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Skyrim Workshop Now Supports Paid Mods

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Sendou

Member
What is the incentive (and benefits) of paid mods versus free ones?

Come on, I know you're not obtuse.

What would you think? Potentially the higher quality of paid mods compared to their free counterparts of course.

What's the incentive to buy games/books/movies when you can get them for free too?
 
Yeah you will have to adopt an early access approach to buying mods I would think. If you are buying based on what might get added in the future you are setting you are just setting yourself up for disappointment.

Also does anyone know what Valve does if a game/mod gets taken down via DMCA notice. Do they let those who bought it keep using it or do they refund the money and remove it from accounts?

see my edit... i forgot a serious issue with mods. you are paying for something that might not work anymore if the main game is updated.
 

Krejlooc

Banned
so some personal insight into HL2VR dev process for all those "this kills passion! You don't need that money to make a living!" crowd

our mod will be depreciated in about 3 months. As in, it will no longer work. OVR is dropping direct X 9 support, meaning our only option is to switch to an OpenGL renderer. This is tantamount to essentially a complete rewrite of a very significant portion of our mod.

Now, all 3 members of our team got together explicitly to try and start a career in VR development. Our artist, Jaz, lives in the UK, and, without violating his trust here, he is in dire times financially. For the past year and a half, one of the only things keeping him sane is looking ahead to potentially getting a paycheck by landing a job thanks to his mod work. To really drive the point home about how dire some of our finances are, two of us had to pitch in to buy one of us a $25 invite to a tech demo we needed to work with. That individual couldn't afford $25.

I am in the process of setting up my own development studio through private funding. I have reached out to Jaz to try and get him to relocate to the US to try and get him making some money here. Setting up my own studio, managing a project, then actually going through with development is a massive undertaking. Nate, our project lead, has a career in Austin now. We all have social lives and day jobs. We estimate the work it'll take to get HL2VR going without Direct X 9 will be hundreds of hours of coding for Nate and I. Any time I put into HL2VR comes at the expense of my day job, which I truly work around the clock.

We have had serious discussions about whether or not we can afford to personally keep HL2VR going. The knowledge that we could eventually sell the mod has been an enormous factor in keeping us going. Speaking of which - this has been known for a good year and a half now. I find it funny that those bemoaning what this means to the "community" apparently aren't apart of said community because they had an entire seminar about this at Dev Days. Black Mesa is releasing under this model. This has been known for so long.

So, about that talk of the death of free mods and all that shit - we could have started monetizing our mod with Valve's blessing a long time ago. We have discussed selling our mod for ages now. We haven't, though. Why? Well, as professionals, we take pride in our work, and we do not want to sell something that is still a work in progress. Thus, for almost 2 years, this mod that we could have sold, has been given away for free. We have hundreds of thousands of downloads of our mod, and haven't seen a dime from it. We don't even operate an ad server on our project website. Nate pays the fee.

The notion some of you guys have that we, who have done work for free for years, are somehow going to struggle to become motivated to keep our monitzation going is ridiculous. If we are selling a mod and an update breaks it, we have more motivation to fix it now because, so long as it's broken, we can't keep selling it. Don't you guys get it?
 
Being paid for my work gives me more incentive to keep my mod working with updates.

And you dont HAVE to buy my work.

So let the free market take care of that.

Free market, you don't have to buy it

congrats you're using the same arguments corporate shills have when they were trying to end net neutrality

Well enjoy creating content on your own for a publisher that takes a 75 percent cut without any of the perks that working for a publisher would normally give you (and without any of the regular benifits of being employed, like a pension and health care and social security)

Those darned entitled gamers wanting to deny you this awesomeness. tisk tisk

Why go make a game like these guys http://unknownworlds.com/ (former mod team behind natural selection, one of the most popular half life mods) when you can go for all of the above and get exploited by bethesda
 
What would you think? Potentially the higher quality of paid mods compared to their free counterparts of course.

We're already getting fully-fledged companions with thousands of lines of dialogue, DLC-sized expansions and people who have taken up the task of fixing up the company's games for them, without payment.

