The poster child for paid mods, The Shadow Scale armor.
Punching the Sleeping Bear
Steam's full page ad and FAQ about the program.
What is modding? It's a lot of things. It's an art form unique to the world of PC gaming, for the most part. It's a form of expression for those with the talent or the time. It's a gesture of affection to a particular game, either in the form of additional content to bugfixes the developers may have missed. Lastly, it's one of the last truly open sector of the gaming community, unchecked and unregulated and completely anarchistic.
Or at least it was.
On April 23, 2015, Valve, the creators of the Half Life games and the immensely popular Steam digital distribution platform, and Bethesda, creators of The Elder Scrolls series and one of gaming's biggest publishers, launched a new program through Steam's Workshop service. The Workshop was a way for modders to upload their mods and the community to download them, and while it might not have been quite as popular as other mods sites, it was convenient and innocuous enough for no one to really care.
But suddenly there was a new banner on the homepage, along side a sale of Skyrim. The banner read:
The Steam Workshop has always been a great place for sharing mods, maps, and all kinds of items that you’ve created. Now it's also a great place for selling those creations.
With a new, streamlined process for listing and selling your creations, the Steam Workshop now supports buying mods directly from the Workshop, to be immediately usable in game.
Discover the best new mods for your game and enable the creators to continue making new items and experiences.
The idea was to allow mod creators to sell their work in exchange for real money. On paper, this sounds great, since some modders have put hundreds of hours into their mods, everything from complete overhauls that change the way Skyrim is played to entire expansion packs rivaling those from Bethesda themselves. Certainly these people deserve to be rewarded for their hard work right?
Cloud of Greed
A number of mods available, checked by Checktilda.
Whatever Valve/Bethesda's original supposed intentions were, the truth was obvious. They had found a way to make money selling DLC to players without any work on their part. Bethesda would get more DLC then an entire factory of coders could churn out and keep their game running well past it's shelf life (Morrowind, Skyrim's grandfather, still has an active modding community a full decade post launch). Valve, meanwhile, would get attention to their Workshop and another selling angle for any game that had workshop integration, including titles like Cities: Skylines, ARMA 3, or the recently updated Dying Light. Meanwhile, modders that have put dozens of hours of work into something will finally receive a fair pay for their work.
Except they get ripped off the most.
See, Valve and Bethesda decided they needed to get paid too, and why not? Bethesda made Skyrim, along with the mod tools people use, and Valve were putting up their server space for hosting. Obviously they needed to get something out of this deal. The valuation they came up with:
30% of profit goes to Valve
45% of profit goes to Bethesda
25% of profit goes to the modder.
That means for every dollar a mod makes, the modder is only seeing 25cents, kind of screwy considering their the ones actually doing all of the work here. There were other limitations too, like how a mod had to sell at least $400 before the modder made a cent. This is in stark contrast to the supposed Apple store split of 70/30, with 70% going to the content creator. While it could be argued that App creators are making original content and modders are just creating derivative work, that valuation is still incredibly low for a lot of people, and it's obviously just Valve and Bethesda trying to pad their pockets.
The God is Bleeding
One of the many protests. The petition to kill paid mods reached 130,000 signatures at Change.org.
It's impossible to get an exact time-frame, but it's clear that the paid mods were almost immediately unwelcome. The first I heard of it was through panicked and angry messages on a board I happened to be reading on the toilet, and I rushed to my computer to confirm the rumors. It was true, paid versions of things that had been free for ~20 years. Obviously there was going to be some upset.
Upset might be underselling it a little bit.
At first there was the confusion. People couldn't believe that something like mods would be sold for money. Sure, there were mods that evolved into full games, like Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, or countless others, but these were the rare case that stood out.
Then there was the anger at Valve. "How could they do this?" "Why would they do this?" For the longest time Valve could do no wrong, and all of a sudden this was happening. In internet terms it was like watching a cute kitten suddenly transform into Hitler, Third Reich and all, and this was it's fuzzy, cuddly kristallnacht.
Then there was the anger at each other. "What kind of greedy bastard would expect money for a mod?" "Well, why should we work for free?" There was bad blood boiling on both sides, like the creator of Garry's Mod Garry Newman stating:
Valve broke the modding community... by revealing that most of them are cunts.
Animated fishing, the first mod to be taken down due to infringement. Had the program continued, it would not have been the last.
Community reaction was... less then stellar.
Uneasy Silence
As of now, April 28th, the paid mods section is down. Neither company has made further statements and Skyrim is slowly rebuilding it's review score. It's unlikely Skyrim will ever have paid mods again.
That's the thing about this though, is that "Skyrim" won't have paid mods, and it shouldn't. But Valve didn't say they were removing the option, just they were removing it from Skyrim. Other games have already admitted their interest in paid mods, including Space Engineers and, considering his inflammatory statements, Garry's Mod.
Paid mods could, possibly, work. Yes, there's certainly the unpleasent idea of being sold a constant stream of DLC when games already cost an arm and a leg, and yes there are numerous uncertainties about the system that will need to be addressed, like a longer refund period in case of a mod-breaking update. A donation system is prefereable, certainly, and the experiment has failed, but there is the grounds for a system in the future.
This has been pointed out elsewhere, but it's likely we'll see this idea re-attempted in the near future. The best avenue for this would be a new release, and Valve admitted that their biggest misstep was trying to invade a well established community, some of whom have been around since Morrowind. We'll likely see this attempted again in a future Bethesda title, and their upcoming E3 appearance will be more telling when it comes.
It's over for now, and everyone is slowly slinking back to their holes, awaiting further news. We've seen the face of paid mod content, and it's an ugly, disgusting beast. Whether or not it'll ever rear it's head again, that remains to be seen.
Image Sources:
http://ec0c5a7f741a6f3bff65-dd07187202f57fa404a8f047da2bcff5.r85.cf1.rackcdn.com/images/X6BdGgoKIdT2.878x0.Z-Z96KYq.jpg
http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Steam-Workshop-Now-Supports-Paid-Mods-Skyrim-Gets-Premium-Items-Free-Weekend-479223-2.jpg
http://static1.gamespot.com/uploads/original/1535/15354745/2854228-2832875602-28535.jpg
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--NfRXhIti--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_636/1227696896714866095.jpg
http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--ViZoOzKN--/1227897868503046504.png
http://techgage.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Current-Thoughts-On-Valve-680x445.jpg