Behind the Line: Paid Mods

Paid mods…

A lot of things have been said about them, and as with many explosions like this there’s a lot right and a lot wrong buried in all the yelling. I think we all need to calm down and look at this rationally.

 

The basic facts

For anyone not aware, recently Valve opened a mod market on Steam where creators could put their work up for sale on a mod marketplace. Then everything exploded and it was shut down 4 days later.

You said it, Ron.

You said it, Ron.

Even in the Internet news era, where people report on everything almost instantly, that was pretty fast.

The idea behind this is that it would mean that mod makers will be able to get financial rewards for all of their hard work, and could even make a cottage industry of continuing, or supporting that work. This could also draw in more modders to make even more mods, and possibly better ones. This would also be an additional source of revenue for the developer to allow more support for the games with the largest fan base. Valve would also get some of the money because they are providing the architecture where these transactions are taking place. Sounds win-win-win, right? More on that later…

The first (and only) title that this paid mod initiative was activated for was Skyrim. This makes sense considering the stupifyingly robust mod community there is for that game, it would be the richest vein to mine. The revenue was to be split three ways, with the share being 30-35% for Valve, 45% to Bethesda, and the remaining 20-25% to the modders. More on that later too…

Anyway, the market went live, crap appeared for sale alongside legit items, conflicts and copyright violations were found, players had protests, locusts devoured crops, questions were raised, maidens and children wailed in agony, accusations were leveled, the sky split open in fire, and the paid mod initiative was rescinded for at least the time being. I think most of that happened anyway.

Here is an artist's rendition.

Here is an artist’s rendition.

 

The complications

This is an initiative that Valve has had in mind for years, and have been working on how to get it right. However, when it was released, many things went wrong, most of which were due to how things all went together in a tangled web of pieces and strings that stack on each other in an orchestra of causality, blame, and madness.

A composite sketch from eyewitnesses

A composite sketch from eyewitnesses

I’ll just list out some of the points here:

  • Modders were only given a couple months of advance notice. In that time frame, they weren’t able to make anything new and compelling to put up for sale.
  • There was no enforcement policy for quality, or content, instead preferring the community to self police the content, which led to a lot of claims that content in mods was stolen, or belonged to others.
  • Advance notice to the player base was minimal. People tend to not react well when significant changes are made without reasonable advance notice. They will feel cheated, betrayed, deceived, pick your term. Even if it is a universally praised change, some will be upset, and rightfully so, at the disruption for which they were not able to prepare.
  • Many mods require other mods. Is it right for mod A to charge $10, when it requires mod B to run, and mod B is free. Shouldn’t some of the money go to mod B for facilitating mod A?
  • Many mods are not entirely stable. These are fan made add-ons that are a labor of love, and not necessarily of the highest quality. While there are clearly many amazing, stable, high quality mods out there, not ALL of them are. Some are very niche, some are jokes, and some are just too ambitious.
  • Many mods are incompatible with other mods. If a player were to buy two mods because they wanted to use both at once, but their functionality is actually mutually exclusive, then how is it justifiable to charge for both?
  • To be more specific, the Skyrim modding community is already firmly established. While it can be looked at as a way to provide a source of income for the modders, putting what everyone expects to be free behind a paywall, even if it is only for new things, will be seen as TAKING AWAY something that is tacitly understood to be free and available to all, and that NEVER ends well for anyone.
  • Modding has historically been considered open-source. For those who don’t know, that means the code is open for anyone to grab and do whatever they like with it. To have mods restricted behind a pay wall is antithetical to that idea. Additional content that is locked off is usually… made by the developer and called DLC.

Add all of this up and you get a powder keg waiting to go off in an explosion of unacceptable behavior.

A wise one once said, "There's no justice like angry mob justice."

A wise one once said, “There’s no justice like angry mob justice.”

 

My Reaction

I think it is important at this point for me to establish my own point of view before I talk about others’. I do firmly believe that Valve were trying to come up with something that would truly be a win for everyone involved. This makes business sense on a number of levels, to me at any rate. I also think that they didn’t consider the secondary effects of these changes to the existing market/ecosystem/environment.

All of the points I listed above are predictable, and were clearly not taken into account, and they weren’t taken into account for some reason. Now this is just a guess on my part, but I don’t think they were known but ignored. I think Valve never realized they were there in the first place.

That may sound outlandish, what with the spectacular reaction that it generated, so please let me explain. There are times when the focus of a project is so prominent, that the side effects are neglected.

It's an easy mistake to make...

It’s an easy mistake to make…

In this case, I think that the focus was entirely on getting the technical side of things working. Once that was complete then everything else would simply fall into place. Because the focus was entirely on that, there wasn’t any awareness that second or third degrees of effects were even a thing that could happen.

I imagine that they considered it a small side thing at first, saw a lot of mods on Skyrim making it a good place to try this out, because there’s so much mod traffic there then it’s certain to get some traction. A game with less mod traffic might either go unnoticed, or the presence of ANY pay wall might kill the modding community for that game outright.

