Skyrim Mods: now with paid option

[salm]

I think companies want to monetize mods and I don´t think there is much that is going to stop them.
I think there are plenty of ways how this can be done in really bad ways. See the Valve and Bethesda did it and it backfired enormously.
It could be don a lot worse, though. It could be done just good enough, so that people complain but not enough to keep Valve from making money. And then it could be done in a bunch of ways that is good for everybody. Ideally that would mean that the free aspect of modding and a commercial version coexist and that the comercialisation part introduces an incentive for developers to implement better mod tools and easier access to files and perhaps promotion.

[Purple]

There can still be free mods. They just need to implement a system with wich you can tag your mod as commercial so that everybody knows that they may not use it. Mods exist even though there is commercial downloadable content which is nothing else than commercial mods.

You just don't get it. DLC is already blurring the difference between mods and games and not in a good way. But it at the very least has some standards of quality you expect (see what Thanas said, I won't needlessly repeat it).

There will probably be certain amount of liscensing violation but who cares? That happens almost everywhere. You don´t have to make a perfect system, just one that is good enough.

The mod devs, that's who. If you want company lawyers breathing down your neck for stealing their share of the money be my guest. No one sane is going to invest months or years of his time on a project that exists only for as long as the game company decides not to shut you down.

Or you could use the free mods and puzzle blocks to develop your mods and simply not use the commercial ones. While some modders will leave the free mod community the free mod community won´t be completely depopulated. After all open source software exists and people dedicate time to it even though they could make money with their time and skill.

It will however be massively damaged. Worse yet, it will be flooded by people producing useless reskins and worthless bits just to earn some money. And the big high profile mods that take months or years to develop will constantly see their assets ripped off and monetized by others.

These Engines are really not all that different these days. You can downlaod the Unreal or Unity Engine and a bunch of Templates and Models and you build your own game with very little or no programming or 3D modelling skill.

Have you actually worked with either of those?

Now, obviously it isn´t the exact same thing but the mechanisms that drive the respective content shops could be used to sell modding content as well.

The two are only about as similar as driving a car or piloting an airplane. You have a steering wheel in both!

There are similar problems, like what happens if somebody sells a script in the Unreal shop that borrows severely from a different script written by somebody else for free? And despite that they have functioning system.

You can't really license programing scripts like that anyway. I mean, you can patent the algorithms but that's that. Modding is very different because of its nature.

[TheFeniX]

I think companies want to monetize mods and I don´t think there is much that is going to stop them.

Intense nerd rage, which I'm surprised actually worked in this case. Probably because valve and Beth didn't want to spend money to make money and will now instead wait till they can force consumers into the system with something like Fallout4, because the community only has a backbone when there's not some juicy pile of code they might not get to pre-order.

I think there are plenty of ways how this can be done in really bad ways. See the Valve and Bethesda did it and it backfired enormously.
It could be don a lot worse, though. It could be done just good enough, so that people complain but not enough to keep Valve from making money. And then it could be done in a bunch of ways that is good for everybody. Ideally that would mean that the free aspect of modding and a commercial version coexist and that the comercialisation part introduces an incentive for developers to implement better mod tools and easier access to files and perhaps promotion.

When has it ever been done right? valve buying out the Counter-Strike and Team Fortress teams? DICE buying out the Desert Combat team to work on BF2? Those were whole teams of guys who should have been working in the industry anyways. And seen many mods for BF3 or 4? There's, what?, the Sims modding community, which has it's own myriad of issues and probably shouldn't be looked at as a model for anything.

When people talk about "it's ok in principle" it just smacks as a worthless precursor comment people add in to give themselves some kind of "middle-ground" argument. There is no middle-ground here. This goes horribly wrong in every sense when money vastly outweighs the desire to make a quality game.

Look at unlocks. Used to be you beat the game, beat a super-boss, entered in some code and you got a new character, reskin, whatever. "Hey, let's monetize that!" Then it was pre-purchase DLC (sometimes locked ON THE DISC), now it's cough up money or buy DLC to unlock what you already paid money for. God damn, they sell us level-ups now. As I mentioned before, Desert Combat was a huge part of of the longevity of BF1942 and DICE monetized that skill for BF2. Now there's no (or very little) mod community for BF3/4.

This shit is like if you popped in your Avenger's DVD and when Hulk was about to kick ass, a pop-up appeared and said "pay $5 for HULK SMASH." Even worse, it's "Pay $0.99 for MULK DEMOLISH!" And, oh yea, it might make your DVD unwatchable unless you uninstall it. That shit's not "good in theory," I don't know why people give video games a pass. Not when a better system has been around forever. To make modding into a workable system like DLC is, you have to treat it like DLC. Then it just becomes DLC, buggy, broken, stolen assets DLC with the creator getting dick for a cut. The market is already flooded with bullshit cash-grab low-quality DLC from so-called AAA developers. Why would I buy into a system that just expands that to anyone who can open the CK? Because someone, somewhere, at some point in time might make a system that isn't out to gouge me to death ($5 to have your character bent over a barrel!)?

Unreal doesn't count because they are building a development community, not a modding one: They aren't throwing some broken SDKs at the greater-Internet and saying "good luck with that." You really think Bethesda is going to build that kind of community, when a solid one already exists, and they can't even release an error free SDK? Besides, even if someone does come along to do it right, it won't be the big boys. They just fuck everything up terribly.

