Steam Allows Paid Mods

[Tornado]

I feel I should mention I'm not calling SSMB user Gabe an idiot

 

Suuuuuurre.

[Autosaver]

And the best part is there's a refund period, so the issue with crappy mods is unfounded.

How is 48 hours enough to see that the mod won't break after a new update, or that it won't break with other mods? Hell, 48 hours isn't even enough time to see if it works with the game completely. There could be a game breaking bug after unlocking x spell and the creator isn't necessarily forced to fix it.

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Speaking of skins/hats/guns/etc, those comparisons are actually quite silly. I play a lot of games that use these systems, and it's not really comparable to modding. What Valve does in regards to skins is take community created work and have Valve's own development team implement it into the game. If it breaks, Valve is responsible for fixing it. It's guaranteed to work with the game and all future updates. There's no "Will this eventually break?" or "What if the creator stops caring?" Also, skins and hats generally take a lot less work compared to modding. That's why there really wasn't an issue with Valve taking a majority of the cut.

 

Gabe himself states that money is how the community steers work. What a load of bullshit. People have been modding Skyrim for 4 years, with no cost, and apparently money is driving it? No wonder Gabe got over three thousand downvotes and a bunch of angry gamers arguing with him. You know you've done wrong when a website that considers you "King" is revolting against you. I thought I'd never see the day where we're seeing Valve being pit against EA.

 

EA... a lot of people have been pointing out that their service does some things better than Valve's. Origin allows a refund, of full retail games. I believe Valve's policy is they can only do this once, and it's generally considered an "exception". Another point is that they actually have customer service. For a company that almost has a monopoly on digital PC gaming, it's super sad to see Valve being rated lower than EA in customer support surveys & research.

 

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Honestly though, the issue isn't really specifically about mods. It's just what Valve has turned into. The horrible customers service. Greenlight being garbage. "Early Access" being a thing. Valve's own games (Dota 2, CS:GO, etc) constantly having shitty updates that break the game, and now mods.

[Mauro Fonseca]

You have the right to be paid for any work you do, if you so choose.

Some people will release mods for free, some will release mods for pay. And the best part is there's a refund period, so the issue with crappy mods is unfounded.

Sounds like the best of both worlds. Someone who makes a kickass mod is unreasonable for wanting to make some pay for it?

Let the market decide, not romanticism about what the ideal video game should be. Video games are ultimately an industry, and all the other things that are critiqued - microtransactions, free to play, the move to mobile, etc. - are products of this.

"X should be for the art and not the money" is a good ideology, but it also falls flat when faced with reality. Would you go up to every artist, singer, musician, actor, etc. and tell them they should do it for free? I'd hope not. Art is good in and of itself, but there's no shame in trying to make a living off of it. Especially if you're good at it.

Consider copyright laws, patents, etc. We may hate the legal monopoly these give companies for a time being, but that monopoly encourages innovation of products. How many drugs would be developed if you couldn't monopolize it for a few years to recoup research costs and make a profit? Probably not many.

Valve should definitely not be taking that much of a cut, though. Sure, they give exposure... but Amazon takes 15% and eBay 13% for exposure on their sites. Valve should take a similar cut and give more to the modders.

 

Should I start demanding payment for the Sonic fanart I do of my own will, then?

 

The problem here is as mods take more effort, people are forgetting the part where this is just fan modifications done presumably out of the fans' own will to change something in the games. So sorry, no, I don't find it reasonable to start expecting payment for, say, Melpronterations. You know, keeping things on a lower sphere of reference.

 

I won't tell a musician not to try and make a living off their craft. Unless all the music they make are musicals about Sonic the Hedgehog.

[Lisbon]

Honestly though, the issue isn't really specifically about mods. It's just what Valve has turned into. The horrible customers service. Greenlight being garbage. "Early Access" being a thing. Valve's own games (Dota 2, CS:GO, etc) constantly having shitty updates that break the game, and now mods.

Don't forget how they region locked a bunch of areas in Eastern Europe and South America because of currency differences compared to the USD and the Euro. They didn't even take the games they blocked people from playing out of their libraries, so there's people are still fighting with Steam's bullshit customer service program just so they can re-purchase games they had already owned.

 

---

 

Anyway, the 30% cut Valve takes is apparently the cut they take from everything they sell on Steam, and not just from the works being sold on Steam Workshop. Generally I wouldn't take this at face value because Phil Fish is a scumbag himself, but it's pretty believable considering they're taking 30% off of the mod market. That's absurdly high, and they don't do a whole lot other than provide a DRM (which it can be said that the use of a DRM only benefits Steam) and host a site for the companies to sell their games on. Go look at Fallout 3, which literally requires modding just so it can start up on modern OSs, and Gothic II, which requires editing the Steam files in x86 just so it will run.

