7 ms·

I think Valve/Steam (and Bethesda) really screwed up on this one. Although the idea of modders being fairly compensated for their work is a great idea the execu

I think Valve/Steam (and Bethesda) really screwed up on this one. Although the idea of modders being fairly compensated for their work is a great idea the execution was poor at best. Only 25% going to the content creators? Really? And a poor returns mechanism, getting a refund gets you banned from the steam store for 7 days to stop abuse. That's a poor returns policy when you're buying things like mods that might be of really poor quality once you start to use them.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
nailer 11y ago
Ditto. I'd quite happily pay for mods - they add value, there's more a chance of bugs being fixed, Steam would make installation less of a hassle. But 25% going to the authors is awful. The game's original creators - who already benefit from increased sales - additionally get more of the revenue than the actual mod creator.
- Jolijn 11y ago
  In business terms, you could consider giving a cut to the modders a marketing expense (you might sell more because the mods increase the value of your game, perhaps?). But you can also consider it as providing a platform that modders exploit commercially, and you can squeeze them as much as is sensible in any commercial relationship. I think the number of people buying a game because of a mod is rather small, so business people will see things more from the second viewpoint.
  - nailer 11y ago
    Really? I'd never buy Half Life 1, since late 90s graphics looks pretty poor these days, but I'd happily pay for it to use Black Mesa. Better yet - from another post here: > "How many copies of Arma 2 were sold explicitly because of DayZ? How many copies of Half-life were sold because of Counter Strike? Warcraft 3 and Dota? etc."
- malka 11y ago
  The biggest issue for me was 'library' mods. ie mods that sole purpose is being used by other mods. SKSE for instance. They were virtually unable to profit of this system. However, if Steam handled mods dependy, they could retribute mods like this. That could actually be very good for AppStore, and free libraries : each sale in the appstore could also profit to the ones that created the basic build block.
- gkwelding 11y ago
  This is true, and if you read into it you'll find that it wasn't anything to do with Valve, but actually Bethesda who defined the 25%, they've already profited immensely from the game and I found it quite hard to swallow that they were not stiffing dedicated content creators.
  - toxican 11y ago
    I struggle to see why Bethesda has any say at all. They need Valve/Steam more than Valve/Steam need Bethesda. What, are they going to launch their own paid mod system? Who would waste their time with that? Seems to me like Valve holds all the cards... edit: And maybe Bethesda would've taken their ball and gone home for any less, but I'm sure Valve could've found another developer. They probably should have ,given Bethesda's bad reputation for making games that need bug-fixing mods, terrible DLC, and the vastness of the FREE modding community.
- giancarlostoro 11y ago
  I don't understand, Steam hosts mods for free, so why would they want such a huge chunk? Then Bethesda just needs a minor incentive for developing the mod tools, which were already funded for the creation of the game (I imagine they use the same tools, if not something more advanced, correct me if I'm wrong?). In fact the mod tools don't get updated all that often after being released as far as I'm aware.
  - aethr 11y ago
    When Steam is hosting mods for free, then they are effectively just hosting files. They transfer so much data, I can imagine this would be effectively zero cost for them. Once they start charging for something, the entire payment infrastructure is now part of the picture. They need to pay merchant fees, assume risk for disputed transactions, arrange for the money to be split up and transfered to stakeholders, etc. This may not account for 30% (who knows) but it does make sense to charge something.
  - duaneb 11y ago
    I dunno, a mod store could raise the support necessary for running a store by an order of magnitude or two. Plus, to their credit, it seems like they were spitballing and ready to revise. EDIT: Actually, they will get a favorable reaction to a much more reasonable compensation (say 25%) to content creators now that the community has gotten the worst of its reaction out. It might even be calculated.
- meddlepal 11y ago
  Unfortunately, I think this concern will be lost in the noise. The most noise on this issue seems to have been that gamers do not want to pay for mods and not that modders feel they are being unfairly compensated. I really don't have an issue with paying for good mods and in fact I was really excited by the initial announcement because I would have totally gotten into game modding if I could earn some significant supplemental income doing it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- madez 11y ago
  It's an example for the perfectly accepted greed in the corporate world. Valve claims that 30% share is fair while having one of the highest income per employee of any company. That means that their share is too high. It's more than what the government demands from you, while the government is _much_ more important than Valve is for any business. The CEO of Valve argues that money steers the community. That's true, and it leads to slavery, drug trafficking criminal organizations and war if the government doesn't regulate. Commercialization does not only have good consequences. Though being able to extort more money out of the masses might skew your vision on that. Just because it sells doesn't mean people like it. It might be lack of alternatives. I'm not in principle against money. If you really think that you should, offering a service to make payments to the authors easy might be good. But among many things, DON'T BE RIDICULOUSLY GREEDY. Let's suppose now that to develop the infrastructure for your service was really expensive and the market volume is not big enough to get the investment back with small percentages. This is an interesting situation because even if you are "forced" to offer it with 25% share for the author some authors will use it due to lack of alternatives. Right now I don't have a good solution to this problem. Maybe lower your cut according with the return you already got until you arrived at a fair share? Maybe the best would be if you didn't offer your service at all...