You know who does F2P right? Angry Birds. You know who takes that type of model and turns it into dogshit? Fucking EA. Beth/Zenimax aren't much better.

[Lagmonster]

1. Modders already can profit from work, via donations. The entire Silent Hunter mod scene for example finances itself from donations, which kept the main mod site running for several decades now. So I think this is a bit of a false dilemma.

That's fine by me. Kickstart it if you wish. My only concern is that Person Who Does Work gets paid if they wish to be. If a modder said, "I have this major update that I'll release if I get X dollars in donations", awesome. Just as long as there is an avenue for the artist/programmer. In all honesty, I was under the impression that modders were generally forbidden from selling mods.

2. You cannot feasibly restrict this to some games. You can expect that the worst devs (aka the especially greedy bastards like EA, Bethesda etc.) will use this for all their games because they see a cash grab. The good developers will not do so and might even fight any attempt to monetize mods because their games live and die with their mod scenes (like Paradox). So in essence, all you get is shittier games becoming shittier due to more shitty dev interference and better games becoming shittier as well because talent might shift to where the money is.

Asking how to 'restrict' paid modding to games friendly to it is the wrong question: The right question is to ask "where would it work, and where wouldn't it?", and watch developers succeed or fail individually. Some games would be trivially easy to introduce a mod store in for certain assets. Take the Sims, where there is already a built-in store for new art assets (new couches, wallpapers, etc.), and which doesn't seem to require technical complexity to integrate. It would be easy to commission fan work and add it to their store. Other games couldn't possibly have such a system without either confusion, malice, or failure. It isn't that difficult to envision how a paid modding system would benefit some games and horribly doom others.

3. If this goes, shitty devs will shift even more of the actual developing over to the mod scene. "After all, these monkey do better work for free and extra profit for us, so why not exploit it?"

A few posts back I said that what is sorely needed is a reliable refund program for video games that would prevent this kind of behaviour by making it easy for companies to lose money on poor products. It strikes me as one of the few products where companies can knowingly sell defective or incomplete products while marketing them as otherwise.

4. This will cumulate in mods having DRM as well.

Well, possibly. Even some game devs are trying to hide DRM or avoid it entirely due to its severe unpopularity, so this is also speculative.

And that in some cases Bethesda should be the ones paying for mods, not the consumer. For example, they should have straight up written a check to the people who made the unofficial patches.

That is just baseless optimism, no way in hell any shitty dev will ever pay for mods. Paradox once bought a mod (Arsenal of Democracy for HoI2) and sold it, but they are by far the exception. So I can't see this ever working out the way you intend to.

Of course it's baseless optimism. It also may or may not be good business: Modders almost certainly cost an order of magnitude less cash than a QA team. That's an avenue I haven't explored that could benefit modders or hurt gamers.

So I can't see any good at all coming out of this except for a hypothetical solution to a problem that IMO doesn't even exist in the first place.

We disagree. I think "This person is forbidden from demanding compensation for his artistic work" is a problem. The top modders should have some venue to be compensated if they wish to be.

[TheFeniX]

We disagree. I think "This person is forbidden from demanding compensation for his artistic work" is a problem. The top modders should have some venue to be compensated if they wish to be.

I don't think this system works like that. Giving donations is one thing, but look at the top mods on the Nexus.

Nude mods, male and female: doubt that would make it through Beth's QA. I would also bet money, at the least, the textures are rips and not created by hand.
Immersive Armors: laundry list of credits and contributors. Probably a lot of borrowed assets, but who cares: he isn't directly making money off it.
Unofficial patchs, FNIS, SKyUI, Racemenu, XP Skeleton, Realistic Ragodolls, a map update, 2K textures, and more: all QoL improvement mods that exist because Beth gave PC users a console port with very little inherent customization.
Hairs: ok. Give you that one. Oh wait, he took meshes from The Sims.

There's literally not a mod up there, at least that I can see, that doesn't either take other people's work, have multiple modders, gives users a functioning PC experience, or a combination of all three. That is specifically due to the current setup of the Skyrim modding community and why it is one of the most expansive ones out there, if not the most expansive. A system that places limits on that, no matter how consumer friendly (and it won't be) will narrow it down to what we have with what it will become: DLC. Which for every Dawnguard, Dragonborn, Shivering Idles, etc, we get a dozen more sets of garbage like horse armor and paint.exe reskins.

[Elheru Aran]

It may be ripping stuff off, but it still takes a lot of time, some programming, and a certain degree of thinking things through to come up with all that. If it's valued enough by the community, I don't see any reason why the people running the game wouldn't acknowledge that with a small prize. Hell, it could even be something like just giving them a $10 ingame store card or something like that.

[Thanas]

It may be ripping stuff off, but it still takes a lot of time, some programming, and a certain degree of thinking things through to come up with all that. If it's valued enough by the community, I don't see any reason why the people running the game wouldn't acknowledge that with a small prize. Hell, it could even be something like just giving them a $10 ingame store card or something like that.

That is not what we are talking about here (and to my knowledge no modder has ever received a thank you from a publisher).

That's fine by me. Kickstart it if you wish. My only concern is that Person Who Does Work gets paid if they wish to be. If a modder said, "I have this major update that I'll release if I get X dollars in donations", awesome. Just as long as there is an avenue for the artist/programmer. In all honesty, I was under the impression that modders were generally forbidden from selling mods.

