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| Steam Home Page and the Shadow Scale Set mod herald the end times. |
For those who do not know what is going on, essentially, Bethesda and Valve teamed up to put a feature on the Steam Workshop where mod authors can monetize their creations. Sounds harmless at first, kind of like YouTube, but the complexities and fine details unravel a complete monstrosity lurking within. The very first thing I notice, above all else, are idiots charging literally five dollars for a small texture update. I think, okay, that's no big deal, they'll just get shunned out of the front page of popular mods. Then I start reading more, and more, and... oh what a mess. The next catch to all this is that Bethesda and Valve make a profit off of the modder's work. Okay, sounds fair, the modder's can't just say they did everything themselves including make the assets that are used in the game, sure give Bethesda and Valve a profit. Then there's the number: seventy-five percent of the profit goes to Valve and Bethesda. Even when the modder has done most of the legwork. But you know, plenty of people download these things. The money should add up just fine, yeah? Wrong. In order to make ANY money, modders have to make four hundred dollars. So why the fuck would they even bother with charging money? Unless they are insane and think they can sell fucking armor sets for fifteen dollars! Now they are the Bethesda morons who thought selling horse armor was a good idea!
I fumbled around the Steam discussion boards, trying to make sense of the catastrophe that was upon us all. Hell, I'm not even huge into the modding community, and this is already starting to hurt. I try to go on to all the paid mods' pages and downrate all of them into Oblivion (get it?) before they stay on the front page long enough for idiots to actually shell out money for these scams. But what do I see? I can't vote on the mods! I try to go down to the comments and discussion, but I can't do that either! Valve has locked out anybody who hasn't paid for the mods from having any say in the mod whatsoever!
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| You can see it on the debut pack once again now, but you still can't rate or view comments/discussion on the individual mods themselves. |
I started panicking, having flashbacks of George Orwell and the dystopian futurism. There's no way this can be happening! Searching for some solace, some comfort in other people who were outraged, I found quite a number of groups who have coalesced into the Free Mod Alliance. Among these, I joined with the Free the Workshop group and the Boycott Buying Workshop Mods group to keep an eye on the craziness that is happening. Meanwhile, I rushed over to the Garry's Mod discussion to see if this curse has spread to that game yet.
Luckily, for now, their workshop does not have paid mods yet. However, I found some horrifying news which I am honestly not even surprised by. Garry Newman, creator of Garry's Mod, and Ultimate Twat-lord of All Time (and I'm not even saying this because of his decision with paid mods. He's been an asshole ever since before I even started playing his mod literally in 2009), wrote a blog article showing off his love and support for this ridiculous system.
Garry's Mod, of all the games on Steam, has the highest risk of being utterly destroyed by this system. It is a game that solely depends on mods; it is absolute shit without any, as it is a sandbox game. Skyrim is kinda crappy in design but it at least has fun quests and roleplaying and such in and of itself. Garry's Mod has nothing more than a few basic barebones models you can use to build things with. If you are unfamiliar with Garry's Mod, think of its core design as a dollhouse that you can add nearly any doll you can think of to, as well as decorate the dollhouse, choose what kind of house you even use (basically, you can have everything in a huge city or on a flat, grassy plain), and even use some crazy shit like a TV that can connect to the Internet and play YouTube videos, among other things. This is just Garry's Mod at its core; then you have gamemodes that can turn Garry's Mod into pretty much anything you want.
Of course, though, the dollhouse is nothing without the dolls or furniture. These are essentially the mods in Garry's Mod, and there are possibly hundreds of thousands of them out there, certainly thousands in the Steam Workshop alone. If you truly love this game, you'll find yourself running up into hundreds of mods downloaded. With this new system, the mod authors can say, "You know what, fuck my current subscribers and make you pay for the mods you already own so that you can continue to receive updates. And if you stand your ground and say no, only to find that your mod breaks later on, guess what? You either gotta pay for the update or uninstall the mod.
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| If you think I'm just being crazy in that last paragraph, no, this shit has only just gotten started. |
Luckily with Skyrim I don't have that many mods downloaded from the Steam Workshop, and none of them cost a dime (for now). Garry's Mod hasn't begun monetization yet, but unlike with Skyrim, where I had about fifty mods, I have around two-hundred and fifty mods in Garry's Mod. The likelihood of several of those mods becoming monetized is pretty damn high. And Garry's Mod is so unstable, it's design is so buggy, the next update to Garry's Mod always has the potential to break all the damn mods I own. Hell, every time I log in, there is always an update for at least fifty of the mods I use. There is never going to be any getting around the monetization if I want to continue to use my mods.