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    > while the government is _much_ more important than Valve is for any business. Hah. If only that were true. The government's only positive role in commerce is ensuring political stability. Lots of times, they fail hard at that one job. Once you have political stability, then the government becomes a power broker. The tax system is really an elaborate financial instrument for big business, has been ever since the dawn of mercantilism. The value you gain from the government is proportional to how close you are to the giant sums of money being funneled through it. Sure, there are things like welfare programs that ensure an adequate baseline of minimum prosperity, (i.e. the homeless in the US won't starve to death, and might get a bed to sleep on a couple times a week) but you only really benefit from them if you really need them, and relying on them is no fun. And we only have those because those of us close to the poor, who can't just shut them out, threw enough of a fit to force the elites to. The rest of us, lower and middle classes, small and medium businesses, including entities like Valve, don't get squat from the government. We have to earn our own keep, we can't rely on the government to bail us out. The government is entirely too small to help out the rest of society in any meaningful way. They can try to pass laws, but laws breed loopholes and suck for the same reason Valve's lofty initiative failed, it's impossible to consider the incentive structure of the new world you're creating with a law until you actually enact it and see what's going on, and there's only so far hiring experts will get you. Legislation is a long, slow slog towards a saner world on the aggregate, and a vehicle for pork in the particular. The only thing worthwhile the government provides US businesses is in just being there. Great that we have one, but extremely hard to point out specific things it does that aren't already being far better done by other commercial entities.
- TheHypnotist 11y ago
  So you would willingly pay full price for your standard game, whether it's half-life 3, skyrim 2 or whatever, and on top of that pay for mods just because it makes your UI nicer and you like that sweet axe skin?
fallat 11y ago
I think the more important thing is they actually responded to their users. Valve is a model company. Live and learn.
- gkwelding 11y ago
  Exactly. People don't mind if companies screw up like this just as long as they know when to admit they were wrong.
- toxican 11y ago
  Yet people (primarily redditors) were swearing up and down that our complaints meant nothing and that we were wasting our time and that Valve only cared about money. Like seriously, have those people been paying attention? If anybody is going to listen to their userbase, admit their mistake, and do a 180, it's Valve.
  - okasaki 11y ago
    The sentiment probably comes from experiencing Valve's customer support, which is a lot like Google's - either - the automated system solve your problem, or - you have enough influence to generate bad press for them, or - your problem will most likely be ignored.
    - lsaferite 11y ago
      Gabe has acknowledged how horrible the customer support is and they are, supposedly, working on a solution. I count myself fortunate to have never needed to interact with the customer support. <knocks on wood>
      - suby 11y ago
        The time for a solution was ten years ago. It has always been quite bad.
- jclos 11y ago
  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.
giancarlostoro 11y ago
The whole EA getting off Steam fiasco is something similar, except a new policy in Steam wants 30% of anyone's revenue for DLC even if you setup your own payment system, and distribution system. So Steam would be getting money for doing absolutely nothing.
- johnchristopher 11y ago
  Doesn't Valve bring in the users and the channel to them ?
  - giancarlostoro 11y ago
    Used to, I imagine EA is going to sell games regardless of Steam, they have quite a "portfolio" of games that just "sell themselves". The only reason I ever got on Steam was because of Counter-Strike, I imagine the only reason others hear of Origin is because of games from BioWare and DICE.
- bcoates 11y ago
  As a user, I'm totally fine with that. PC game distribution was so braindead that third parties (Steam, etc.) could strong-arm their way into un-bundling. Having chosen a payment and download system I'm not inclined to let game publishers try to force me into a different one, and whatever financial incentives Valve can apply to make that painful is great.
mhuffman 11y ago
They still think that "the problem" was that they were asking for mods to be compensated(and that the exiting mod community doesn't like commercialism), not that they were keeping 3/4 of it.
- tormeh 11y ago
  Valve kept 30%, Bethesda kept 45% and modders got the rest. It's not just Valve's fault.
  - M8 11y ago
    Wow, Bethesda is sure greedy in a self-punishing way. I mean you have to buy the game before buying mods. Surely 5-10% would be enough.
    - Aoyagi 11y ago
