Steam Workshop Now Supports Paid Mods

[Geostigma]

this just provided to many shady motivations to publishers and developers.

I obviously haven't read the other posts in this thread and I'm fully aware I'm probably parroting stuff already brought up.

But it not only brings up shady motivations for publishers and devs it also brings up shady motivations for other modders.

I can imagine every now and then legitimate free mods on Nexus being tossed on SWS by another person for 99 centers for a quick cash in and then being a extra douchy person and also sending a take down notice to the original free mod and creator. It will be rare but it will happen and sure it will be swept under the rug but it will still happen and be a head ache for legitimate modders and a legitimate fear as well.


Valve is such an awful company when it comes to support and policing it's own content. I know not a lot of you are pc gamers but I invite you to load up steam and look at the green light section of steam.
I'll be generous here , 30% are completely broken games with no intention of being fixed, 30% are early access games with no intention of being finished , and the other 30% are legitimately good games which probably wont finish due to funding. The remainder is the exception and not the rule of these games (like elysian etc)

I have no hopes for the mod market on the SWS if Valve can't and wont even do the right thing with the hilariously broken green lit games.
Toss in Valves awful and borderline illegal refund practices and it's gonna be a huge shit show with people trying to refund mods that break the install or just flat out suck (a huge percentile).

But yeah as I said earlier these mods are and should only be portfolios for the modders resume. Nothing more nothing less.
The guy who made Faalskar for Skyrim now works at Bungie. The Black Mesa mod team was purchased by Vallve. A ton of BF1942 modders were brought in to help make BF2 and 2142. Astralfoxy made a better client for League of Legends and he was hired by Riot games to help make a new client.

The list goes on and honestly it's already a really sweet deal. There are so many people in the industry who got their start making new content for games they love and now work for great companies and dev teams. Thats a waaay better deal then 25% of 99 cents.

 

[Cthulhu]

I'm thinking they picked the wrong game to launch this thing on - the TES series and its modders are 10+-year old bittervets, one does not simply barge into that.

They could slowly re-introduce it with new or smaller games first, or even their own titles.

 

[Geostigma]

What scares me though is that it will snowball and become precedent.

It could be small for other games, maybe different hats in L4D3 or Crowbar skins in HL3 (implying it comes out lol).

And then TES:6 comes out and all of a sudden I gotta pay 5$ for armored thong horse armor and spiderman companions. And every game after that that would have had free mods all of a sudden doesn't.

 

[Obsidian Fire]

^^You should see what Bethesda said about all this (check their blog). They've pretty much said that they (at least) will never do away with the ability for people to distribute free mods. So if they go back on that, well... lets just say the modding community is going to cry foul even more then they are already...

 

[Geostigma]

That's fine and dandy but in the future doesn't stop the creator from deciding that they would rather make money instead of releasing it for free. It still changes the landscape of the mod ecosystem regardless if they have good intentions.

The only way it should work is with a pay what you want button a la bandcamp or humble bundle.

 

[Cthulhu]

Well I guess if paid mods become a thing, then... IDK, no problem? You don't need mods, there will always be something better,

 

[Hisako]

What scares me though is that it will snowball and become precedent.

It could be small for other games, maybe different hats in L4D3 or Crowbar skins in HL3 (implying it comes out lol).

And then TES:6 comes out and all of a sudden I gotta pay 5$ for armored thong horse armor and spiderman companions. And every game after that that would have had free mods all of a sudden doesn't.

It's reasonable to be worried about things like this, but at the same time the word "precedent" reminds me of the many, many other times people have been worried about problematic decisions in the games industry becoming a "precedent".

People said that Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes was a "precedent" for "$40 dollar demos" flooding the market (that phrase certainly did, though ), but it's been more than 12 months since people said it would happen and we haven't been inundated yet