But getting back to the incredibly pleasant things Mr. Newman said, I am just completely amazed. I linked his blog article but fuck it I am going to highjack his writing and post it here.
There’s a lot of craziness about paid mods, a lot of people who don’t know how they feel. It’s probably no big suprise that I’m all for it. I sold a mod once and everyone was angry that it was happening, until it happened and they got a much better product than they’d have gotten when it was released for free, then they seemed to calm down a bit. It has given me a carreer for 10 years. It’s bought me two houses, a bunch of cars. It’s created a company that has hired 30+ people.So here’s some important points:THERE ARE STILL FREE MODS
A lot of the craziness seems to come from the thought that no-one will ever release their mods for free. That makes no sense.Some stuff won’t be worth charging for. Some people won’t want paying for their stuff. If a mod takes 10 seconds to make and someone wants to charge $10 for it then they won’t sell any copies because it’s not worth it. This is how the market balances itself. They’ll either have to lower their price or make it worth the price.YOU DON’T HAVE TO BUY ANYTHING
No-one is holding a gun to your head. You don’t need these mods, you just want them. Are they worth more to you than whatever else you’re going to spend the money on? No? Well don’t buy them, do without.YOU’RE A KID AND YOU DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY
So find a way to pirate them. That’s what we all did when we were kids with no money. Valve’s job is to make it more convenient for you to not pirate stuff.PEOPLE WILL UPLOAD STOLEN STUFF
I’ve said it a million times – If “people are assholes on the internet” was a reason not to do something then we’d never do anythingStuff is going to happen. There was a time where they’d almost completely stopped making PC games because of piracy. Should we really let the fact that sometimes people are assholes dictate what we do? Or should we just deal with it when it happens?>WHO IS WINNING
So lets take a look at what is in this for everyone. Who wins out of this.Users
- More choice
- Better supported mods
- Some stuff costs money
Modders
- Money
- Career
- Actual mod support from game devs (because they directly profit from it
- 25% revenue sucks
- Resistance to new things
Game Developers
- Money
- Longevity
- Resistance to new things
Valve
- Money
- Support
- Chargebacks
- Babysitting
- Resistance to new things
So obviously Valve and Game Devs are the biggest winners right now. That’s the wrong way around in my opinion. The modders should be getting the majority share of the revenue from this – that just seems like common sense.It’s obvious that Valve and the game developer need to make money here too, enough to cover costs at least – but it’s the modder’s work that is making the money. I don’t know whose choice that is though, but it feels like someone is being a greedy asshole. This is something that will get better with time.IT’S A CHOICE
It’s most important to remember that this is a choice. You don’t have to charge for your mod. You don’t have to buy a mod. In the same way that there’s hundreds of free games on Steam right now that you’ve never played, and there’s hundreds of paid games on Steam right now that you’ve never bought.If you don’t like it then don’t use it, but don’t take the opportunity away from people that do.
I didn't want to pick this apart, but all of these things were pretty much what I was thinking as I read this, so I would count it as my experience. I would not entirely count the following statements as well-defined argumentative points I'd use in something like that Vindication essay I mentioned, there'll be certainly plenty of f-bombs I wouldn't normally use, but they are still fairly sound nonetheless.
Actually, never mind. I realized midway through that, if I was going to write this long extensive list, I'd might as well save it for the more serious Vindication when I get around to it. But basically, so much of this is absolute crap, and it's no surprise coming from Garry Fucking Newman of all people. I'll say at least this, though-- I guess, since Garry here is so cool with people stealing each other's work, look at this! I stole your fucking blog post and put it in my own! How do you like them apples!
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| Yourself included |
Things only got worse from then. People were reporting that they were being banned for posting links to their groups and to the petition against paid mods in other discussion boards pertaining to games with Steam Workshop mods. I had changed my username to Cheetah #FreeTheWorkshop Blades and wrote in my profile, "Come at me, Valve Scrubs, I'm ripped! We EA now? You may pillage my wallet with your Steam Sales BUT YOU SHALL NEVER HAVE A CENT OFF ME AND PEOPLE'S MODS!!!" People were getting banned just for joining anti-mod groups altogether. Needless to say, I was terrified. Then shit really hit the fan.