      They said something along the lines if "25% is an 'industry standard". I think they referenced to the hats, knives and whatnot being sold on TF2/CS:GO marketplaces.
    - jonlucc 11y ago
      I'm sure from Bethesda's perspective, they own the IP and built all of the tools for the modders. It made sense in their meetings, but failed in the community.
stupidcar 11y ago
I agree with everything you said, but it seemed like a lot of the more nuanced feedback on this was drowned out by a subset of gamers having a screaming tantrum at the suggestion of paying anything for a mod, regardless of where the money was going. I'm hopeful that Valve will eventually try this again on a new game with a fairer compensation structure and a better community infrastructure in place. I'm not so hopeful that that same subset of gamers won't have a tantrum all over again.
- mmf 11y ago
  I wonder what would happen if GitHub placed a clone fee and split it between itself and the repo owner...
  - Mtinie 11y ago
    If that was an option, but not the only option, it could make for an interesting addition to their business model. * Public repositories (fork for free) * Premium repositories (fork for a fee) * Private repositories (restricted to content owner who pays the fee)
  - mcphage 11y ago
    So basically, GitHub offering a service where users could charge for software, and get the source code as well? And not just a core dump, but be part of a community building up that source? ...That's a pretty solid idea.
    - Mtinie 11y ago
      ^ this. If anyone is interested in building it, send me a note, I'd love to be involved (but totally lack the skills to do it myself).
      - mcphage 11y ago
        Heck, me too—I can think of several projects I worked on but eventually gave up on. If there was a way for me to get paid for it, still work on it, and have other people help out as well? Without having to operate my own storefront?
edem 11y ago
It should be the other way around: Steam keeps 25% brokerage.
Aoyagi 11y ago
Where were you with your rational thinking when the witch-hunt was going on on Reddit? It was so disappointing to watch.
pekk 11y ago
The original content creators are the people who made the base game and own the IP of which mods are derivative.
castell 11y ago
Bethesda introduced DLCs to the PC gaming world in 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion#Additional_content http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion#... The first update came as a set of specialized armor for Oblivion‍ 's ridable horses; released on April 3, 2006. Although gamers generally displayed enthusiasm for the concept of micropayments for downloadable in-game content, many expressed their dissatisfaction at the price they had to pay for the relatively minor horse-armor package on the Internet and elsewhere.[85] Hines assured the press that Bethesda was not going to respond rashly to customer criticism. Valve introduced DRM to the PC gaming world in late 2004: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software)#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software)#History Valve's Half-Life 2 was the first game to require installation of the Steam client to play, even for retail copies. This decision was met with concerns about software ownership, software requirements, and issues with overloaded servers demonstrated previously by the Counter-Strike rollout. During this time users faced multiple issues attempting to play the game. There are alternatives like GoG, that are DRM/DLC-free.
- vacri 11y ago
  Valve introduced DRM to the PC gaming world in late 2004 Utter nonsense. Have you never played an abandonware game from the late 80s and early 90s? "Enter the first letter of the third word on page 14 of the manual"? I used to get pirated Amiga 500 floppies with the copy protection stripped out and a little boot animation from the pirates inserted. Valve introduced Steam to the PC gaming world... but then again, it's their product. And when all is said and done, Steam has been a significant net benefit.
  - castell 11y ago
    You are wrong. DRM != copy protection You can own the DVD with a copy protection and even legally create a backup-copy. You simply cannot own a DRM product, as its bound to a server side check. DRM products may suddenly vanish from your PC, or change its content. Valve already wiped some games and changed the regional settings (removing games from certain parts of the world in retrospect) and Rockstar released an automatic patch for GTA San Andreas (2005) over Steam which altered the game (broke several features like widescreen support, removed several songs from radio stations)
TheHypnotist 11y ago
Modders should be able to ask for donations, nothing more. They should see this as an opportunity to create great content based off of a much larger and more established game. If they want to get compensated, perhaps their great content will take off and one day they can make their own standalone, but until then, donations only. See Counter-Strike, DayZ, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Insurgency, et al.
- blakeyrat 11y ago
  Two comments: 1) Valve half-assed the implementation (of course) so that existing mods couldn't be changed to "pay what you want" (a.k.a. donations) unless you deleted and re-uploaded the mod (thus breaking auto-updates for anybody who had the old version). 2) The real tragedy here is that Valve's also turned off the "pay what you want" option in addition to the listed price options. So if I do want to accept donations for my mods, even understanding my "cut" is only 25%, I can no longer do that.
pbhjpbhj 11y ago
>Only 25% going to the content creators? Really? // What percentage do the actual content creators get usually in a blockbuster game release? That probably provided a floor for what Valve/Steam consider reasonable. Is that 25% of gross or net of sales taxes or ...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