Compare that to GoG, which also takes a 30% cut, according to the Fez guy - GoG will go through hoops in order to make sure the games they sell will work. Go buy a game like Dungeon Keeper or its sequel and try to get that to operate on a modern computer. Good luck with that, actually, because it simply won't run on any machine that isn't 15 years old. However, GoG restored that game to be able to run on modern PCs, and they've done the same for many, many games on their website. That's not easy work and it's a hell of a lot more than Valve does. I can get behind them taking a bigger cut than normal because often times GoG puts in a lot of work on the games they sell, and the prices are also generally cheaper on GoG anyway due to the fact it focuses on older and indie games instead of AAA titles.

 

So yeahh, if Steam takes a 30% cut just for selling the game through their website, that's just even more of their corporate greed shining through.

[Moppsy]

How is 48 hours enough to see that the mod won't break after a new update, or that it won't break with other mods?

 

I thought it was actually 24 hours?  But yeah, testing a mod is something the consumer most of the time has to do.  I've been using mods for almost a decade now and there are lots of times where a mod I downloaded seemingly worked fine for a couple of days but then caused something to become FUBAR'd somewhere else.  Though it wasn't completely beyond all repair because I could load back to a previous save after deleting the mod (I used to do this manually in both oblivion and skyrim before I found NMM and Mod Organizer).  One or two days isn't enough time and the hassle of asking for tons of refunds is not worth it.

[JezMM]

Should I start demanding payment for the Sonic fanart I do of my own will, then?

 

The problem here is as mods take more effort, people are forgetting the part where this is just fan modifications done presumably out of the fans' own will to change something in the games. So sorry, no, I don't find it reasonable to start expecting payment for, say, Melpronterations. You know, keeping things on a lower sphere of reference.

 

I won't tell a musician not to try and make a living off their craft. Unless all the music they make are musicals about Sonic the Hedgehog.

 

The issue I have with this argument is that you're presenting that first question as sarcastic, but I'd honestly say "yes if you want to charge for your fanart you have every right to".  People already do it via prints, fan comics in Japan, and paid-for remix albums like Chronotorius and that recent Metroid symphony album (the former of which I own and had no regrets about paying for as it was sublime).

 

I literally see nothing wrong with demanding payment for any craft, the only difference with fan material is you have to be prepared to recieve a C&D from the company who own the IP if they so wish to give one.

 

If your fan material is high enough quality that people are willing to pay, then fucking go for it.

 

 

In fact, the only real difference here is the fact that fan art, remix albums and video projects etc can exist independant of their source material.  Mods require you to own the official product to run so they're a different beast in that sense.

 

 

But no, fuck the idea that people can't charge for fan content that has as much love and effort put into it as an original work would require.

[Mauro Fonseca]

The "payment" is the fact you're managing to pull off working on something you don't own at all in the first place. All those examples you're giving me? If we're to start taking them as a serious means of life, man, fuck that. Were I Nintendo, I'd cease and desist it all. It's one thing to do something out of love from fandom. It's another to piggyback on others' creations and demand a living off of it.

[Autosaver]

 

If you get a mod refund, you get banned from the community market for 7 days. gg

[Nepenthe]

There's always been an argument to be had, both in terms of an ethics and legality, that there is a difference between a copyright and a physical work containing that copyright, and indeed people have made money and gotten jobs through the utilization of fan content despite us living in an age of excessive copyright stronghold. After all, if I draw a picture of Mickey Mouse, the paper it exists on, the conscious and subconscious pen strokes that are unique to my drawing style, and the personal interpretation of the character are objectively mine. I do not own the rights to the character, true, but that in and of itself doesn't mean the physical piece itself belongs to Disney, and what is constantly forgotten is that people will pay just as much the artist's work itself as they will pay for the mere visage of the character. There's several online artists I admire who I'd pay to draw me whatever, and I wouldn't give a shit if the character existed beforehand or not because I'm not paying for the character; I'm paying for the style. Of course, if I were start making enough money off of Mickey, Disney has right to assume that it's only through utilization of his face and send a cease-and-desist. But ignoring the elephant in the room that is Disney being the company that got its break through public domain works and subsequently repaid the world with essentially kickstarting the shitty state of extended copyright we now have to deal with, cease-and-desist letters don't erase this general debate.

