So as of this week, you can now sell mods on steam. A portion (set by the developer) of the money earned goes to the developer, and steam takes their usual 10% microtransaction fee.
This is causing a lot of drama, and modders are removing their mods off of free sites, and putting them exclusively on steam, some pretty over-priced.
Good/Bad/wow/processing information?
Personally, I think it's great since it gives modders options.
It's great. The 12000 people who are signing a petition to stop is are... misguided.
If a modder wants to continue working for free, they can, or they can use a pay-what-you-want system. If they want to charge a price, they can. There will surely be the same "race to the bottom" pricing as we've seen on the App store though, where content will start at decent prices but pretty soon most things will be at the minimum price (e.g. 99c).
In my game, we've been planning our own version of this for a while. My thinking was -- supporting a vibrant modding community is very important to us, I don't want to restrict them in any way... but, I also want to sell my own DLC. How can I justify my own DLC when modders will be doing equally good work for free? There's no simple answer to that, so the answer is to disrupt the question: If you can't beat them, compete in a different market! Giving modders the power to call their own work DLC means that now I'm competing with them on an even playing field -- I can charge a fair price for my DLC, and modders that are producing mods of equal quality to my DLC can charge a fair price for their own work as well.
It's win-win.
Except for the small percentage of entitled whingers in the steam community, who feel that they as consumers have the right to dictate that modders shouldn't be allowed to choose whether they'd like to be compensated for their work.
I learned C++ coding, 3D modelling, texturing, animation, special effects, AI, etc, etc in the insanely popular Half-Life 1 modding community. There's been nothing really like it since IMHO -- it was the scene that gave us Team Fortress classic, Counter Strike, Day of Defeat, Insurgency, Natural Selection, The Ship, etc... These days the people who used to make these kinds of mods just pick up Unity or Unreal Engine instead, and make "indie games". It would be nice for these kinds of communities to re-emerge as a viable alternative to making a fully fledged indie game.
There will surely be controversy though. Cloned mods. Stolen content. Bad team break-ups and grey-area copyright concerns. People charging money and promising that every feature in the world will be added in the next update, only for them to never be heard from again...
The response is exactly what I'd expect. Of course lots of people are going to put their mods up for sale on the newly-available market for outrageous prices; that's what happens when a new market emerges. It will eventually self-correct. It's what markets do.
The idea of allowing modders to charge for their work isn't new, but in the past, been limited to individual studios supporting such a thing with individual games. Valve's approach here is probably the largest, broadest attempt our industry has seen. I'm in favor of modders being able to charge, if they wish, for the results of their hard work so long as the developer of the original game is okay with that as well; Steam's system allows for that as the developer must "build in" workshop support, so I'm in favor of it.
Hm. Do you think the market will also adjust for the developer set price %?
For example, a game like Mount&Blade 2, which has a large community sets their % to 10% to attract more modders, and then the TES devs lowering theirs from 75% (Yes really) to 45% to try and compete?
This has the power to upset the current DLC model quite a bit. If Skyrim had this capability since the beginning, odds are there would have been better campaigns on the workshop then the official DLC... "Why buy the DLC when you can play the better/cheaper mod?".
Hm. Do you think the market will also adjust for the developer set price %?
For example, a game like Mount&Blade 2, which has a large community sets their % to 10% to attract more modders, and then the TES devs lowering theirs from 75% (Yes really) to 45% to try and compete?
Now there is a potential pay wall between even trying out if i'll like a particular mod(or maybe i'd like a diffrent variant but now i have to pay twice)
You have a 24-hour grace period right now. Not sure if this is permanent though (it should be, it helps eliminate the stress of the paywall).