nailer 11y ago

Ditto. I'd quite happily pay for mods - they add value, there's more a chance of bugs being fixed, Steam would make installation less of a hassle. But 25% going to the authors is awful. The game's original creators - who already benefit from increased sales - additionally get more of the revenue than the actual mod creator.

Jolijn 11y ago
In business terms, you could consider giving a cut to the modders a marketing expense (you might sell more because the mods increase the value of your game, perhaps?). But you can also consider it as providing a platform that modders exploit commercially, and you can squeeze them as much as is sensible in any commercial relationship. I think the number of people buying a game because of a mod is rather small, so business people will see things more from the second viewpoint.
- nailer 11y ago
  Really? I'd never buy Half Life 1, since late 90s graphics looks pretty poor these days, but I'd happily pay for it to use Black Mesa. Better yet - from another post here: > "How many copies of Arma 2 were sold explicitly because of DayZ? How many copies of Half-life were sold because of Counter Strike? Warcraft 3 and Dota? etc."
malka 11y ago
The biggest issue for me was 'library' mods. ie mods that sole purpose is being used by other mods. SKSE for instance. They were virtually unable to profit of this system. However, if Steam handled mods dependy, they could retribute mods like this. That could actually be very good for AppStore, and free libraries : each sale in the appstore could also profit to the ones that created the basic build block.
gkwelding 11y ago
This is true, and if you read into it you'll find that it wasn't anything to do with Valve, but actually Bethesda who defined the 25%, they've already profited immensely from the game and I found it quite hard to swallow that they were not stiffing dedicated content creators.
- toxican 11y ago
  I struggle to see why Bethesda has any say at all. They need Valve/Steam more than Valve/Steam need Bethesda. What, are they going to launch their own paid mod system? Who would waste their time with that? Seems to me like Valve holds all the cards... edit: And maybe Bethesda would've taken their ball and gone home for any less, but I'm sure Valve could've found another developer. They probably should have ,given Bethesda's bad reputation for making games that need bug-fixing mods, terrible DLC, and the vastness of the FREE modding community.
giancarlostoro 11y ago
I don't understand, Steam hosts mods for free, so why would they want such a huge chunk? Then Bethesda just needs a minor incentive for developing the mod tools, which were already funded for the creation of the game (I imagine they use the same tools, if not something more advanced, correct me if I'm wrong?). In fact the mod tools don't get updated all that often after being released as far as I'm aware.
- aethr 11y ago
  When Steam is hosting mods for free, then they are effectively just hosting files. They transfer so much data, I can imagine this would be effectively zero cost for them. Once they start charging for something, the entire payment infrastructure is now part of the picture. They need to pay merchant fees, assume risk for disputed transactions, arrange for the money to be split up and transfered to stakeholders, etc. This may not account for 30% (who knows) but it does make sense to charge something.
- duaneb 11y ago
  I dunno, a mod store could raise the support necessary for running a store by an order of magnitude or two. Plus, to their credit, it seems like they were spitballing and ready to revise. EDIT: Actually, they will get a favorable reaction to a much more reasonable compensation (say 25%) to content creators now that the community has gotten the worst of its reaction out. It might even be calculated.
meddlepal 11y ago
