Looking at: The paid mods debacle

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:

Garry Newman @garrynewman

Valve broke the modding community... by revealing that most of them are cunts.

2:16 PM - 24 Apr 2015

Meanwhile one member of the Skywind team (a mod to inject the entire game of Morrowind into Skyrim's engine) stated:

"if you got into this activity with the explicit purpose of making money, you’re delusional. And if, when presented with a completely exploitative method of achieving it, you jumped on it, you’re a fool. Nobody owes you anything for time you yourself chose to expend."

Modders began to feel like they were entitled to a decent pay, while gamers felt they were asking to much of a community already nickeled and dimed to the last cent. The media was worse, with sites like Polygon praising the program (although that particular article seems to have disappeared), and other sites like Forbes calling it a disaster. It was a war between groups that had been friends for a very long time, and we're likely going to see repercussions from this for an even longer time. 

People began to take out their anger on Steam, taking to the forums to insult anyone who bought mods, anyone that put their mods up for sale, and anyone that supported Skyrim. Skyrim's user approval rating dropped from a 98% percent to 84%. That might not seem like much, but Skyrim's positive ratings were a mountain, and that mountain just shifted a long way. This drop has taken Skyrim from the top 10 games on Steam, down outside of the top 1000 games. 

There were the protest mods added to the workshop, everything from an in-game version of Gabe Newell, to just simple protest signs to... horse testicles for $99. Modders began to pull their work wholesale from both the Workshop and Nexus, either in protest or to protect themselves. 

Steam had been the god of PC gaming, an untouchable pseudo-monopoly towering above. And that god just bled. 

The Issues

Animated fishing, the first mod to be taken down due to infringement. Had the program continued, it would not have been the last. 

Like I said, on paper the idea of allowing people to charge money for mods isn't a bad thing. Some teams create content that's definitely worth money. If the rise of Youtube celebrities or independent bloggers (this writer, sadly, not included) taught us anything it's that if people are willing to pay you, then you can get paid for your work. But there was a host of issues with the program that prevented it from ever being a good idea:

1) Tradition. Mods have always been free, whether or not people liked it. Trying to change a decades old tradition can't happen overnight, and even if we create a system that works, like the much proposed donation button, it's unlikely that the vast majority of people will be able to turn this into a living. 

2) The split. People on both sides, save a few outspoken individuals, agree that the split between the modders and the companies is outrageous. Valve and Bethesda were making bank doing very little work and it didn't seem very fair. 

3) the legal issues. Mods have always existed in a legal grey area, allowing their creators to use otherwise copywritten work because no one was making money off it. It's why there's a Game of Thrones mod for Crusader Kings, because the mod wasn't taking money away from GoT's copyrite holder. Now that these mods were being sold as products the grey area turned dark black and it was only inevitable before lawyers got involved. 

4) Other mods. This is a two pronged issue: 

First was the brutal civil war within the mod community itself. Modders called paid modders sell-outs and accused them of ruining their artistic integrity, while paid modders called the unpaid a bunch of unambitious idiots holding back progress. It's created a lot of tension it what used to be a tight-knit community. 

The Second issue is that of mod compatibility. This might be an issue unique to Skyrim, but it's the only game affected so it's what I'll run with. See, Skyrim mods often require a lot of work to run, and sometimes, especially complicated mods, require other mods to run. Less then 24 hours after it's launch we saw two mods taken down because the creator hadn't gotten permission from an animator to use the animator's work. Then there were infrastructure mods, like UI overhauls or script modifications that were necessary for a lot of different mods. These infrastructure mods either didn't get a kickback from any sale that required them, or worse, would require users to buy additional mods to get one mod to work. 

Here's the breakdown:

ModA needs ModB to work. ModA is for sale, but ModB isn't. ModB's creator never sees a cent of ModA's sale. 

ModA needs ModB to work. ModA is $.99, ModB is $9.00. ModB is necessary to run mods C-F and is free to charge what they want because in order to run any other mods, people need to buy ModB. 

5) Mod piracy. This was a new threat, created almost overnight. There were two versions of mod piracy going on. The first was people stealing free mods from other sites and trying to sell it as their own. Thankfully no mods outside the original 19 were ever added, but it's likely this would've been an issue in a very short time, as many of the non-protest mods under review were stolen. 

The second issue was the idea of normal piracy. People didn't want to pay for content they felt should be free so they took to illegal torrenting. I won't link it here, but I have confirmed reports of the paid mods appearing on The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites. 

"It takes a big man to admit he's wrong." 

Community reaction was... less then stellar.

People raged over the weekend. The PR wasn't working, and even the media was turning against the idea. Gabe Newell himself tried to diffuse the situation on Reddit, only to be disgraced and embarrassed. It was clear something had to break, and the community wasn't going to back down. 

PC gamers are entitled, but it's an entitlement that comes from tradition. For the longest time they've held themselves far above the console gamers with things like regular sales, better graphics, higher framerates, and a much larger library of games. Whereas console gamers have grown to eventually accept the worst things about their platforms, like paid internet connections, graphical downgrades, and almost constantly paying full price for games, PC gamers rage against their machines, often until something changes. 

In the evening of April 27, less then a week after it's launch, the paid section of Skyrim's workshop was taken down. It was a hasty retreat, with many of the links pointing to the paid mods still being active as of this writing less then 12 hours later. Representatives from both Valve and Bethesda made statements, which I'll include below, in full. 

Valve:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/3435tu/paid_mods_in_steam_workshop/

We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we'll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.

We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing. We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different.

To help you understand why we thought this was a good idea, our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid. We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it.

But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop. 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. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here.

Now that you've backed a dump truck of feedback onto our inboxes, we'll be chewing through that, but if you have any further thoughts let us know.

Bethesda:

http://www.bethblog.com/2015/04/27/why-were-trying-paid-skyrim-mods-on-steam/

After discussion with Valve, and listening to our community, paid mods are being removed from Steam Workshop. Even though we had the best intentions, the feedback has been clear – this is not a feature you want. Your support means everything to us, and we hear you.

It's damage control at it's worse, because it was obviously damage control. It's so rare for companies to admit they were wrong, and even rarer for them to completely 180. Even Micrsoft only removed a few of the "features" of the Xbox One, and that was before it's release. This wasn't backpedaling, this was... this:

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:

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