On the Steam Workshop for Skyrim itself, things got pretty hilarious for a bit. People were submitting complete horse shit in the paid mods section, demanding hilariously ridiculous and yet strangely accurate prices of $99.99 for their joke.
As for free mods, modders created various quirky mods that stormed the front page and are going down on the first few pages of the Top Rated of All Time, making five stars with thousands of ratings within literally a day. Among these, which I believe may have been the first, was the No More Imperials mod by Medicine Man, formerly Fuck Valve. The description reads, "This mod removes every imperial from the game, effectively breaking the game, just like how valve broke the modding community." I thought this was hilarious, uprated it, and Hell I even subscribed to it (while setting it not to load of course, I have precious saves after all ha ha). Many others did too, this was literally the number one mod on the Most Popular page, with five stars out of over three thousand ratings. Other mods spurred about, dominating the front page from crapmodware whores trying to make money off lazy reskins. Then, suddenly, I found in the discussion for the No More Imperials mod: "PSA: The Creator of This Mod Has Been Banned."
Valve fucking banned somebody for user-generated content that made it completely clear what it did. It was even wildly popular on the front page! And before you even think to say, "Oh please, that's a game-breaking mod, of coursed they'd pull it," there are other game-breaking mods on there as well! Here's what I think happened: that was the first mod they saw and banned the guy before realizing there had been an influx of other protest mods. So what do they do? Are they going to ban everyone else as well who creates a mod that is not in their favor?
Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! HELP! HELP! I'm being repressed!This was actually happening! An Orwellian nightmare spun about by fucking Valve has come to life! I've seen so much shit in my time: I've seen piracy sites taken down, I've seen SOPA nearly get passed (and is still actually postponed for now), I have seen Comcast abuse their customers, I have seen Microsoft hopelessly fail at trying to control whether players can lend their games to other people. So many times, shit like this has come close (well, Comcast is an actual thing unfortunately), but has never followed through. Valve was the first company I've ever seen abuse its moderating powers to silence people who were against their business propositions.
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| Not my ban, just posting this here to give you the magnitude of the effect. |
Today appears to have been a little more tame... ish, Gabe Newell, the big man himself, took to Reddit and whoa man what a storm he faced. The post only made the top twenty of today's front page, but it has over sixteen thousand comments. That thread is now such a mess to get through that you have to go to GabeN's user history to find what he's said.
I'm going to go over his statements and find the things that he said that struck me most. I'll include context, of course.
To start off the discussion, GabeN says, "As a baseline, Valve loves MODs (see Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, and DOTA). The open nature of PC gaming is why Valve exists, and is critical to the current and future success of PC gaming."
Fellow Redditor: "You just cannot be for real. You talk about an 'open nature', but you want to monetize this? It's absolutely disgusting. Why not just add a donate button to mods? It would solve everything. This system is just the beginning of the end. To add a little: The crux of the issue is that modding has always been this free thing on the side that has enhanced games, authorized or not. It being authorized is not the magical green light to profit land everyone thinks it is. When you've got major stakeholders suddenly involved in what was largely a passion hobby, shit is going to go sideways real fast. They are the gatekeepers in a paid system. They can pick the winners and losers. They can decide who even gets to play. Everyone should be asking why this seems equitable, not searching for some sort of silver lining. The premise is bullshit. Valve and companies that take part in this are going to spin some serious yarn about it being good for creators, while they lop off 75% of every transaction. It's really about profit for them, not enhancing the community. We're already seeing stolen mods, early access mods, all sorts of crap. This is a poorly implemented feature system that is meant to generate revenue for Valve and its partners, nothing more. If they cared, they'd curate and moderate the store rigorously, and they'd also not be removing donation links. There'd be a "pay what you want" option. There are many ways to do this better, and in a way that's more beneficial for the modders and the consumers. Instead, we get another IV drip of money hooked up to Valve and we're all supposed to smile about it."
GabeN responds: "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. You need a more robust Valve-is-evil hypothesis."
This one scares me. Not really because of any implication that GabeN isn't making himself sound very well, but he says specifically that the mods have already generated ten thousand dollars. What the fuck? There are only nineteen mods that have been out for two days! I don't know if I kept what I mentioned about Garry's ill-conceived notion that the market will "balance itself" so that good mods will show up over paid mods, but here we are on day three and the mods have already made a ridiculous amount of money. This goes to show that the majority of the workshop goers are indeed rich, brainless idiots who'll spend money on anything, unknowingly destroying an entire community in the process. People's good, free mods are going to drown under the high ratings the fools give to paid mods.