Unfortunately, I think this concern will be lost in the noise. The most noise on this issue seems to have been that gamers do not want to pay for mods and not that modders feel they are being unfairly compensated. I really don't have an issue with paying for good mods and in fact I was really excited by the initial announcement because I would have totally gotten into game modding if I could earn some significant supplemental income doing it.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
madez 11y ago
It's an example for the perfectly accepted greed in the corporate world. Valve claims that 30% share is fair while having one of the highest income per employee of any company. That means that their share is too high. It's more than what the government demands from you, while the government is _much_ more important than Valve is for any business. The CEO of Valve argues that money steers the community. That's true, and it leads to slavery, drug trafficking criminal organizations and war if the government doesn't regulate. Commercialization does not only have good consequences. Though being able to extort more money out of the masses might skew your vision on that. Just because it sells doesn't mean people like it. It might be lack of alternatives. I'm not in principle against money. If you really think that you should, offering a service to make payments to the authors easy might be good. But among many things, DON'T BE RIDICULOUSLY GREEDY. Let's suppose now that to develop the infrastructure for your service was really expensive and the market volume is not big enough to get the investment back with small percentages. This is an interesting situation because even if you are "forced" to offer it with 25% share for the author some authors will use it due to lack of alternatives. Right now I don't have a good solution to this problem. Maybe lower your cut according with the return you already got until you arrived at a fair share? Maybe the best would be if you didn't offer your service at all...
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  > while the government is _much_ more important than Valve is for any business. Hah. If only that were true. The government's only positive role in commerce is ensuring political stability. Lots of times, they fail hard at that one job. Once you have political stability, then the government becomes a power broker. The tax system is really an elaborate financial instrument for big business, has been ever since the dawn of mercantilism. The value you gain from the government is proportional to how close you are to the giant sums of money being funneled through it. Sure, there are things like welfare programs that ensure an adequate baseline of minimum prosperity, (i.e. the homeless in the US won't starve to death, and might get a bed to sleep on a couple times a week) but you only really benefit from them if you really need them, and relying on them is no fun. And we only have those because those of us close to the poor, who can't just shut them out, threw enough of a fit to force the elites to. The rest of us, lower and middle classes, small and medium businesses, including entities like Valve, don't get squat from the government. We have to earn our own keep, we can't rely on the government to bail us out. The government is entirely too small to help out the rest of society in any meaningful way. They can try to pass laws, but laws breed loopholes and suck for the same reason Valve's lofty initiative failed, it's impossible to consider the incentive structure of the new world you're creating with a law until you actually enact it and see what's going on, and there's only so far hiring experts will get you. Legislation is a long, slow slog towards a saner world on the aggregate, and a vehicle for pork in the particular. The only thing worthwhile the government provides US businesses is in just being there. Great that we have one, but extremely hard to point out specific things it does that aren't already being far better done by other commercial entities.
TheHypnotist 11y ago
So you would willingly pay full price for your standard game, whether it's half-life 3, skyrim 2 or whatever, and on top of that pay for mods just because it makes your UI nicer and you like that sweet axe skin?