That is why it is a donation. Nobody is selling mods.

Asking how to 'restrict' paid modding to games friendly to it is the wrong question

On the contrary. That is the heart of the matter. Why should shitty devs get further money from the work of other people?

3. If this goes, shitty devs will shift even more of the actual developing over to the mod scene. "After all, these monkey do better work for free and extra profit for us, so why not exploit it?"

A few posts back I said that what is sorely needed is a reliable refund program for video games that would prevent this kind of behaviour by making it easy for companies to lose money on poor products. It strikes me as one of the few products where companies can knowingly sell defective or incomplete products while marketing them as otherwise.

a) dodging the question
b) I might just as well wish for a blowjob from Kate Beckinsale, it is not going to happen.

4. This will cumulate in mods having DRM as well.

Well, possibly. Even some game devs are trying to hide DRM or avoid it entirely due to its severe unpopularity, so this is also speculative.

There are only three, maybe four, game devs who do not use DRM, and only one is an AAA content producer.

That is just baseless optimism, no way in hell any shitty dev will ever pay for mods. Paradox once bought a mod (Arsenal of Democracy for HoI2) and sold it, but they are by far the exception. So I can't see this ever working out the way you intend to.

Of course it's baseless optimism. It also may or may not be good business: Modders almost certainly cost an order of magnitude less cash than a QA team. That's an avenue I haven't explored that could benefit modders or hurt gamers.

So...let's fire the Q&A teams in favor of exploiting modders. Do you even realize what you are arguing for here?

We disagree. I think "This person is forbidden from demanding compensation for his artistic work" is a problem. The top modders should have some venue to be compensated if they wish to be.

I don't think you understand what a mod is and how modders work. These are hobbies. They are not work. Nobody who does a mod does expect it to be a source of income. I suspect that if you had any involvement with a mod scene you would not even come up with those ideas that are beyond bizarre.

[TheFeniX]

It may be ripping stuff off, but it still takes a lot of time, some programming, and a certain degree of thinking things through to come up with all that. If it's valued enough by the community, I don't see any reason why the people running the game wouldn't acknowledge that with a small prize. Hell, it could even be something like just giving them a $10 ingame store card or something like that.

So theft is ok as long as you worked really hard? I worked really hard to rebuild the scripts from Crime and Punishment to make my own tweaks for personal use because the author ignored my e-mails. Can I have recognition now?

If they wanted to truly acknowledge the developers of QoL mods, they would include the mods into the base game at no extra charge to the consumer (or worst case, included in an expansion, like Crossbows for Dawnguard), not try and get them to sell them while Beth keeps most the money. Further, what happens when Apachii gets a check from Beth? EA doesn't care enough to fight fair use for a free mod from some random person. But when money is involved and EA isn't the one stealing? They aren't going to care Beth isn't paying them directly for their mod, only their "hard work." Someone is going to get stepped on, and it isn't going to be Beth because they have lawyers and money.

[salm]

You just don't get it. DLC is already blurring the difference between mods and games and not in a good way. But it at the very least has some standards of quality you expect (see what Thanas said, I won't needlessly repeat it).

Yes it is blurring the line. My point exactly. A content or mod App store done right would ensure quality. See Unreal and Unity Content stores.

The mod devs, that's who. If you want company lawyers breathing down your neck for stealing their share of the money be my guest. No one sane is going to invest months or years of his time on a project that exists only for as long as the game company decides not to shut you down.

Yes they will. That is, if the liscensing is transparent enough. If it is clear that your mod gets shut down if you use stuff form mod x then this shouldn´t be a problem. Mods are shut down now for trade mark violations, like when people create Star Wars or similar mods. Modding doesn´t suffer from that enough to keep modding form existing.

It will however be massively damaged. Worse yet, it will be flooded by people producing useless reskins and worthless bits just to earn some money. And the big high profile mods that take months or years to develop will constantly see their assets ripped off and monetized by others.

Yes, there will be people creating useless resikins. Who cares? These reskins are produced allready. People who want to create total conversions for free as their hobby won´t suddently jump to creating boring reskins. Furthermore, since modding and creating games in general is getting a lot easier there will be even more modders and hobby game maker in the future than there are now, so there will be a certain amount producing quality mods just like there are a certain amount of people producing absolutely fantastic open source software.

Have you actually worked with either of those?

Yeah, I got my Unreal liscence when it went down to 20 bucks per month. Since January 2015 it is free. It is also piss easy to use, in fact it is absolutely trivial to learn how to produce stuff with the Unreal Engine compared to how horribly complicated it was to mod the Doom 3 engine. Or even modding the Source engine which was a breeze compared to Doom 3.

The two are only about as similar as driving a car or piloting an airplane. You have a steering wheel in both!

Please explain why you think that?

You can't really license programing scripts like that anyway. I mean, you can patent the algorithms but that's that. Modding is very different because of its nature.

No it isn´t.

[salm]

Intense nerd rage, which I'm surprised actually worked in this case. Probably because valve and Beth didn't want to spend money to make money and will now instead wait till they can force consumers into the system with something like Fallout4, because the community only has a backbone when there's not some juicy pile of code they might not get to pre-order.

I don´t disagree with that. I just think that if Valve or whoever does it sufficiently right then there won´t be enough nerd rage.