[Mauro Fonseca]

Public domain is public domain, though. And I love the public domain. Exactly because I think it's really fucking abysmal to make money of things that aren't yours if they're not in the PD.

 

Not to mention, that changes the onus of it all. You don't do fanart to get paid, you do fanart because you want to express your liking of something. The idea was always that it's something you do to show appreciation, not a job you're expected to take, thus being justified in taking money from, thus justifying companies releasing half-finished messes and going "eh buy teh fan mods for the bugfixes" while you're rolling in the dosh because you grabbed my mod and added 10-foot-ling horse dicks into every character's forehead.

[JezMM]

Okay but who said anything about making a living off of something?  Very VERY few artists make a living off drawing nothing but fanart.  Those who do are a very skilled and/or VERY lucky minority.  We're talking here about the majority of people just getting a bit of extra pocket money for their hard work on fan created content.

 

And the funny thing is in the case of officially supported paid mods on Steam, the developers are actually 100% endorsing and agreeing to have this fan content be created and sold for the creator to get some profit (and some for them too, so really they're getting their dues by providing the content for the creator to build off of in their mod).

 

 

 

 

Plus this idea kinda stifles the possibility of like, cool stuff existing.  There's an artist who I REALLY want to commission one day to draw a picture of Princess Daisy for my specification because I love the way they draw Daisy.  They don't take free requests (and rightly so) so why should they draw her exactly as I want?  I could draw my own but I really want to see the picture in their style so that completely ignores the point.  And according to you, I can't commission them because making money off other people's properties is bad, even though if Nintendo did want to set examples they could send C&Ds to big name internet artists who have done commissions of Nintendo characters.

 

So this picture can never exist because getting paid for fanart is "cheating" or something even though no-one gets hurt here.

[Solkia]

You know, this probably never would have been nearly as bad if DLC hasn't been so controversial.

[Mauro Fonseca]

Okay but who said anything about making a living off of something?  Very VERY few artists make a living off drawing nothing but fanart.  Those who do are a very skilled and/or VERY lucky minority.  We're talking here about the majority of people just getting a bit of extra pocket money for their hard work on fan created content.

 

And the funny thing is in the case of officially supported paid mods on Steam, the developers are actually 100% endorsing and agreeing to have this fan content be created and sold for the creator to get some profit (and some for them too, so really they're getting their dues by providing the content for the creator to build off of in their mod).

 

 

 

 

Plus this idea kinda stifles the possibility of like, cool stuff existing.  There's an artist who I REALLY want to commission one day to draw a picture of Princess Daisy for my specification because I love the way they draw Daisy.  They don't take free requests (and rightly so) so why should they draw her exactly as I want?  I could draw my own but I really want to see the picture in their style so that completely ignores the point.  And according to you, I can't commission them because making money off other people's properties is bad, even though if Nintendo did want to set examples they could send C&Ds to big name internet artists who have done commissions of Nintendo characters.

 

So this picture can never exist because getting paid for fanart is "cheating" or something even though no-one gets hurt here.

 

There's a difference. You're commissioning this artist.

 

Pay me to draw, and I will. I can point and say "well, I was paid".

 

What this is is "I drew this Sonic. Want to see it? Pay." A different principle. Creating of your own volition, not as a job.

 

The entire principle of it is fucked. It throws away the idea of fan effort. It's pretty much the killing of the mod community.

[Nepenthe]

Public domain is public domain, though. And I love the public domain. Exactly because I think it's really fucking abysmal to make money of things that aren't yours if they're not in the PD.

You completely ignored the argument I put forth about physical labor and copyright...and the point I implied that corporations are killing it by continuously extending time limits.

 

Not to mention, that changes the onus of it all. You don't do fanart to get paid, you do fanart because you want to express your liking of something. The idea was always that it's something you do to show appreciation, not a job you're expected to take, thus being justified in taking money from, thus justifying companies releasing half-finished messes and going "eh buy teh fan mods for the bugfixes" while you're rolling in the dosh because you grabbed my mod and added 10-foot-ling horse dicks into every character's forehead.

Fuck this "do it for the love" bullshit. Love doesn't put food in my stomach. Yes, I do Sonic fanart because I like Sonic. But if some nerd is going to come to my artist's alley table at a convention one day and wants to buy one of my non-commissioned pieces of Sonic for $40, I'm going to get paid- not for the IP but for the labor I put into the piece- use that money for art supplies, maybe a Steam sale, and again, food, and get on with my life. Sega isn't going to miss that money, nor would I stand for some moralizing blowhard- especially one that couldn't even draw and had no desire to- coming up to my table rabble-rousing about how I'm a shithead for daring to sell one of my physical drawings to someone who wanted it. Fuck outta here.