fallat 11y ago

I think the more important thing is they actually responded to their users. Valve is a model company. Live and learn.

gkwelding 11y ago
Exactly. People don't mind if companies screw up like this just as long as they know when to admit they were wrong.
toxican 11y ago
Yet people (primarily redditors) were swearing up and down that our complaints meant nothing and that we were wasting our time and that Valve only cared about money. Like seriously, have those people been paying attention? If anybody is going to listen to their userbase, admit their mistake, and do a 180, it's Valve.
- okasaki 11y ago
  The sentiment probably comes from experiencing Valve's customer support, which is a lot like Google's - either - the automated system solve your problem, or - you have enough influence to generate bad press for them, or - your problem will most likely be ignored.
  - lsaferite 11y ago
    Gabe has acknowledged how horrible the customer support is and they are, supposedly, working on a solution. I count myself fortunate to have never needed to interact with the customer support. <knocks on wood>
    - suby 11y ago
      The time for a solution was ten years ago. It has always been quite bad.
jclos 11y ago
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.

giancarlostoro 11y ago

The whole EA getting off Steam fiasco is something similar, except a new policy in Steam wants 30% of anyone's revenue for DLC even if you setup your own payment system, and distribution system. So Steam would be getting money for doing absolutely nothing.

johnchristopher 11y ago
Doesn't Valve bring in the users and the channel to them ?
- giancarlostoro 11y ago
  Used to, I imagine EA is going to sell games regardless of Steam, they have quite a "portfolio" of games that just "sell themselves". The only reason I ever got on Steam was because of Counter-Strike, I imagine the only reason others hear of Origin is because of games from BioWare and DICE.
bcoates 11y ago
As a user, I'm totally fine with that. PC game distribution was so braindead that third parties (Steam, etc.) could strong-arm their way into un-bundling. Having chosen a payment and download system I'm not inclined to let game publishers try to force me into a different one, and whatever financial incentives Valve can apply to make that painful is great.

mhuffman 11y ago

They still think that "the problem" was that they were asking for mods to be compensated(and that the exiting mod community doesn't like commercialism), not that they were keeping 3/4 of it.

tormeh 11y ago
Valve kept 30%, Bethesda kept 45% and modders got the rest. It's not just Valve's fault.
- M8 11y ago
  Wow, Bethesda is sure greedy in a self-punishing way. I mean you have to buy the game before buying mods. Surely 5-10% would be enough.
  - Aoyagi 11y ago
    They said something along the lines if "25% is an 'industry standard". I think they referenced to the hats, knives and whatnot being sold on TF2/CS:GO marketplaces.
  - jonlucc 11y ago
    I'm sure from Bethesda's perspective, they own the IP and built all of the tools for the modders. It made sense in their meetings, but failed in the community.

stupidcar 11y ago

I agree with everything you said, but it seemed like a lot of the more nuanced feedback on this was drowned out by a subset of gamers having a screaming tantrum at the suggestion of paying anything for a mod, regardless of where the money was going. I'm hopeful that Valve will eventually try this again on a new game with a fairer compensation structure and a better community infrastructure in place. I'm not so hopeful that that same subset of gamers won't have a tantrum all over again.