Like I said, anything you can do and want to be paid for is already being done just as well (for less or free). I'm not one to argue against people getting paid for their work (they should), but everything about this arrangement feels short-sighted and woefully ignorant of where the modding community is at. Not even getting into the paltry creator cut while Valve/Bethesda pocket the rest.

What's the incentive to buy games/books/movies when you can get them for free too?

That's not the same thing, and you know it. There have already been plenty of reasons why - modular content that may break after use with no expectation of support from the creator, wonky pricing structures, etc.
 

Juniez

Banned
project reality 2 on CE3 died when some members of the team were upset and appropriately demotivated with its 'never taking any revenue from this project' stance whilst demanding professional-quality work and later bled talent to Squad and some other paid spiritual successor. that is my story
 

Juniez

Banned
Free market, you don't have to buy it

congrats you're using the same arguments corporate shills have when they were trying to end net neutrality

Well enjoy creating content on your own for a publisher that takes a 75 percent cut without any of the perks that working for a publisher would normally give you (and without any of the regular benifits of being employed, like a pension and health care and social security)

Those darned entitled gamers wanting to deny you this awesomeness. tisk tisk

Why go make a game like these guys http://unknownworlds.com/ (former mod team behind natural selection, one of the most popular half life mods) when you can go for all of the above and get exploited by bethesda

so the problem, then, is not the concept of compensation but rather the fact that valve and friends are in charge of it
 

Branson

Member
I don't like this, should have a donate button at the most. I just hope nexus stays populated with fantastic mods. Workshop is horrible anyway if you want to do anything decent modding wise to your game.
 
This is going to be one hell of a conundrum due to the very nature of Skyrim's stability in conjunction with mods. People jump to conclusions all the time, assume that a specific mod is causing problems in their Skyrim install, and make angry comments about it on the mod page, when in fact a myriad of different factors unrelated to the mod or completely beyond the mod author's control is causing the problems.

Yeah, that was my first thought when I read the thread title. Managing load orders and deleting incompatible mods to make stuff work. I don't think its a big deal for free content, and maybe over time developers like Bethesda will work to better integrate mods, but I feel if your charging that stuff has to be worked out.

As other have mentioned, this also kind of goes against the nature of the modding community. I don't necessarily have a problem with it, but I am sure that some will see it as further monetizing / corporatization of a formerly community based free endeavour.
 

MUnited83

For you.
mods were always free, and should remain free, imo ...so how is paying for them now a good thing?

it'll be pretty much like paying for DLC now ...and everyone will likely want to charge for their work, rather than just doing it for fun.

i don't see how this is good for the PC community.
How the hell is content creators getting paid for their work is a bad thing.
 

Sendou

Member
We're already getting fully-fledged companions with thousands of lines of dialogue, DLC-sized expansions and people who have taken up the task of fixing up the company's games for them, without payment.

Like I said, anything you can do and want to be paid for is already being done just as well (for less or free). I'm not one to argue against people getting paid for their work (they should), but everything about this arrangement feels short-sighted and woefully ignorant of where the modding community is at.

I can't agree with you in that we have reached some kind of quality ceiling with mods. Even if we had there can never be enough quality content and this recent development is only an extra incentive to make high quality content. I mentioned this previously but one example is hiring a professional voice actor. It's something I don't think many mods have done previously and while I respect the efforts of any amateurs working on mods for free of charge I don't think they hold up to the work of professionals.
 

Almighty

Member
see my edit... i forgot a serious issue with mods. you are paying for something that might not work anymore if the main game is updated.

Yeah that is another concern. Though that won't be a problem until Fallout 4 so I guess we will have to wait and see how that goes.
 
What if you buy an MMO, and they take the server down in a year?

Most MMOs are subscription based or free to pay with micro transactions. With subscription based MMOs, if I pay for a month and I don't like what content I'm getting then I can just cancel my subscription. Or if it goes down after my subscription ends i get what i paid for. It if its a one time $60 payment that goes down without a long term warning then I should get a refund as the product I purchased does not work and I was not informed.

Same with mods. I pay for a mod, and I expect updates and bug fixes regularly. If I don't get that, I should have a refund as the product I bought doesn't work. Its different than your TV breaking or something because the inability to keep up with updates is entirely the developers fault. If the developer cannot support a mod after a certain point, they should let people know far in advance.
 
