valve is taking 30% of everything sold on their marketplace no matter what, so if you write that out and only count the money that could go to the publisher the split was actually 65/35 publisher/modder.

That said, I can understand people arguing too much or too little. All I am saying is that I think, overall, paid mods are a net positive once they shake out the kinks.