When has it ever been done right? valve buying out the Counter-Strike and Team Fortress teams? DICE buying out the Desert Combat team to work on BF2? Those were whole teams of guys who should have been working in the industry anyways. And seen many mods for BF3 or 4? There's, what?, the Sims modding community, which has it's own myriad of issues and probably shouldn't be looked at as a model for anything.

When people talk about "it's ok in principle" it just smacks as a worthless precursor comment people add in to give themselves some kind of "middle-ground" argument. There is no middle-ground here. This goes horribly wrong in every sense when money vastly outweighs the desire to make a quality game.

It really might go horribly wrong. I won´t be surprised if it does. But there are examples like the Epic and Unity content store where it went pretty good. In principal The Unreal Engine monetizes on this principal. They give out free software and cash in on it as soon as people either create commercial games with it or create and sell content which other game creators use to create games.

Look at unlocks. Used to be you beat the game, beat a super-boss, entered in some code and you got a new character, reskin, whatever. "Hey, let's monetize that!" Then it was pre-purchase DLC (sometimes locked ON THE DISC), now it's cough up money or buy DLC to unlock what you already paid money for. God damn, they sell us level-ups now. As I mentioned before, Desert Combat was a huge part of of the longevity of BF1942 and DICE monetized that skill for BF2. Now there's no (or very little) mod community for BF3/4.

This shit is like if you popped in your Avenger's DVD and when Hulk was about to kick ass, a pop-up appeared and said "pay $5 for HULK SMASH." Even worse, it's "Pay $0.99 for MULK DEMOLISH!" And, oh yea, it might make your DVD unwatchable unless you uninstall it. That shit's not "good in theory," I don't know why people give video games a pass. Not when a better system has been around forever. To make modding into a workable system like DLC is, you have to treat it like DLC. Then it just becomes DLC, buggy, broken, stolen assets DLC with the creator getting dick for a cut. The market is already flooded with bullshit cash-grab low-quality DLC from so-called AAA developers. Why would I buy into a system that just expands that to anyone who can open the CK? Because someone, somewhere, at some point in time might make a system that isn't out to gouge me to death ($5 to have your character bent over a barrel!)?

You really don´t have to like it. I´m not sure if I like it myself. I´m saying that I could like it if it is done right and would not like it if it was done badly. As for unlocks, I really don´t care about unlock like a charcter reskin now costing money. I don´t buy it and I was never interested in getting it after completing task X or task Y.

Unreal doesn't count because they are building a development community, not a modding one: They aren't throwing some broken SDKs at the greater-Internet and saying "good luck with that." You really think Bethesda is going to build that kind of community, when a solid one already exists, and they can't even release an error free SDK? Besides, even if someone does come along to do it right, it won't be the big boys. They just fuck everything up terribly.

You know who does F2P right? Angry Birds. You know who takes that type of model and turns it into dogshit? Fucking EA. Beth/Zenimax aren't much better.

That is the question. They have a development community. Modding is development with the only difference that there are more things allready finished. But if you have looked at the most recent Unreal and Unity iterations you will see that it is getting a lot more like modding. Just ten 7 years back I needed to get a programmer to change anything besides silly reskins and couple of levels in the doom engine. Now I can create a full blown game without kowing shit about programming in the unreal engine. I can download templates for all kinds of games and change the rules accordingly.
Modding 7 years ago was more difficult than creating an own game is these days. At least if you move past silly reskins or increasing the destructive power of the shotgun.

Anyway, Valve and Bethesda want to cash in on it. Are they willing to create a sufficiently good enviornmet for this to happen? I don´t know. But they see that Unreal, Unity and perhaps Crytech (not sure about that) have functioning business models for that so they might be trying to get a slice of that cake. Otherwise a lot of modders might simply move on to Unreal or Unity and leave Bethesda behind.

[Lagmonster]

Asking how to 'restrict' paid modding to games friendly to it is the wrong question

On the contrary. That is the heart of the matter. Why should shitty devs get further money from the work of other people?

You may need to explain why this is the 'heart of the matter' in case I didn't understand, but I don't think that the "shittiness" of the dev matters, because it's the modders' fault if they decide to support that behaviour. Modding is, after all, voluntary, as is choosing to buy the games. In a world with paid modding you may find yourself more angry at consumers and modders than you are at the developers/publishers, in the same way that people are more angry with those who buy from telemarketers than at the telemarketers.

However, the actual answer is that since the dev controls the game, they also control the mod community. As an interest point, the guy who made SKSE posted this:

I know this is not the "valiant stand" that some folks have been clamoring for us to take. They want us to forbid the use of SKSE in any paid mods in the hopes that none of the great mods would ever make it to the paid Workshop. Honestly even if we were inclined to take that approach, I don't think it would work. The Script Extenders themselves are on a fairly wobbly legal footing given what we have to do to make things work. Bethesda has always "looked the other way" as far as that is concerned. Trying to prevent paid mods from happening would be more likely to get the Script Extenders banned than successfully preventing paid mods.

The way I read that, even the fundamental modders have no power to deny companies the cut they want; they can only refuse to mod.

3. If this goes, shitty devs will shift even more of the actual developing over to the mod scene. "After all, these monkey do better work for free and extra profit for us, so why not exploit it?"

a) dodging the question

I'm not sure how you're convinced that this 'will' happen, but even a thoroughly lazy publisher is likely to consider that a) it's too big a risk that the community may simply refuse to do the work, thus leaving them in the lurch, and b) it would generate incredibly bad press that could cost them sales down the road. "Baseline playable" is mandatory out of the gate, and that's not likely to change just because of consumers who are willing to fix things for free (and since nobody's taking wild advantage of this free labour as it is, you kinda have to ask how plausible this scenario actually is).