There is one item under review now:
Better Combat AI (Donation version)
I guess following the same donation method used in google play store can work here too.
One item for free and the same item paid if you want to donate.

I've no problem whatsoever with this model (though they would be much better off redirecting people to a nexus page with a donation option). But screw creators who use other people's free work and then lock their derivative work behind a paywall.
 

Krejlooc

Banned
Most MMOs are subscription based or free to pay with micro transactions. With subscription based MMOs, if I pay for a month and I don't like what content I'm getting then I can just cancel my subscription. But if its a one time $60 payment that goes down without a long term warning then I should get a refund as the product I purchased does not work.

Same with mods. I pay for a mod, and I expect updates and bug fixes regularly. If I don't get that, I should have a refund as the product I bought doesn't work. Its different than your TV breaking or something because the inability to keep up with updates is entirely the developers fault. If the developer cannot support a mod after a certain point, they should let people know far in advance.

What if I bought MAG a month before it shut down?
 

Nzyme32

Member
Like I said earlier, Valve can't even get its customer service division straight. Expecting them to be on top of this to the level some people here expect it will go (that is, gangbusters) is assuming a hell of a lot, even without the issues I mentioned earlier.

The Nexus blog post had good points too:

That post is from March. It doesn't really give any ideas as to what they think of this
 

elyetis

Member
There are ways....but real talk, you don't want to.
With Mod Organizer they show as Non-MO Mods, same as DLC and it can't manage them.
So the general idea is yes, but it's really not that good ?
MO is pretty much the only thing making modding Skyrim bearable, I fail to see how having to spend money on mods ( hopefully new one, but very likely many of which you already had for free up until now ) through a platform which make modding your game harder, will be a win for us.

I hope I'm wrong.
 
I can't agree with you in that we have reached some kind of quality ceiling with mods. Even if we had there can never be enough quality content and this recent development is only an extra incentive to make high quality content. I mentioned this previously but one example is hiring a professional voice actor. It's something I don't think many mods have done previously and while I respect the efforts of any amateurs working on mods for free of charge I don't think they hold up to the work of professionals.

And yet, there are. Just for Skyrim alone, I can name a bunch of the top of my head. Vijia, Hoth, Interesting NPC's, Z'hago. Vijia had dialogue contributions from Terry Pratchett. Falskaar puts other DLC's from Bethesda to shame. Civil War Overhaul took what Bethesda couldn't finish and made it a glorified game in itself. Then there's stuff like Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, The Nameless Mod, Shifter, some of the Total War mods...

I could go on and on. It's never been a better time to get into the game, and frankly, in many cases they're showing up developers how to manage post-launch support for their games (which had led to quite a few modders joining said companies).

Like I said earlier, if I'm paying a dollar or two (or six) as some of these mods want, what am I getting for my money versus buying another (complete) game or nabbing the same item for free at another mod site?

That post is from March. It doesn't really give any ideas as to what they think of this

You're right - just looked at it now. I still agree with the general sentiment, and it's more true than ever.
 
What if I bought MAG a month before it shut down?

If they didn't inform people that it was going to shut down well before it did and just pulled the servers and told people about it a few weeks before it happened, then you should get a refund.
You would have found information detailing the shutdown 5 months beforehand and could have gone back to the store for a refund.

That's more than enough time. Five months is fair.
 

Branson

Member
I look forward to Fallout 4 mods being locked to the terrible Workshop by the mod tools. Although I'm sure there will be ways around that. Frustrating all around, and I hope it doesnt go down a bad path. Which it probably will, they usually do.
 
So the general idea is yes, but it's really not that good ?
MO is pretty much the only thing making modding Skyrim bearable, I fail to see how having to spend money on mods ( hopefully new one, but very likely many of which you already had for free up until now ) through a platform which make modding your game harder, will be a win for us.

I hope I'm wrong.

Any workshop mod you can extract and repack to use with MO.
 

Mesoian

Member
So the general idea is yes, but it's really not that good ?
MO is pretty much the only thing making modding Skyrim bearable, I fail to see how having to spend money on mods ( hopefully new one, but very likely many of which you already had for free up until now ) through a platform which make modding your game harder, will be a win for us.