At least GabeN has memory of Valve's roots in mods, judging from his first statement. We'll see how much that's worth in the long run.
Next, G: "Our view of Steam is that it's a collection of useful tools for customers and content developers. With the Steam workshop, we've already reached the point where the community is paying their favorite contributors more than they would make if they worked at a traditional game developer. We see this as a really good step. The option of MOD developers getting paid seemed like a good extension of that."
R: "What do you think about the issue of people stealing mods and re-uploading as their own and selling it as their own?"
G: "Between us and the community, it won't work." ---- Important: People regard this as the first time they've ever seen GabeN downvoted on Reddit.
Another response to a similar question, "This is a straight-forward problem. Between ours and the community's policing, I'm confident that the authors will have control over their creations, not someone trying to rip them off."
Unfortunately, nobody seems to agree that GabeN knows what he's talking about, or that he's way in over his head on being able to police stolen content. I personally don't know what to expect out of Valve on that, other than knowing that it is extremely easy to copy mod files and upload them as your own.
Next, R: "What's up with all the banning and censoring of people complaining about this feature? How can you consider this to be 'open'?"
G: "Well, if we are censoring people, that's stupid. I'll get that to stop. On top of it being stupid, it doesn't work (see Top Gear forums on Jeremy Clarkson)."
Huge sigh of relief on my end. This was honestly the thing that terrified me the most, so I was glad that he dispelled it. It wasn't only once that he said this, either: "As I said elsewhere, if we are censoring, it's dumb, ineffective, and will stop." He even personally responded to somebody who was wrongly banned. That was nice.
Next, R: "Coming from someone who has modded games including skyrim... Modding is something that should continue to be a free community driven structure. Adding money into the equation makes it a business not a community. With all the drama that has happened it is clear that this will poison modding in general and will have the opposite effect on modding communities than intended."
G: "Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers. If something doesn't help with that, it will get dumped. Right now I'm more optimistic that this will be a win for authors and gamers, but we are always going to be data driven."
This gives a very faint sliver of hope that this nonsense program could be dropped. Unfortunately, GabeN seems to be way in over his head here. So, this "feature" is going to linger for a while.
Next, R: "What are you drinking if I may ask?"
G: "A vanilla steamer."
... Seriously? This guy is in a coffee shop with two hours to answer questions on a critical topic.
Here's an interesting bit: R: "Isn't the 75% cut seen as a bit high?"
G: "The pay-outs are set by the owner of the game that is being modded."
"It's set by the game, not by Valve." "Each game sets its own share."
That means Bethesda set that horrid ripoff of a profit cut! Coming from the people who made horse armor as DLC, why am I not surprised? If this is what Bethesda makes of their modding community now, I have little hope for whatever they may be announcing next. Their games are nice and all, but mods truly make them last, but it seems like they are trying to destroy all that now.
Moving on, G: "I'm going top to bottom and then starting over at the top. I can only type so fast on an iPad."
This was in response to somebody bitching about how long he was taking to respond to questions. This I actually found genuinely funny because it's GabeN fumbling on an iPad.
Here is the worst of it... R: "So why is he saying stuff like "we care about you" "mods are important to us" etc etc. He cannot be both pro money and pro community."
G: "Actually money is how the community steers work."
R: "Funny, the community successfully steered modding work in Elder Scrolls for about ten fucking years with nothing but goodwill and thanks, before you guys got involved."
This was absolutely disgusting. If what I have read had just been left at this, I would've been very upset with how this turned out. But, then there was this really interesting thread started by the creator of Nexus Mods, a site filled with entirely free mods mainly for Bethesda games.
R: "Hi Gabe, Robin, owner of Nexus Mods here. Sorry to hear about the issue with your eye.
Can you make a pledge that Valve are going to do everything to prevent, and never allow, the "DRMification" of modding, either by Valve or developers using Steam's tools, and prevent the concept of mods ONLY being allowed to be uploaded to Steam Workshop and no where else, like ModDB, Nexus, etc.? Edit, for clarity in the question: For example, if Bethesda wanted to make modding for Fallout 4/TES 6 limited to just Steam Workshop, or even worse, just the paid Workshop, would Valve veto this and prevent it from happening?"
G: "Hi, Robin. In general we are pretty reluctant to tell any developer that they have to do something or they can't do something. It just goes against our philosophy to be dictatorial. With that caveat, we'd be happy to tell developers that we think they are being dumb, and that will sometimes help them reflect on it a bit. In the case of Nexus, we'd be happy to work with you to figure out how we can do a better job of supporting you. Clearly you are providing a valuable service to the community. Have you been talking to anyone at Valve previously?"