You also need to explain why it's impossible to impose a consumer protection model on video games rather than just dismiss it via sexual fantasy, because if you're going to keep speculating on the upcoming Shitty Devpocalypse then eventually we're going to turn to speculating on viable solutions, including expanded consumer protection laws.

So...let's fire the Q&A teams in favor of exploiting modders. Do you even realize what you are arguing for here?

Yeah. I'm talking about sub-contracting elements of QA to people who do the job better, and then paying them transparently and fairly. I also said roughly three times that I had no idea if such a program would work or not, but it is not 'exploitation'.

I don't think you understand what a mod is and how modders work. These are hobbies. They are not work. Nobody who does a mod does expect it to be a source of income.

I don't think it matters what they expect or don't. We can attach a cash value to the hours of labour and necessary creativity and skill needed to create a mod, so words like 'hobby' and 'work' don't actually mean anything. I don't care how much or little you think I know about modding, everything a human does can be assigned a dollar value. If the modders choose not to charge or are forbidden from doing so, great. If they don't KNOW to charge, less great but still great for me. If they have no choice but to charge, hate that, and mod for profit anyway, I have to ask what kind of integrity they actually have.

But if you really want to insist on this hobby/work distinction, it's easy to point to people who will profit off of something they would do even without the potential for profit, or who started out with a hobby and transitioned it into a career (see: basically all of Etsy), or even who move between the two states.

[TheFeniX]

It really might go horribly wrong. I won´t be surprised if it does. But there are examples like the Epic and Unity content store where it went pretty good. In principal The Unreal Engine monetizes on this principal. They give out free software and cash in on it as soon as people either create commercial games with it or create and sell content which other game creators use to create games.

That's like saying the car modding community has the same principals as someone setting up a free to use shop where you can build your own cars when you may have the artistic skills, but not the mechnical ones. They are related, but they are not the same business model. Though some modders use the modding platform for actual video game development such as what we've got out of the Half-Life and Source engines (Unknown Worlds making Natural Selection, for just one example) that is not the main thrust of the Elder Scrolls modding community. Same with Jedi-Knight and Fallout modding. These are fans of the game series and want to see improved.

You only have to look at the modding content for those games to see that.

As for unlocks, I really don´t care about unlock like a charcter reskin now costing money. I don´t buy it and I was never interested in getting it after completing task X or task Y.

Then you're probably enjoying the emphasis on that versus actual content. The fact is, a lot of consumers have noticed how the DLC trend has moved more and more into cash-grab content. It has become less about "Spears are cool, let's add spears into the game for a nominal price" and instead has become "let's cut out what used to be included in the cost of the game and sell it for more money." People not caring about this ("Dude, you don't HAVE to buy it") are as much of the problem as people who buy the stuff. Without backlash, without "fuck you, I'm not buying your game because you offer this garbage," there is no incentive for them to make quality DLC.

And this is what Skyrim modding will turn into, what it DID turn into, with even one of the paid-modders saying this is what it will turn into. This isn't sky-is-falling paranoia: it already fucking happened within 5 minutes of going live.

That is the question. They have a development community. Modding is development with the only difference that there are more things allready finished.

That "only difference" is a pretty big one.

But if you have looked at the most recent Unreal and Unity iterations you will see that it is getting a lot more like modding. Just ten 7 years back I needed to get a programmer to change anything besides silly reskins and couple of levels in the doom engine. Now I can create a full blown game without kowing shit about programming in the unreal engine. I can download templates for all kinds of games and change the rules accordingly.
Modding 7 years ago was more difficult than creating an own game is these days. At least if you move past silly reskins or increasing the destructive power of the shotgun.

And yet "development" costs are skyrocketing so the poor poor publishers have to monetize every little thing to keep padding their coffers..... And I modded Jedi-Outcast. It wasn't hard when a developer supports the community. That was 13 years ago..... holy fuck, that was 13 years ago...... wow.

Anyway, Valve and Bethesda want to cash in on it. Are they willing to create a sufficiently good enviornmet for this to happen? I don´t know. But they see that Unreal, Unity and perhaps Crytech (not sure about that) have functioning business models for that so they might be trying to get a slice of that cake. Otherwise a lot of modders might simply move on to Unreal or Unity and leave Bethesda behind.

A lot of these people are not interested in development. They want to make small tweaks to a popular Sandbox game with a setting they already like, Elder Scrolls or Fallout and the modding itself it relatively easy when compared to a lot of other games. They probably won't "move on" anywhere, they'll just quit modding.

And what do you mean "you don't know" if they're going to create a good environment? Did you pay no attention to this whole clusterfuck? Do you know nothing about Steam's development "community" in other aspects of the system? It's terribad, but it makes valve money while dumping all the consequences of the piss-poor system on the "developer" and the consumer. Sweet deal.

[salm]

That's like saying the car modding community has the same principals as someone setting up a free to use shop where you can build your own cars when you may have the artistic skills, but not the mechnical ones. They are related, but they are not the same business model. Though some modders use the modding platform for actual video game development such as what we've got out of the Half-Life and Source engines (Unknown Worlds making Natural Selection, for just one example) that is not the main thrust of the Elder Scrolls modding community. Same with Jedi-Knight and Fallout modding. These are fans of the game series and want to see improved.

