Steam Charging Money for Mods

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Valve basically lives off making paid games based off free mods like Team Fortress (Quake mod made into an HL mod made into a commercially viable project) and Counter-Strike (originally an HL mod made into its own game).

[Brethern]

You can hardly blame a community that has been asked to buy DLCs and expansion packs that should have been in the game in the first place for years to be careful with these kinds of things. Plus that mod makers seemed to get the short straw: the 25% is almost insultingly little compensation. Valve talks about the concept of modders living off their work, yet the reality is that jobs in the gaming industry are hard to come by anyway, and that this system would essentially have talent work for peanuts without any contract or benefits, with publishers and developers still making a nice buck. That hardly seems fair at all.

Valve almost seems to be forgetting that modding is a two way street. Yes, people make money off of someone else's games, but these games also dramatically increase in value because of these mods. Oblivion and Skyrim are only good for a handful of hours of gameplay without them to most people. Because of mods, they are still being sold and played in quantity.

Valve is one of the few companies that actually treat the modding community with respect. Plenty of people got hired by them for doing excellent work in user created content.

This is one of the situations where either valve didn't realize what the back draft would be or they knew the back draft was going to happen and they wanted to see what the response would be.

Either way Valve listened to the community and things are the way they were.

[MartGonzo]

They've backtracked

[Camacha]

Valve is one of the few companies that actually treat the modding community with respect. Plenty of people got hired by them for doing excellent work in user created content.

Yet this time they seemed to operate complete opposite of that. They should know the hardships in the game industry as much as anyone else.

[Special Agent Sigvan]

Maximum Damage Control

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Valve is trying to suppress good paid mods by providing modders with an informal framework for them to distribute, and Valve gains 75% of that profit (~$0.74 for a $0.99 mod).

Back then, modders would make good mods for free and then later get hired and actually start selling a better version of their mod. Or they would start a company and establish professional relations (i.e. on equal grounds, 99% profit) with the company of the game they are modding, and begin selling the mods. That's success right there, and that's good business.

Meanwhile, Valve as a publisher is placing modders yet again as inferior by establishing unequal, implicit terms with modders. It's as if they were kids. Hello... there is a thing called the law! Any time you deal with money or for-profit products you have to conform to commercial regulations, and your mod revenue is supposed to be taxable. Valve seems to be completely disregarding it and encouraging modders to disregard it as well so that they can grill modders later when they seem to be raking in a bit too much money. Individuals who sell stuff have poor knowledge of the law and thus poor legal protection, whereas a company (even a tiny one) is committed to a product and can legally represent itself.

Anyway, I think I should move on to more productive things.

[Brethern]

Yet this time they seemed to operate complete opposite of that. They should know the hardships in the game industry as much as anyone else.

And this system could have worked out well for everyone, mod authors earn money for their work, entitled people are weeded out of the community and the devs continue to receive funds for a game they created.

[AbhChallenger]

Valve did not take 75 percent. They took standard microtransaction percent. Bethesda took the lions share.

[Special Agent Sigvan]

Valve did not take 75 percent. They took standard microtransaction percent. Bethesda took the lions share.

That's STILL bad.

[Camacha]

And this system could have worked out well for everyone, mod authors earn money for their work, entitled people are weeded out of the community and the devs continue to receive funds for a game they created.

Please read back for reasons why those things might not work out so well.