Blaming half-assed game releases on anyone but publishers and devs is also fucking ridiculous. Corporations literally exist only to make money and would be bending you over whether or not there existed any unprofessional laymen to patch things up for you. It's not like hobby modders are the only ones capable of doing this. Gamers want better games? Gamers want EA and Activision and Konami and Microsoft and whomever else to stop doing dumb shit? Get together with each other and put your moral money where your mouths are, instead of continuing to buy up these fucking half-assed, broken-on-release games in record numbers, and tuning in to E3, and getting into dumbass console war arguments like they matter, or at least don't do all of these things and then whine about it on the back end or blame artists and modders for all of your troubles. Oh, you won't be able to play the latest fucking third-person action-adventure game or whatever. Oh, how will you fucking survive?

[Your Vest Friend]

No Jimquisition posted here yet? Huh, it is relevant.

 

[Nepenthe]

There's a difference. You're commissioning this artist.

 

Pay me to draw, and I will. I can point and say "well, I was paid".

 

What this is is "I drew this Sonic. Want to see it? Pay." A different principle. Creating of your own volition, not as a job.

 

The entire principle of it is fucked. It throws away the idea of fan effort. It's pretty much the killing of the mod community.

 

First, your analogy is tortured because you can get a general idea about how a game will play without having played it, in turn deciding whether you want to surmount the paywall or not. However, the only way to experience visual art is, well, visually. Unless you have an idea of an artist's style and character (and even then I'd be suspicious), who the fuck buys a piece of art they cannot look at? I mean, you can try this and see how it works out, but I imagine you'll be back to your day job soon.

 

Second, people buy non-commissioned art all the time. It's called making prints (or hell, people will buy the original drawing). I draw something. I like it; think it looks good. I decide in the aftermath of making this that people can buy it for personal use and press the "Make prints" button on dA or go down to my local FedEx. This oh-so dastardly practice which has existed since the dawn of money has not killed off the art community or its purveyors' love of creating and sharing art. If the ability to sell one's mod work and be compensated for the summation of education, trial-and-error, specialized skills, years off a person's life they could be actually doing something with more utility than pleasing your ass, and ultimately, sheer passion, is all it takes to destroy the mod community, then it was never that strong of a community in the first place.

[JezMM]

By the by, Gabe has confirmed that if the option isn't there already, the ability to set pay what you want with a minimum of $0 will be there, as well as free mods continuing to exist on the workshop, means people are unlikely to get away with bug fix mods and charge for them.  Enough people will think that they're assholes that one such person will probably be a fellow modder and figure out a fix for themselves and then put it up for free.  I'm 99% sure people will boycott mods that are asshole-ish in any way like that.

[Mauro Fonseca]

Fuck this "do it for the love" bullshit. Love doesn't put food in my stomach.

 

You know what might? Not drawing Sonic fanart. Making your own thing, or trying to get a job drawing for someone. No success in either option? Well, who told you to be an artist? You're subject to the whims of entertainment.

 

You spent years making a mod and now feel you wasted your life? Sad for you. Make a new game in itself, then you'll deserve some money for it.

[Nepenthe]

You know what might? Not drawing Sonic fanart. Making your own thing, or trying to get a job drawing for someone. No success in either option? Well, who told you to be an artist? You're subject to the whims of entertainment.

 

You spent years making a mod and now feel you wasted your life? Sad for you. Make a new game in itself, then you'll deserve some money for it.

 

I do more than just draw Sonic fan art. And I get paid for that too (alongside it). So miss me with that bootstraps bullshit.

 

And what's ironic about you telling an artist to get a job drawing for someone is that they'll still be getting paid for drawing shit that doesn't belong to them anyway. This gets taken to extremes at large companies, again like Disney, where artists do not have any actual IP rights on anything they draw- even if the characters and shorts are original and made without the resources of the company. If you're employed by a corporation, in many cases you do not own your artwork. So I guess you shouldn't be... employed, or something? Or should we all just strive to hope that people have a bigger appetite for original content than we know they do?