You only have to look at the modding content for those games to see that.

They are related enough to compare them. They don´t have to be 100% identical.

Then you're probably enjoying the emphasis on that versus actual content. The fact is, a lot of consumers have noticed how the DLC trend has moved more and more into cash-grab content. It has become less about "Spears are cool, let's add spears into the game for a nominal price" and instead has become "let's cut out what used to be included in the cost of the game and sell it for more money." People not caring about this ("Dude, you don't HAVE to buy it") are as much of the problem as people who buy the stuff. Without backlash, without "fuck you, I'm not buying your game because you offer this garbage," there is no incentive for them to make quality DLC.

I´m allready not buying games that have such nonsense integrated. Not buying stuff because of things I don´t like is backlash.

And this is what Skyrim modding will turn into, what it DID turn into, with even one of the paid-modders saying this is what it will turn into. This isn't sky-is-falling paranoia: it already fucking happened within 5 minutes of going live.

It might have happened right after the first, badly implemented iteration of mod monetization.

That "only difference" is a pretty big one.

I don´t see it as that big. I can sell large Addons and huge content packs and even whole game templats on the Epic or Unity store. Or I can sell or give away for free a small piece of script, a single material or animation. The first would be comparable to a totatal conversion whereas the latter would be comparable a reskin or power boos on the shotgun in modding terms.

And yet "development" costs are skyrocketing so the poor poor publishers have to monetize every little thing to keep padding their coffers..... And I modded Jedi-Outcast. It wasn't hard when a developer supports the community. That was 13 years ago..... holy fuck, that was 13 years ago...... wow.

That´s why I said that I needed a programmer. If you´ve got enough people for all the tasks required, then everything is easy. If I´m on myself and have to do stuff outside of my area of expertise then it is difficult. If an Engine like the Unreal Engine has tools that make it easier for me to do things outside of my area of expertise then things are easier. Doom 3 had no such tools. Unreal has plenty.

A lot of these people are not interested in development. They want to make small tweaks to a popular Sandbox game with a setting they already like, Elder Scrolls or Fallout and the modding itself it relatively easy when compared to a lot of other games. They probably won't "move on" anywhere, they'll just quit modding.

There is no reason for these people to stop. They can still implement their small tweaks. Just not in games and mods where it explicitly states that they´re not allowed to.

And what do you mean "you don't know" if they're going to create a good environment? Did you pay no attention to this whole clusterfuck? Do you know nothing about Steam's development "community" in other aspects of the system? It's terribad, but it makes valve money while dumping all the consequences of the piss-poor system on the "developer" and the consumer. Sweet deal.

I know they created a bad environment. Then they took it down a couple of days later. They will implement another iteration of this environment sooner or later. This next or some following iteration might be good. Or perhaps Valves will allways be bad and someone else will create a good one for a different game than Skyrim.

I find it more interesting to think about the requirements for a functionable environment for payed mods than just going lol valVE stoopid payed mod impozibul. Very few things are impossible if there is enough demand for them.

[Thanas]

You may need to explain why this is the 'heart of the matter' in case I didn't understand, but I don't think that the "shittiness" of the dev matters, because it's the modders' fault if they decide to support that behaviour. *snip* The way I read that, even the fundamental modders have no power to deny companies the cut they want; they can only refuse to mod.

Exactly. So here is what is going to happen:
-Shitty devs will milk the mod community for money
- Asswipes will steal mod content, shitty devs will not care, after all they get money
- Shitty devs will stop bug fixing, that is what mods are for and they make money
- DRM gets introduced to mods by shitty devs to prevent any kind of modding otherwise, causing a ton of issues in the first place. Oh, you want to open your game directory to fix one corrupted file? That's cute.
- Likewise, any addition to the game will start costing money.
- Shitty devs will not care that this will destroy a mod community for they got money, as a result modding largely dies out. Instead, what we will have, are a few dev-approved teams that get exploited by the devs to make what is essentially DLC.
- Meanwhile, some asshole will declare that it is all fine and dandy that customers get fucked over even more because after all, some hypothetical guy got 3 dollars a month more for a reskin using somebody elses work in the process.

I'm not sure how you're convinced that this 'will' happen,

Because that is exactly how some publishers already operate? Particularly activision and Bethesda?

but even a thoroughly lazy publisher is likely to consider that a) it's too big a risk that the community may simply refuse to do the work, thus leaving them in the lurch,

...which is why Bethesda and Activision are well-known for their bug fixing, right? Oh wait.

and b) it would generate incredibly bad press that could cost them sales down the road.

Like it does for all the shitty devs like EA and Bethesda out there? Nope. People will buy the shit because they like games.

"Baseline playable" is mandatory out of the gate, and that's not likely to change just because of consumers who are willing to fix things for free (and since nobody's taking wild advantage of this free labour as it is, you kinda have to ask how plausible this scenario actually is).

There is a big difference between "I can get this game to start" (and many games can't even start on launch, see the recent GTA V for that) and "I can play the game with all the options without it crashing.

You also need to explain why it's impossible to impose a consumer protection model on video games rather than just dismiss it via sexual fantasy, because if you're going to keep speculating on the upcoming Shitty Devpocalypse then eventually we're going to turn to speculating on viable solutions, including expanded consumer protection laws.

