Paid mods for skyrim

[eRe4s3r]

Valve tricked modders with that legal trick into a disenfranchised slave status.

Keep the hyperbolic statements down. Unless you can actually prove that Valve wants to do this, I don't want to read these kind of trashy eye-grabbing sentences on these forums.

But censoring others' posts would be bring us all back to the Animal Farm, with our collective horses ass getting kicked by comrades.


 


I had to try my hand at it.


But seriously, Eraser has been around here for a long time, productively, as have a bunch of other participants in this hot button thread. Can we turn the temperature down? I don't want to see genuinely good people get pissed off and take their ball and go home over this thing.

<3

To me hyperbole is a valid concept of defending my point of view on an issue where I don't intent to budge even a nanometer.

That said, the "fight" has been "won", though I didn't think I'd see the 2 parties involved rudder back quite as furiously as they ultimately did. It's good to see that Beth in their blog post actually did see the greatest threat to modding in a DRM'ed steam workshop (Which is where my comment was coming from and this is something Bethesda most definitely would never want, because for sure that company is not happy that Steam is so dominant). But Steam doesn't just want this, steam already does this. Or try downloading and using a mod for dota 2 not on the steam workshop. Or try downloading a steam workshop mod for a game that isn't exclusive to steam. Steam did everything it can to prevent you from actually *downloading* mods hosted on the workshop flat-out which hampers and blocks actual good mods. As this makes a configurable mod install impossible. It makes complex interacting mods impossible etc. And this is why people rightfully call Steam Workshop mod DRM and rather go to the Nexus

Steam talks about services and how they want to do good. But everything they did the past years was blocking access to more and more things unless you were a steam user in the steam application. To the point where they did even take us the ability to download workshop mods properly (aka via downloader or browser) 3 years ago. Not what I would call defenders of freedom of modding.

And ever since Civ 5 I hate the steam workshop with a passion, because on release I couldn't play a single modded game to completion with a glorious unpreventable auto-update of either a mod or Civ 5 breaking my game.... so anyway

This was a topic that is now worth a few good laughs at the very least

Ps.: only Beth games I mod are the ones with guns and ghouls in them

[kasnavada]

From the Valve public announcement.

We've done this because it's clear we had no idea didn't understand exactly what we were doing.

I fixed it for them.

That they didn't foresee this coming, what with the WW2 level legal minefields confronting them, reveals an incredible lack of foresight that merits, in my opinion, a large group of people being fired.

There's another thing to look for, I think. When a corporation wants to impose something it knows will be unpopular, like a new fee for something that was once free (like checked baggage), what they'll often do is something pretty outrageous to start with.

Yes, this one. I can't believe they're that dumb, and can't really believe that what Steam now is can be the result of sheer dumb luck.
The concept is good, execution terrible.

Yep, well, you and I aren't super significant a sample.

I spent more time modding Morrowind than playing it, it was like a second job. The combination of personality traits that attracted me to fantasy role playing was the same thing that kept me from being able to enjoy it without a ton of mods tweaked just so.

I don't know about any statistics about mod usage, but you're not a significant sample either =). No one is individually.

My opinion is that most mods are garbage, and that a game should be good out of the box. If a mechanic hurts the game but can be modded, it does not make the game better, it makes my trust in those devs worse and makes me look at the competition. If content's lacking... then it's the same. There are a few mods that shine and deserve to be rewarded somehow, and currently it's not the case.

The only time when I use mod is when there is no competition I can easily go to, and when I really like the game. I used 3 in the last 15 years, the mod that make pilots eject M6 and higher pilots in X3 TC & X3AP, a mod for banished, which reduces the max-age of your guys, and I was "forced" to use the "semi official" balance mod for Dominions 3 when I played MP.

(Taking over cap ship is annoying at best in X3. In banished, if you don't kill your guys early, you will eventually find yourself with a dead town unless you actively remove geezer from their homes, as young people in that game apparently can't think of making kids until they leave their parents, at 50 or 70 years old. And, the average life expectancy for "banished people" apparently is 85, but making kids stops at 40, and getting out of school is anywhere between 15 and 30 (that depends on which school they decide to go to). In Dom3, the devs can't care about balance - they want to add new races and mechanics with little concern to balance, and anyway, given what the game is, it's impossible for a 2 guys team on their free time to balance. Actually I believe it's impossible to balance, full stop.)

That said, like the discussion about achievement on some other part of this forum, if I don't want to use mods, then I don't and everyone's happy. So from a game dev's point of view, if the game can include them, they should include them.