Edited April 27, 2015 by Nepenthe

[Sean]

People are so bitter about the prospect that some artists are actually paid for doing the things they love, that they'll say the most vile shit to put them down while trying to explain that what they have isn't a real job or that they don't deserve compensation

[Nepenthe]

^ And the thing is, I worry about that shit all the time. I literally just made a status where I relented was going to be offering original work for $25, and one of my friends- note, my friends- still tried to lowball me and ask me to do one for him for $20. And now that I've done some examples and figured out the labor, I've learned that $25 is not enough unless I wanted to be working at well below minimum wage levels (and that's not going to fucking happen). So now I have to raise prices which to some people is the equivalent of stabbing their cat.

 

See, people who aren't creators of some sort don't see any of this and thus don't think about it or even care, the constant nagging, the indignant attitudes, the overbearing expectation that you're supposed to skip a meal or a light bill so you can give them a costume or some shitty fanart to fap to or the disposable, shit-riddled entertainment that is gaming for little to nothing, mainly because they can't afford what you're actually worth. Like you being able to draw means you're supposed to be their slave or something. People like to uphold artists as champions of their free-speech, anti-censorship, exchange of information ideals until it comes time to actually compensate them for their livelihood, then they're liable to get a middle finger. It's entitlement personified.

[JezMM]

You know what might? Not drawing Sonic fanart. Making your own thing, or trying to get a job drawing for someone. No success in either option? Well, who told you to be an artist? You're subject to the whims of entertainment.

 

You spent years making a mod and now feel you wasted your life? Sad for you. Make a new game in itself, then you'll deserve some money for it.

[Mauro Fonseca]

I do this for a living too. I appreciate the money that comes in when I do fanart for pay too. You know what, had I the silver tongue for it and a bag full of bootleg Sony DVDs, I still wouldn't consider myself an official SONY Retailer.

 

Red light in the streets. You stop your car. The stereotypical poor kid comes and washes your car's screen without asking, then stretches his hands. You're saying he did a good job, he deserves it, he's worked for it. I'm saying no-one asked him for anything, if I pay him it's because of my own good will, and what he's doing is begging.

 

Make all the money you want off of fanart instead of your own original content or someone else's content out of being hired to do so. Hell, pay me to do the same. Doesn't mean I'll consider it any worth as a career.

 

Again, took years making that mod, feel you deserve some money for it? Tough luck. Next time, don't spend years doing said mod. The relation of power is all in the others' hands, and you know it. Don't go demanding for scraps.

[Nepenthe]

Frankly, it's the other way around. If you feel people who are charging for their labor are wrong for doing so because they didn't first make the tools before they started the work, well, you're not obligated to buy it.

[Tani Coyote]

Should I start demanding payment for the Sonic fanart I do of my own will, then?

Tracy Yardley had every right to sell his prints at Sonic Boom 2014, and SEGA approved of him doing so. I doubt they confiscated every penny he made off it, too.

You may use someone else's character, but at the end of the day it's your work. The original creator has every right to demand royalties or issue a cease and desist, but it's still your work and it's not unreasonable you get some payment for it. Indeed, any company that demanded 100% of the proceeds is idiotic, because that eliminates the incentive to keep producing. I'm looking at you, Nintendo, with your "You can keep monetizing our content but now it will all go to us heehee!" bullshit.

 

 

The problem here is as mods take more effort, people are forgetting the part where this is just fan modifications done presumably out of the fans' own will to change something in the games. So sorry, no, I don't find it reasonable to start expecting payment for, say, Melpronterations. You know, keeping things on a lower sphere of reference.

If you don't want to pay, don't.

But don't tell people who put in the effort of design that they can't expect any payment at all purely because a work is derivative.

Look at how this is set up, also: Steam is collecting a cut, the mod maker is collecting a cut, and the game owner is collecting a cut. Everybody wins. There's nothing wrong here. If a company doesn't want their IP infringed on, they just tell Steam and Steam pulls it.

This isn't like somebody just randomly made a mod and made a corrupt bargain with Steam to get paid for it while the original creator gets ignored. Hell no. This is a brilliant marketing ploy because it promises revenue for content creators, IP owners, and Valve.

Let the market decide.

 

Unless all the music they make are musicals about Sonic the Hedgehog.

If they are making derivative works, they have every right to ask for payment.

And SEGA has every right to ask for royalties.

I'm not seeing the problem here.

 

How is 48 hours enough to see that the mod won't break after a new update, or that it won't break with other mods? Hell, 48 hours isn't even enough time to see if it works with the game completely. There could be a game breaking bug after unlocking x spell and the creator isn't necessarily forced to fix it.

Sounds like Steam needs to take a page from eBay then and have a longer period.

The problem with digital goods of course, is you run the risk of people backing them up, or getting their fix and then demanding a refund.