That's cute. There have been no such protections for over twenty-five years. Without the US going first on this it will not happen (and the US is not willing to do so). So you tell me, where exactly this magical protection is going to come from. If there was decent protection, half the DRM-measures used would be outlawed for fucking over the customers system.

Yeah. I'm talking about sub-contracting elements of QA to people who do the job better, and then paying them transparently and fairly. I also said roughly three times that I had no idea if such a program would work or not, but it is not 'exploitation'.

That can already happen. You don't need paid mods for that.

I don't think it matters what they expect or don't. We can attach a cash value to the hours of labour and necessary creativity and skill needed to create a mod, so words like 'hobby' and 'work' don't actually mean anything. I don't care how much or little you think I know about modding, everything a human does can be assigned a dollar value. If the modders choose not to charge or are forbidden from doing so, great. If they don't KNOW to charge, less great but still great for me. If they have no choice but to charge, hate that, and mod for profit anyway, I have to ask what kind of integrity they actually have.

But if you really want to insist on this hobby/work distinction, it's easy to point to people who will profit off of something they would do even without the potential for profit, or who started out with a hobby and transitioned it into a career (see: basically all of Etsy), or even who move between the two states.

Again, you're not getting it. This is like an amateur without having any knowledge of modding scenes trying to explain to somebody who does how the mod scene is supposed to work. I'm awfully reminded of "but that's how phyiscs are supposed to work, teacher".

[Lagmonster]

Exactly. So here is what is going to happen:

Even assuming we allow every single step in your Nostradamus-like doom prediction, and I don't, almost all of it requires consumers to take it up the ass forever, and for no better (say, indie) developers to step up and create better games. I'm cynical and conservative, but just not that pessimistic. Minecraft is the ultimate answer to the worry that game development will be eaten alive by the worst elements of business.

but even a thoroughly lazy publisher is likely to consider that a) it's too big a risk that the community may simply refuse to do the work, thus leaving them in the lurch,

...which is why Bethesda and Activision are well-known for their bug fixing, right? Oh wait.

Skyrim has been patched at least two dozen times, addressing lists of bugs, stability issues, and so forth. Millions have played the game un-modded top to bottom without significant issue. On what evidence are you basing the idea that they are/are going to intentionally cut corners with the expectation that the mod community will fix bugs?

Like it does for all the shitty devs like EA and Bethesda out there? Nope. People will buy the shit because they like games.

Remember when I said you may end up more angry at modders and consumers than at devs? This is that time.

There is a big difference between "I can get this game to start" (and many games can't even start on launch, see the recent GTA V for that) and "I can play the game with all the options without it crashing.

True, and I won't defend a company for failing to ensure a good quality product. But I'm trying to say that it sounds like a conspiracy theory, not to mention bad business, to go from "made mistakes/rushed products" to "included 'the mod community does free QA' as a stage in their business plan".

That's cute. There have been no such protections for over twenty-five years. Without the US going first on this it will not happen (and the US is not willing to do so). So you tell me, where exactly this magical protection is going to come from. If there was decent protection, half the DRM-measures used would be outlawed for fucking over the customers system.

It's not relevant how much time has passed. Seat belt laws didn't come into play until long after the adoption of the automobile as common. In the case of video games, they've exploded into the mainstream fairly recently, and while I can't say that it'll happen any more than you can say it won't, I'm willing to bet that even powerful industries becomes malleable to change once there is enough consumer interest in that change.

The most recent legislation I remember was actually being bandied about in Europe, who were debating in 2009 to offer consumers a two-year guarantee. I expect it failed in the face of lobbying, but it won't be the last time someone tries it.

But if you really want to insist on this hobby/work distinction, it's easy to point to people who will profit off of something they would do even without the potential for profit, or who started out with a hobby and transitioned it into a career (see: basically all of Etsy), or even who move between the two states.

Again, you're not getting it. This is like an amateur without having any knowledge of modding scenes trying to explain to somebody who does how the mod scene is supposed to work.

You keep saying that without any explanation. I'm sure it sounds reasonable to you, but any even remotely impartial observer is probably wondering what is so special about modding that we can't attach a cash value to it (with or without the creator's permission). My perspective is a) if it takes time, a wage can be assigned to it, and b) nobody's incorruptible (as evidenced by the modders who went paid the nanosecond they could).

[TheFeniX]

They are related enough to compare them. They don´t have to be 100% identical.

Granted. But the business models are completely different. Namely: modding never had one. It was all born out of Carmack being surprised people were able to mod Doom and as a nerd himself thought it was cool. He had to fight the "business guys" (who have always been actively hostile towards modding) to not only avoid taking action against modders with cease and desists but also give them access to tools to make modding easier (such as the ability to mod without changing the vanilla files with WADs). The guys at Epic have always been more nerds than business-men and have decided not to cash in on the modding scene, but give them access to a whole different system in which to create their own work.

I don´t see it as that big. I can sell large Addons and huge content packs and even whole game templats on the Epic or Unity store. Or I can sell or give away for free a small piece of script, a single material or animation. The first would be comparable to a totatal conversion whereas the latter would be comparable a reskin or power boos on the shotgun in modding terms.

That's your work developed under a use license where it stays your work and you can sell it. Up until the whole "sell mods" thing went online, that was impossible.