R: "Hi Gabe, Interesting answer, it's a shame you wouldn't put your foot down in support of the modding community in this case, but I appreciate your candour on the topic. Alden got in contact about a month ago RE: the Nexus being listed as a Steam Service Provider. For any users following this closely, you can read my opinions on the topic in a 5,000 word news post I made today at http://www.nexusmods.com/games/news/12459/ ? (I appreciate you probably don't have the time to read my banal twitterings on the topic, Gabe!). He has my email address if anyone needs to contact me. I built the Nexus from the ground up, 14 years ago, to be completely free of outside investment or influence from third-parties and to be completely self-sustaining, but there's no reason why we can't talk." ----- By the way, I recommend you to read that post he linked if you are really interested in all of this insanity going on.
G: "I went and read it. I thought it was good. The one thing I'd ask you to think about is your request to put our foot down. We would be reluctant to force a game developer to do "x" for the same reason we would be reluctant to force a mod developer to do "x." It's just not a good idea. For example we get a lot of pressure to police the content on Steam. Shouldn't there be a rule? How can any decent person approve of naked trees/stabbing defenseless shrubberies? It turns out that everything outrages somebody, and there is no set of possible rules that satisfies everyone. Those conversations always turn into enumerated lists of outrageous things. It's a lot more tractable, and customer/creator friendly to focus on building systems that connect customers to the right content for them personally (and, unfortunately, a lot more work). So, yes, we want to provide tools for mod authors and to Nexus while avoiding coercing other creators/gamers as much as possible."
R: "If there's anyone who understands your plight in being pressured in to more conservative policing of content based on personal views, beliefs and opinions, it's me. The Nexus is known to host some of the most liberal content out there and we're lambasted for it on many sides. Some game devs won't even touch us because of it. But my personal opinion remains the same, irrespective of whether I agree with or like the content (and there's plenty of stuff on the Nexus I'm really not a fan of), if I take down one file for insulting certain sensitivities, where do I draw the line? Who's line? My line? Your line? So yeah, you're preaching to the choir on that one. However, we're not talking about limiting types of content, we're talking about the functionality of Steam being used to fundamentally change a principle tenet of the modding community that's existed since the very beginning. That is, the principle that the sharing of mods can be free and open to everyone, if they so wish, and that that choice remains squarely in the hands of the people who develop those mods. Please, do not misunderstand me, I believe I've made myself clear that if certain mod platforms want to explore paid modding then they can, for better or for worse, but I am categorically against the concept of mods only being allowed to be shared online, with others, through only one platform. I'm against the concept of modders not having a choice. While a lot of melodrama has ensued from Valve and Bethesda's actions this week, I absolutely believe that you would be destroying a key pillar of modding if you were to allow your service to be used in such a way. I appreciate you cannot dictate what developers do outside and off of Steams services, but Steam is Valve's service, and you can control how your service is used."
G: "'... the principle that the sharing of mods can be free and open to everyone...' Completely 100% agree."
So unfortunately, it doesn't seem like there is much ol' GabeN can do here. If Bethesda wants Nexus down, he can't take Valve, step in, and say, "No." I assume he can't just end the Workshop monetization feature, at least for now. But he also agrees that the sharing of mods should be free and open to everyone, meanwhile just earlier he was saying that money steered the community's work. I think, honestly, that nothing has changed. Clearly nothing has swayed him from stopping this. He's said some nice things about himself and some horrible things. He really can be either for or against the modding community, but even if he was with them, he can't do anything about Bethesda trying to enforce Digital Rights Management on people's mods. So basically, if Bethesda tried to get rid of Nexus, and possibly, maybe, all of the free mods on the workshop, there won't be anything Valve can do. At least GabeN tried to ignore this whole situation, but still, now we are left to see how this is going to turn out. Hopefully, though, this whole sixteen-thousand-comment conversation will sink in, along with the petition that has well over a hundred thousand signatures already.
To end everything that's happened so far, if my account hasn't been community banned yet, I'm sure it will be soon! I jumped on the bandwagon to lower Skyrim's rating as much as possible to draw attention to the people's concerns (the game's rating on Steam has already dropped by almost ten percent!), I went so far as to advocate pirating Skyrim in my "review," but hey! Five out of five people found it helpful!
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| I'm so proud |
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