mmf 11y ago
I wonder what would happen if GitHub placed a clone fee and split it between itself and the repo owner...
- Mtinie 11y ago
  If that was an option, but not the only option, it could make for an interesting addition to their business model. * Public repositories (fork for free) * Premium repositories (fork for a fee) * Private repositories (restricted to content owner who pays the fee)
- mcphage 11y ago
  So basically, GitHub offering a service where users could charge for software, and get the source code as well? And not just a core dump, but be part of a community building up that source? ...That's a pretty solid idea.
  - Mtinie 11y ago
    ^ this. If anyone is interested in building it, send me a note, I'd love to be involved (but totally lack the skills to do it myself).
    - mcphage 11y ago
      Heck, me too—I can think of several projects I worked on but eventually gave up on. If there was a way for me to get paid for it, still work on it, and have other people help out as well? Without having to operate my own storefront?

edem 11y ago

It should be the other way around: Steam keeps 25% brokerage.

Aoyagi 11y ago

Where were you with your rational thinking when the witch-hunt was going on on Reddit? It was so disappointing to watch.

pekk 11y ago

The original content creators are the people who made the base game and own the IP of which mods are derivative.

castell 11y ago

Bethesda introduced DLCs to the PC gaming world in 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion#Additional_content http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion#... The first update came as a set of specialized armor for Oblivion‍ 's ridable horses; released on April 3, 2006. Although gamers generally displayed enthusiasm for the concept of micropayments for downloadable in-game content, many expressed their dissatisfaction at the price they had to pay for the relatively minor horse-armor package on the Internet and elsewhere.[85] Hines assured the press that Bethesda was not going to respond rashly to customer criticism. Valve introduced DRM to the PC gaming world in late 2004: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software)#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software)#History Valve's Half-Life 2 was the first game to require installation of the Steam client to play, even for retail copies. This decision was met with concerns about software ownership, software requirements, and issues with overloaded servers demonstrated previously by the Counter-Strike rollout. During this time users faced multiple issues attempting to play the game. There are alternatives like GoG, that are DRM/DLC-free.

vacri 11y ago
Valve introduced DRM to the PC gaming world in late 2004 Utter nonsense. Have you never played an abandonware game from the late 80s and early 90s? "Enter the first letter of the third word on page 14 of the manual"? I used to get pirated Amiga 500 floppies with the copy protection stripped out and a little boot animation from the pirates inserted. Valve introduced Steam to the PC gaming world... but then again, it's their product. And when all is said and done, Steam has been a significant net benefit.
- castell 11y ago
  You are wrong. DRM != copy protection You can own the DVD with a copy protection and even legally create a backup-copy. You simply cannot own a DRM product, as its bound to a server side check. DRM products may suddenly vanish from your PC, or change its content. Valve already wiped some games and changed the regional settings (removing games from certain parts of the world in retrospect) and Rockstar released an automatic patch for GTA San Andreas (2005) over Steam which altered the game (broke several features like widescreen support, removed several songs from radio stations)

TheHypnotist 11y ago

Modders should be able to ask for donations, nothing more. They should see this as an opportunity to create great content based off of a much larger and more established game. If they want to get compensated, perhaps their great content will take off and one day they can make their own standalone, but until then, donations only. See Counter-Strike, DayZ, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Insurgency, et al.

blakeyrat 11y ago
Two comments: 1) Valve half-assed the implementation (of course) so that existing mods couldn't be changed to "pay what you want" (a.k.a. donations) unless you deleted and re-uploaded the mod (thus breaking auto-updates for anybody who had the old version). 2) The real tragedy here is that Valve's also turned off the "pay what you want" option in addition to the listed price options. So if I do want to accept donations for my mods, even understanding my "cut" is only 25%, I can no longer do that.

pbhjpbhj 11y ago

>Only 25% going to the content creators? Really? // What percentage do the actual content creators get usually in a blockbuster game release? That probably provided a floor for what Valve/Steam consider reasonable. Is that 25% of gross or net of sales taxes or ...