I hope I'm wrong.

Let's put it this way, it is in Valve's best interest to make a solution that allows people to use MO easily.

I do not believe they will come up with said solution. Bethesda sure as hell ain't gonna do it.

But sure, you can still use the steam workshop as a marketplace and manually load mods in MO, but that kind of sucks and does away with one of the more interesting underpinning of MO.
 

Sendou

Member
Like I said earlier, if I'm paying a dollar or two (or six) as some of these mods want, what am I getting for my money versus buying another (complete) game or nabbing the same item for free at another mod site?

That would depend on what you want, wouldn't it? I'm still disturbed by how you say you can nab the "same item" for free at another mod site. Eventually it seems likely to me that the best mod content will be behind a paywall. What then? So at that point you either decide the best mods are worth your money or be content with the free ones.
 
That post is from March. It doesn't really give any ideas as to what they think of this

And Valve went to an artist at March about this apparently.
I'm not saying that they knew about it but I think a modder community would probably the first to be aware of such a change.

I'm considering Wet & Cold since the nexus version is old but I don't see how can this add more than a DLC to be priced as such. I know that there is a refund option but knowing Steam support I honestly doubt that can end without me frustrated for a week or more.
I wonder if the users of the mod still have it or did the modder remove it from your game? If it is still there may I get a short review?
 

aajohnny

Member
And yet, there are. Just for Skyrim alone, I can name a bunch of the top of my head. Vijia, Hoth, Interesting NPC's, Z'hago. Vijia had dialogue contributions from Terry Pratchett. Falskaar puts other DLC's from Bethesda to shame. Civil War Overhaul took what Bethesda couldn't finish and made it a glorified game in itself. Then there's stuff like Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, The Nameless Mod, Shifter, some of the Total War mods...

Idk if you know how hard it is to make a game from the ground up... you are focusing on 100's of different things at once. I'm not putting modders down but they get to focus on a few things that were already made and build upon it and not really have to worry about the game performance or anything and have it totally put against them, it'll just get blamed on the developer. They also don't have time restrictions like developers do. Sometimes things can't get in the game or have to be cut because of numerous problems that can arise and time is one of them. Saying it put them to shame is pretty shameful in itself. Putting a developer down for creating the whole game and allowing the modder to create something isn't right man.
 
I don't have any big problem with this. There will still be plenty of free UGC available, and I think that rewarding creators for substantial content mods is great (though I would prefer them to get more than 25%). There's going to be a teething period for sure, a lot of small cosmetic mods are going to be priced too high because they'll look at the example pricing set by DOTA2, TF2 etc and go from that. The difference is that, in a multiplayer title, cosmetics are about status; you buy them so that people you play with/against will see them. That's not the case in Skyrim, so I think the pricing will need to be much lower for people to bother.
 

Hahs

Member
This is basically Valve (and Beth) doing what Microsoft stated they were intending to implement into X-box Live on the X-box 360 about 10 years ago, when the console was going to launch.

"We'll let content creators be able to charge for their T-shirt skins/Car Liveries in Forza and other titles."

I totally remember that - what a crock!
 

Clawww

Member
I'm curious to see proof of a direct correlation between the quality of something when it's free vs. when it's charged for. Are you saying modders have been holding back, waiting on this day to really step it up?

has nothing to do with people holding back or stepping up. I just think more people would be inclined to create mods or start learning how to do so, and maybe put more time and effort into it, because of this additional incentive. it's going to increase the amount of man-hours people pour into mods. your question about quality if something is free or charged for is fucking disingenuous as hell, by the way.
 

Nzyme32

Member
And Valve went to an artist at March about this apparently.
I'm not saying that they knew about it but I think a modder community would probably the first to be aware of such a change.

I'm considering Wet & Cold since the nexus version is old but I don't see how can this add more than a DLC to be priced as such. I know that there is a refund option but knowing Steam support I honestly doubt that can end without me frustrated for a week or more.
I wonder if the users of the mod still have it or did the modder remove it from your game? If it is still there may I get a short review?