To me hyperbole is a valid concept of defending my point of view on an issue where I don't intent to budge even a nanometer.

To me, it's at best a strawman argument, at worst trolling. None are valid, both are flame-fuel  .

[WingedKagouti]

To me hyperbole is a valid concept of defending my point of view on an issue where I don't intent to budge even a nanometer.

If you don't intend to budge, then there's no room for discussion. If there's no room for discussion why even post?

[Histidine]

Apparently one of the chans spammed Valve's fax machines with black pages (to waste ink) over this thing.

I had two mildly conflicting thoughts on this:
1) Do they really think this is a morally sensible cause of action?
2) Why can't they do something like this over something like the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

[Wingflier]

4chan and moral sensibility don't really belong in the same sentence.

One of the advantages of 4chan is that it's possibly one of the only places in the entire world where notions of modern morality do not apply and are constantly challenged. The mods are essentially the only party even attempting to legislate morality, and even they only seem to be concerned with it for legal reasons (so that the site doesn't get shut down). Even the founder of 4chan who made millions from its popularity has completely left the building, from what I can tell, to escape the legal implications if something ever happens.

So to them, the goal is generally to be as offensive and destructive as possible. If something positive comes out of it, that's a nice bonus. If not? Well we trolled them, wasted a bunch of their ink, and had a jolly good time doing it. It's a win-win.

[eRe4s3r]

To me hyperbole is a valid concept of defending my point of view on an issue where I don't intent to budge even a nanometer.

If you don't intend to budge, then there's no room for discussion. If there's no room for discussion why even post?

To explain why I won't budge, of course. ^^

[chemical_art]

Reading this over, I think it was Valve and not Zenimax who decided to pull the plug on the idea.

Using timestamps, it seems even as little as 3 hours before pulling the plug Zenimax was digging in hard for the long haul. Then, after writing a huge post about why this is a good idea Valve pulls it then Zenimax "updates" the post with a paragraph saying "Oh, it is said the players don't like it. Too bad."

I  don't Valve for pulling it though. They had the most to lose.

Zenimax, legally, has an easy case regarding mods mostly: Everything here is ours. We don't endorse modifications. Those we do we have the luxury of dictating the terms because it is ultimately ours to decide. Zenimax then does a deal with Valve: Valve gets a get of the money but has to perform all the work in upkeeping it.

It is all that upkeeping where the headaches come in. Any of the very many disputes that mods have Valve is ultimately liable for. Protecting modders from plagiarism, quality control, settling disputes when mods break is all their liability. But that is small fry to the much bigger issues.  For example: Copywrited material. Many, many mods use copyrighted material: music, models, names, etc. The list goes on and on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od-b82jxj4E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bifmj1O3D24

These mods exist in the free form because they are given a bit more legal protection both in theory and additionally  in practice (can't sue for much money if no money is earned). The result is legally nothing happens. But if any mod which was formerly endorsed (via being in the "store" of mods) occurred requiring pay then these legal protections evaporate.

You can bet the modder would be sued. Zenimax might be sued as well but they would say "we licensed this to Valve, they are liable". Valve would be the one slammed for the heaviest liability. Even the act of defending against it would be costly.

Then it goes down to numbers: Actually I'll post what is supposed to be Valve co-creator Gabe Newell:

"Let's assume for a second that we are stupidly greedy. So far the paid mods have generated $10K total. That's like 1% of the cost of the incremental email the program has generated for Valve employees (yes, I mean pissing off the Internet costs you a million bucks in just a couple of days). That's not stupidly greedy, that's stupidly stupid."

I think that sums it up. All this...crap...has netted them maybe 10K? That is not enough to even pay for the outrage (Thanks 4chan?) . Let alone that 10K would not cover the cost of fighting off even a frivolous copyright suit regarding a mod.

In short, Valve was making a piss poor amount of money for a huge amount of outrage, let alone any legal minefields. They had nothing to lose but headaches by dropping this idea.

[kasnavada]

From the guy in Steam:

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.

What you just said matches what they said here.
They'll probably restart but with a completely new game, before any mods is started on that particular game. And maybe they will do a donate button (and take a percentage of the donation in the process), which, before having done this stunt, would never have worked without a huge backlash.

As you said, the current modder community does a lot of plagiarization, ignores a lot of what is protected by copyright laws, and sometimes steal from each other. Enabling being paid like that was a legal minefield... because the community & mods already existed.