When I bought Skyrim years back, it was done with the understanding that any mod I downloaded or any that I created was going to be free. It's in their modding license agreement: no modder can charge for that work: Beth technically owns it. Changing that EULA retroactively is bullshit. Just as bullshit as if Epic came out and said "all your shit now belong to us." Just as Rockstar patching music out of old GTA games.

There is no reason for these people to stop. They can still implement their small tweaks. Just not in games and mods where it explicitly states that they´re not allowed to.

That doesn't make a lot of sense.

I know they created a bad environment. Then they took it down a couple of days later. They will implement another iteration of this environment sooner or later. This next or some following iteration might be good. Or perhaps Valves will allways be bad and someone else will create a good one for a different game than Skyrim.

Who? What series? There's not a lot of money on the table here. You have to create a community first.

If Boxing shut down as a promotion tomorrow, you aren't going to have a million more MMA fans overnight. The ES/Fallout modding community doesn't work like that since most of them aren't developers. They don't just move on to the next project. They are fans of that particular series. There's even a rift between the Fallout: NV and Skyrim modders. Skyrim is newer, but NV guys won't move over because Fallout is their game.

I find it more interesting to think about the requirements for a functionable environment for payed mods than just going lol valVE stoopid payed mod impozibul. Very few things are impossible if there is enough demand for them.

You can take it that way, but we already have a paid mods system. It's called DLC. It's 95% garbage with some gems strewn in just like ES and Fallout modding except I don't have to pay anyone to break my game and "refunds" aren't handled with Steam's monopoly money. Even still there is not a huge demand for modding, at least not in the early stages of a cross-platform release. Sure, there are more than enough modders, but as I said earlier: console sales are what made Skyrim a monolith in the sales division and those upfront sales are all suits really care about. All the modding scene did was continue a decent trickle of money when the game would have been dead years ago without it.

Going back to a previous part of my post: I bought Skyrim under certain conditions provided by the publisher in writing. They went back on that, so yea: "stoopid payed mod" or more realistically, fuck people trying to gouge me out of more money on shit I already bought.

[salm]

Granted. But the business models are completely different. Namely: modding never had one. It was all born out of Carmack being surprised people were able to mod Doom and as a nerd himself thought it was cool. He had to fight the "business guys" (who have always been actively hostile towards modding) to not only avoid taking action against modders with cease and desists but also give them access to tools to make modding easier (such as the ability to mod without changing the vanilla files with WADs). The guys at Epic have always been more nerds than business-men and have decided not to cash in on the modding scene, but give them access to a whole different system in which to create their own work.

Modding and indie or hobby game development are similar enough to look at the monetisation possibilities that one of them has and use it as a blueprint for the other.

That's your work developed under a use license where it stays your work and you can sell it. Up until the whole "sell mods" thing went online, that was impossible.

Up until now. So? Change it. Make some transparent system where it is clear who may mod what. If you succeed in doing this one big step in solving this problem is taken.

When I bought Skyrim years back, it was done with the understanding that any mod I downloaded or any that I created was going to be free. It's in their modding license agreement: no modder can charge for that work: Beth technically owns it. Changing that EULA retroactively is bullshit. Just as bullshit as if Epic came out and said "all your shit now belong to us." Just as Rockstar patching music out of old GTA games.

Changing the EULA is the opposite of transparency, hence the opposite of what I´m proposing as a requirement for a good monetisation model.

That doesn't make a lot of sense.

What about it doesn´t? You make a mod. You don´t tag it as commercial. Therefore people may use it and mod it at will and they may not sell it. You make another mod and tag it as commercial mod. Therefore people may not use it in their own mods. This isn´t something unusual. Open and closed source software has been around for ages and people manage to handle the differences just fine. It just needs to be easily distinguishable what may and may not be altered and/or sold.

Who? What series? There's not a lot of money on the table here. You have to create a community first.

Nobody knows. That doesn´t make it impossible to create mechanisms which make commercial mods possible. There will be modding communities after Skyrim and if you have these mechanism developed you can implement them in a decent way from the beginning. If you don´t have them beforehand you might have to deal with the same clusteruck they are dealing at Valve.

You can take it that way, but we already have a paid mods system. It's called DLC. It's 95% garbage with some gems strewn in just like ES and Fallout modding except I don't have to pay anyone to break my game and "refunds" aren't handled with Steam's monopoly money. Even still there is not a huge demand for modding, at least not in the early stages of a cross-platform release. Sure, there are more than enough modders, but as I said earlier: console sales are what made Skyrim a monolith in the sales division and those upfront sales are all suits really care about. All the modding scene did was continue a decent trickle of money when the game would have been dead years ago without it.

So you are not happy with the status quo of commercial mods (DLC). And therefore we should keep the status quo and not think about better systems? I don´t get it. You don´t like the current system and don´t want a different one either. Is the only thig you´d be happy with a system in which there are no commercial mods at all? That´s fine but I doubt that is going to happen because companies are smelling dollars. Therefore it would be better if a decent system was implemented than a bad one.

Going back to a previous part of my post: I bought Skyrim under certain conditions provided by the publisher in writing. They went back on that, so yea: "stoopid payed mod" or more realistically, fuck people trying to gouge me out of more money on shit I already bought.

I´m not arguing with that. This was a bad move. But it´s more interesting to discuss what would be a good move in the future, imo.