I kind of agree, I'd assume they would be smart enough to keep them in the loop, especially with something so community centric. I don't think free mods will go anywhere. In fact, I think free mods may proliferate as people start project off free or with a pay what you want suggested price, and later transition to paid stuff.

The current mods like wet & cold going paid straight away with (seemingly) no new meaningful content, would push me towards just getting the free version. If it is pay what you want, I think that is a whole lot more reasonable. That said, if they keep adding stuff and improving / expanding on it, I'd be happy to pay a reasonable price
 
That would depend on what you want, wouldn't it? I'm still disturbed by how you say you can nab the "same item" for free at another mod site. Eventually it seems likely to me that the best mod content will be behind a paywall. What then? So at that point you either decide the best mods are worth your money or be content with the free ones.

You can sit there and pretend otherwise, but there is just as much content (or better) that has been and will continue to be produced for games like this. Christ, just look at the Companions section on NexusMods - dozens upon dozens of mods that improve functionality, add options, add characters with far more backstory/thought on their own than most in the vanilla game, etc.

You're throwing out hypotheticals and ignoring the issue. This (from what I can tell) is a short-term solution, seemingly hated by a large chunk of people, has little to no redeeming factors outside of "because Steam lol", and you haven't given me a good reason why I should spend money on mods with next-to-no guarantee that they'll be working down the road because it's "good for creators", and even that's tenuous when the cut of profits is so low.

Idk if you know how hard it is to make a game from the ground up... you are focusing on 100's of different things at once. I'm not putting modders down but they get to focus on a few things that were already made and build upon it and not really have to worry about the game performance or anything and have it totally put against them, it'll just get blamed on the developer. They also don't have time restrictions like developers do. Sometimes things can't get in the game or have to be cut because of numerous problems that can arise and time is one of them. Saying it put them to shame is pretty shameful in itself. Putting a developer down for creating the whole game and allowing the modder to create something isn't right man.

Well... yeah. He asked for examples of how mods can be done professionally. And yes, in some cases, I would contend that it does put the quality of the content in the vanilla game to shame. The post-release "unofficial patches" are testament enough for that, to say nothing of the massive content mods that have been released..
 

Mesoian

Member
has nothing to do with people holding back or stepping up. I just think more people would be inclined to create mods or start learning how to do so because of this additional incentive.

And while this is true, I don't think Valve or Bethesda are willing to help with the growing pains that's going to come with a 100 shirt mods being priced at 4.99 each that essentially ruin people's saves.

I think the amount of curation and moderation of this in Skyrim alone is something that Valve isn't going to want to deal with; I doubt they even CAN with their current staff.
 

Aureon

Please do not let me serve on a jury. I am actually a crazy person.
25% seems shockingly low. Think of a total conversion like Nerhim. Should Bethesda/Valve really take home 75% on something like that?

Making a game is still an order of magnitude harder than making a mod, let's not kid ourselves here.
25% (compared to 70% for full games) is still not that bad.
I'd guessed something nearer to 40-50%, like 40 creator - 30 valve - 30 bethesda, but eh, it's still something.

And first and foremost, it's a big legitimization of modding work.
This makes curriculum now.
 

Krejlooc

Banned
because it's "good for creators", and even that's tenuous when the cut of profits is so low.

Thank you for taking this fight up on my behalf. Truly your contribution of $0 in principle is worth more than the pittance I would receive otherwise. I'm sure if content creators were making 75% of the profits off of this, your tune would change. Totally.
 

Sendou

Member
You can sit there and pretend otherwise, but there is just as much content (or better) that has been and will continue to be produced for games like this. Christ, just look at the Companions section on NexusMods - dozens upon dozens of mods that improve functionality, add options, add characters with far more backstory/thought on their own than most in the vanilla game, etc.

You're throwing out hypotheticals and ignoring the issue. This (from what I can tell) is a short-term solution, seemingly hated by a large chunk of people, has little to no redeeming factors outside of "because Steam lol", and you haven't given me a good reason why I should spend money on mods with next-to-no guarantee that they'll be working down the road because it's "good for creators", and even that's tenuous when the cut of profits is so low.

It doesn't even seem you are answering to what I'm saying. I don't really see how we can reach a reasonable conclusion like this. I guess we just have to revisit this issue a year from now and see what happened.
 
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