My personal experience with Skyrim is that it cost $50 USD, and went on sale the next week and has broken multiple times, due to mods and other reasons, but I have still played over 300 hours of that game. Now many people may see this as trolling or trying to stir people up, I legitimately want Skyrims paid mods back. However this doesn’t mean they should be implemented in the same way or be the same kinds of mods. By this I mean I am not going to pay for just a single sword or armor set, but if they were to be larger content packs or towns, cities, new lands or involved long to longish quest. I would spend my money on those and I really want to…
… So let me know what you people think about this and I promise you this is my honest opinion…
I guess I didn’t really say that clearly, if the mod had a considerable amount of work put into it I would be willing to give some money to the creator for there work…
That doesn’t work. The guy who made OptiFine (not a mod for a Steam game but still a valid example) only has a couple hundred dollars in donations in years of his mod being out.
Here’s the thing, I agree that you should be able to give money to modmakers for their effort, I really do. However, they way that Valve was going to do it is not something I think is a good way of doing it. The prices for some of the mods were quite frankly ridiculous, and the fact that 75 % of the cut is split between Valve and Bethesda is absurd.
The better way of monetizeing mods are via donations, either through Nexus or Patreon, since then you could download the mod, play for a bit and if you like the mod and want to support the creator then you can donate money to them. If Steam had done it like this from the beginning, I’m almost certain that it wouldn’t have received such a backlash.
Another problem with the way Valve and Bethesda went about it is that Skyrim has built up a huge number of free mods over the years, some of which are basically essential to have at this point, like the unofficial patches, SkyUI, and a few others. If the creators started charging for those all of a sudden, it would either a) completely screw everyone over if they charged everyone, regardless of whether they already had the mod(s0 in question installed, or b) if not, it would still become a barrier to entry for new players, would would have to shell out extra on top of what they already paid for the game in order to get what’s considered to be a normal, better-than-vanilla experience.
I think, if they implemented a similar policy with a newly-released game (and also didn’t take 75% of the cut), it would work a lot better.
This hour long RoosterTeeth partnered video perfectly (imo) describes all sides of this argument. Check it out. Or not.
Also my opinion is that, Mod makers should be able to charge for their mods without people complaining because they are making something that they could charge a crap ton for, but have made free. Now when they actually want to make a little bit of money for the hours upon hours they put into their protect, people flip their sh*t. I think it’s a little selfish to not at the very least, let them have a donation/pay-what-you want button.
You have to remember that there wasn’t any regulation on it either, so you could just cope someone’s free mod and charge it for a couple bucks on steam. So people could just make money off of other people’s work. Not only that, but a lot of mods involve things from other IPs. Back to making money off of other people’s work, if there was a Mario mod, since Bethesda is pretty much making direct profit from it, Nintendo would have to send a cease and desist to protect their IPs from copyrights. Having unregulated paid mods is bad for pretty much everyone.
I guess that I didn’t really think this whole thing through, more and more I wanna donate, my wallet will hate me, but I want to help them out for there awesome work…
Yeah, paid mods definitely could be a good thing if they were implemented carefully, though at this point I think it’s best to leave games that’ve been around awhile alone. But for now, donations seem to be the only option that doesn’t create a fiasco. =/
Here’s an idea for the mod creators to evade sharing 75% of their earnings
I call it : Forceful Donations
The gist of this system is that you have to voluntarily donate, BY FORCE, to the creator in order for the mod to work (details about how that work may be tricky, but hey, yeah).
Of course, this system appears extremely flawed and full of loopholes and doesn’t solve any other problem than who gets the money.
But.
That’s about it
