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Steam Allows Paid Mods


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So apparently all of the rage Valve is receiving from angry customers via email is actually costing them 1 million dollars.

 

Huh.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/33uplp/mods_and_steam/cqojx8y

 

If you ask me, I don't think paid mods is a bad idea. I just don't like how the system is being handled now.

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I don't buy that for a second.

 

And good fucking lord Gabe, why do you THINK you've only made 10k? 

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What sort of price range are these mods commanding, anyway?

I can't help but feel a lot of customers just don't feel the value's there.

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Honestly, I saw that coming. Valve isn't stupid. They don't want to capitalize on modding. They just want to try new things to encourage content creators to continue creating content for these games. In turn, that generates revenue and keeps games alive longer then ever. Money is a large incentive, so people selling them would had been a great idea. Unfortunately, the way Valve handled it obviously led to severe backlash.

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Mod makers can still start Patreons, in fact that's what they've been doing for a while now.

 

I kind of feel bad for Valve now, the idea got hit like a truck by criticism.

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Good on Valve for taking the feedback into consideration.

 

I kind of feel bad for Valve now, the idea got hit like a truck by criticism.

30488-Woody-Harrelson-crying-money-b-8fc

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ayy

 

lmaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaao

 

remember the part where inbetween lines, what they've written there is "FUCK, WE FUCKED UP APPARENTLY? WE DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY, BUT YOU'RE MAD. NEXT TIME WE'LL DO IT IN OUR OWN GAMES ONLY WE PROMISE"

 

here's hoping someone finally goes "oh wait what if we do donations only, or allow integrating with patreon or some such bullshit and also don't take 75% of the pie"

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It's Microsoft all over again.

 

People strike out, company defends it vigorously, company starts to lose money and PR, company does a 180.

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"Now that you've backed a dump truck of feedback onto our inboxes"

I love how casual these guys can be with their language. :P

The idea has merit, just hopefully next time they'll make it so they don't take such a huge cut (as I mentioned, Amazon and eBay only ask for 15% as their referral fee, so that's probably a good range for this), and they have a better quality control policy.

Quality control with digital goods is a bucket of fun, though, given the internet's population leans towards sociopathy.

It's Microsoft all over again.

 

People strike out, company defends it vigorously, company starts to lose money and PR, company does a 180.

I imagine there were scores of boycotts over this an-

BE RIGHT BACK STEAM SALE!

(In all seriousness I don't think they were really hurt by this... they're like Wal-Mart at this point. People may gripe but they'll keep on coming because of the value afforded by the platform)

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If you look at it through the lens of what they're doing with Dota 2 and TF2 it makes a lot of sense. Some hat makers get serious cash.

 

That side is pretty well moderated, curated, and regulated though. This seemed a little more wild west and that's probably where the problem is. Skyrim mods are such a bizarre, mod upon mod community that you can't just stick something like this ontop of it and expect it to work. Seems like it would be better if it came out with a new game, without the baggage of thousands of existing free mods.

 

I think the idea of paying modders for their work is a really great idea. Allowing someone who has made something fantastic for a game to get something back for their work is great. The backlash I felt is way out of line, although I understand the anger at something being free being no longer free.

 

Villainizing Valve for this when they've done so much good for PC gaming and the community in general though. Come on now. 

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This idea did have merit (and certainly not EA or Activision levels of evil, that's just absurd), it's just that it would've required considerable moderation and a better execution overall. It's refreshing to see such a timely and honest admission of "we fucked up".

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Seems like it would be better if it came out with a new game, without the baggage of thousands of existing free mods.

It's funny you should mention that, because it reminds me of the case with the new Unreal Tournament in development right now - it was announced with paid modding communities practically right off the bat and didn't get anywhere near the backlash this did.

 

In fact, having been with the franchise in some form as early as the 1999 original, it's kind of facinating to see how modding has grown and how paying for them can become acceptable. In UT99 it was not only largely acceptable just to retexture existing weapons or reintroduce some of the ridiculous amounts of dummied out content (Seriously, almost all of Unreal 1 is in there - only thing that's missing is the levels) and slap new functions onto them, most of the best and most famous of them did little more than that. And it was absolute mindfuck into the depths of oblivion when someone did take the time do do their own models, let alone stand up to Epic's own like the pack-in ChaosUT did.

 

It wasn't just standards that increased with latter games though - it takes more effort even to do an equivalent amount of modding in UT3 than it does in UT99. Models are higher poly, textures are higher res, there's more weapons and gametypes to balance with, some of which including vehicles, the list goes on. In many ways it's really not just a fun hobby anymore - in many respects the amount of passion it takes to make a decent mod can literally rival a full game nowadays, and the barriers between mod and full game are slowly eroding in the process. That's only exemplified by the fact that there are many full games out there - Killing Floor, Red Orchestra and The Ball, just off the top of my head - started as mods for Unreal Tournament games to begin with.

 

So maybe somebody made a mod which completely transforms the game and the way we play it, but insists on relying on the game nonetheless rather than making a new game from scratch. That's fine, but blood, sweat and tears still goes into projects like that - I don't think it's unfair that they have the right to demand a little something in return for it. Total conversions, new campaigns, brand new gametypes with completely different metagames, all that shit should be fair game for sale if they really want to make money off of it.

 

Just as long as mods of the older standards - retextures, models, Fuck Her Right in the Pussy bows, stuff like that - remain free, so people can continue doing stupid shit for fun and almost nothing and everyone else doesn't have to pay anything to do it, because there's really no point in asking money for a nuke launcher that shoots Nyan Cats.

 

...wow, this dragged on a lot longer than I thought it would.

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I totally agree. Allow dumb quick stuff to be for free, but definitely, people undertaking the huge epic mod projects should be able to sell it.

 

It's not even a new idea. Doom  was pretty much the first game to officially support modding with the WAD swapping stuff built in, and ID sold mod packs officially with the Final Doom release. Final Doom was essentially, two community level packs packaged as a game or I guess expansion pack.

 

I think I can remember there being more situations like this back in the day, expansions usually, but honestly I've pretty much completely forgotten. I don't think it's a new standard to sell them, it's more free became the defacto because how were you going to get someone to pay for a mod over the internet when they could just download it for free from somewhere else?

 

but ye. weird times better luck next time valve

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I have a feeling that if they retry paid mods in the future, they'll be more like community-made add-ons that are selected by the game's developer and explicitly tested so they can work properly with virtually any combination of 'official' mods - basically, more like community TF2/DOTA2 items and whatnot. That would ensure quality control, really, and would be less of a complete mess.

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