Then there’s the point where some mods might require other mods could have been seen in a couple ways, though none of them particularly complimentary.

  • One, the prerequisite mods should be added to the paid mod program. This seems reasonable, but as mods progress, and the prerequisite mods are updated, and support for the previous “free” versions drops away, it becomes impossible to say that you AREN’T taking things away from players.
  • Two, the prerequisite mods were considered a part of the environment at this point and are simply required things from the community. This would require these mods to be static and never be updated, and that’s an unreasonable expectation, as the big ones will likely be updated, and mods are always building out, so more requirements will develop as time goes on.
  • Three, there was no awareness of mods that require other mods to work. If that one happened, then that’s displaying a level of ignorance of the community that you are offering this to that is unforgivably insulting.

Then there are the points for mod stability, stealing content, open source, or verifying quality for a paid product. The idea that the community will self police is a pipe dream. The fact is that when people buy games they know there’s a certain level of risk that it won’t work on their machine, or that it won’t be good. If people PAY for a mod, the general expectation is that it will work if the base game works. Granted there are exceptions such as graphics enhancing mods where it is reasonable to know that it may push a machine past its limits, but generally if it is adding a storyline, class, or something along those lines, then it would be reasonable to expect it to be stable. The community can’t protect itself against bad mods until people have paid and it is too late. Nor can the community scan all mods to know if there is stolen content in one. The burden CAN NOT be placed there for this concept.

 

Community reactions

The community had a number of reactions, and many were reasonable. People are upset for many of the reasons I listed above, and that’s a good thing. A poorly thought out project does need to be taken to task, and THAT is a community policing itself.

The reactions that I would like to mention here, though, are those that are talking about this as though it is a big money grab, and often accompanied by anti-Semitic racism.

These changes are not simple or cheap to make. This isn’t something that can be treated as a “throw it against the wall and see if it sticks” kind of a thing. This is an idea that would fundamentally change the structure of modding games. It is a significant investment for creating a four party market place (vendor, dev, customer, and now introducing the modder), setting up submission, billing, and payment pipelines, and the legal side of getting approval from everyone involved. And there’s also the cost of reacting to the anger. As Gabe Newell himself said:

“So far the paid mods have generated $10K total. That’s like 1 percent 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).”

Basically, the backlash was strong. Some was unjustified, but a lot was. This gave it enough weight to shatter the program like a hollow man.

A screen capture from a simulation I ran.

A screen capture from a simulation I ran.

 

Conclusions

Calling this a money grab is assuming that Valve is amazingly short sighted. No matter how many examples there are out there of destructively greedy executives, at the end of the day, if you upset your customer base enough, they will leave. The only party I would call greedy here is Bethesda, who apparently set their own share percentage at 45%, which is pretty high, and squeezes the modders themselves. Note that the 30-35% for Steam is a fairly standard cut for the market to take. I also do believe that the developer should receive some of the funds, but a 1:1:1 ratio would probably be more equitable.

For all of the difficulties we’ve discussed here, I do not see these as insurmountable. I think that there can be a place for a paid mod market, but it will require more infrastructure.

I envision the funds from mod sales going to the developer are then used to fund a verification process. They will check stability and quality of the mods, check for compatibility with other mods, and field any legal objections. This gives the developer both financial benefit, and some responsibility, as the modders and Valve already have.

Modders may then have to pay a modest fee (perhaps $100) for submission of a new mod for consideration. This fee would prevent shovelware mod submissions, and cover the up front cost for supporting this review process. Then, any modders who don’t think they’re up to selling their work, maintaining full open compatibility, or meeting quality requirements, they are free to release their work for free still.

I think this can work, but more experimentation needs to be done, and more groundwork needs to be laid. We can get there, and it can bring us good things, just not yet.

But if there’s anything that I would like you, the reader, to take from all of this, it’s this… I like Hieronymus Bosch.

 

 


 

Kynetyk is a veteran of the games industry.  Behind the Line is written to help improve understanding of what goes on in the game development process and the business behind it.  From “What’s taking this games so long to release”, to “why are there bugs”, to “Why is this free to play” or anything else,  if there is a topic that you would like to see covered, please write in to kynetyk@enthusiacs.com

2 Responses to Behind the Line: Paid Mods

  1. Baron Fang says:

    What is it with Valve being unable to accept a need for quality control? If you’re going to take a cut of people’s money then you’re partly responsible for the quality (or validity) of that product.

    • Kynetyk says:

      Valve to cover testing of mods? Well, we can start with the fact that, really, the only portal where there is significant QA on the product is consoles. Apple, Android, PC, they get too much input to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you’re going to add mods to it, consider that every new mod will continue to increase the testing cycle due to the fact that each one will have to be checked for compatibility against every other officially supported mod… there’s no chance in hell that would be remotely cost effective. That’s why it would be better for the developer to take part in it. They would have better tools available to verify functionality, and could post their own requirements, and perhaps have a hand in selecting which mods will get official backing for being put up for sale.

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