And about the possible gains on this, 10K for valve is about 30k of stuff bought... just for a single game in a single week. All other games proposed by steam could generate what... 100 times more ? 1000 times more ? For 50 weeks a year instead of about one ? If they can work the wording of the legal issues about this in order not to be liable, there is money to be made.

The concept is sound, the execution terrible. Then again, I'm pretty sure it's a test about "go for something outrageous - does not matter if we fail - with the feedback we'll restart doing something great".

[KillerofGods]

Yeah... I thought this was a bad idea and only just now realized they got rid of this.

But he had no problem in his entire life to give his stuff away for free.

But neither have modders had a different option. This is just how it's been but that doesn't mean that we can't change our way of thinking about modding and the community around it. Creating and playing videogames was once a hobby too. Now we have multi-billion dollar companies and e-Sports built on it. For better or worse. Whether this becomes anything bigger than a hobby will be up to the general gaming population. 

There is a pay-what-you-want option. It's up to the modder to use that option.

You can always do what Starcraft Universe did, had a early early demo to test the waters, people liked it so they contacted Blizzard and got the go ahead to start a kickstarter where they earned $85,000 dollars.

That also generates some hype and the quality control existed in the amount of hurdles and public relations they had to build up to get to that point.

[KillerofGods]

You can be thankful it's only 40%, in the CS for Skyrim the Eula says that all content created with it, is property of Bethesda. As in 100% owned by Bethesda.

That by itself would keep me from modding Bethesda games.

Mojang recognizes that mod content is owned by the mod author, although there are some things you can't do (per the EULA).  There's some gray areas around the "make money from" but it mostly revolves around not making money from Mojang's IP, and that a large portion of making mods involves, to some degree, Mojang's IP, and more or less comes down to "not hiding anything behind a paywall."  E.g. you can't charge for access.

Ehh, it's a smart thing to do as you never know, just look at DotA and Blizzard. I still don't agree with it but we already agree to worse things in some ToU for games we have already bought but can't play until we agree to those ToU.

and especially since in no way will any significant number of users stop using Steam or buying Bethesda games.

Oh I stopped buying Bethesda games when someone told me that to "really play" an Elder Scrolls game you had to mod it.

That's not really fair... Total War for example, mods can make a good/aging game and make it great. WC3/SC:BW Custom games/UMS (User made settings) map made those games popular for the casual crowd. D2 allowed people to mod the game and add what they thought would be great for those interested in SP at least.

I have around 200ish mods for skyrim and they all are aimed to enhance the basic feel vs changing it. More followers (kinda breaks balance but I prefer immersion,) more quests, more places, more houses, more items, more weapons/armor/spell, new systems (frostbite and other survival intricacies), new animations. The list goes on and on... it allows people to perfect a game for their individual needs vs Bethesda trying to make a game for everyone with potentially hundreds of options more people would find useless.

This doesn't mean Bethesda is perfect as they definitely have room for improvement, but they still make some of my favorite games modded or unmodded. Mods enhance that immersion though and makes a really great game.

[Draco18s]

mods can make a good/aging game and make it great

I agree.

Skyrim is not a good game out of the box.  It's broken, unfinished, and lackluster.

[kasnavada]

The  elder scroll  series is not a good game out of the box.  It's broken, unfinished, and lackluster.

Fixed =).

I personally stopped just after daggerfall, a bit of morrowind but that's it. Although my hating the broken levelling system and enemy scaling to your level as a core mechanic may have been quite a big part of why I never continued.

[Draco18s]

I never played any of the ones before Morrowind and had an alright time with Morrowind (I got to a point where I'd lost track of the main quest, as well as several of the side-quest givers, so I was unable to turn things in) so I quit playing.

Skyrim though, I had more fundamental issues almost immediately.  The level scaling was probably one of those.

[Captain Jack]

Morrowind was the high water mark for TES working right out of the box. Daggerfall still doesn't work even after decades of patching.

[KillerofGods]

mods can make a good/aging game and make it great

I agree.

Skyrim is not a good game out of the box.  It's broken, unfinished, and lackluster.

I've only ever had one "game breaking" bug which was the guards killing everyone in whiterun due to me being a werewolf and the guards thinking I was still a friendly. The only other bugs I can remember is an invisible dragon and khajiit tails stretching out like crazy for their ragdolls.

Unfinished? I mean I thought it was finished.

Lackluster? I play it for the immersion and Skyrim provides one of the best atmospheres to immerse yourself in, would be nice if they allowed a journal system like Morrowwind though.