Steam *REMOVING* paid Mod Support - UPDATED

[eVoL]

People are knee jerk idiots. At least epic are still doing it.

[Subway Diet]

Now you're just being contrarian.
Valve could have handled the whole thing so much better, but instead waded in and turning the whole thing into a cluster fuck free-for-all.

The idea could work, assuming you don;t mind Bethesda meddling in community affairs. It just needed a far more tactful approach that it seems they're capable of.

[DjchunKfunK]

Yeah, I think going into an established community and suddenly allowing people to charge for mods was the wrong place to start. You mention UE4 eVol, but the reason that works is because it has started like that and people go into the system knowing that they may have to pay for stuff.

For this to work it needs to be better thought out and ideally start with a new game that has just come out, that way the community isn't suddenly altered and people go in knowing what to expect.

Ideally you would hope that Valve would learn from this and approach things differently in the future when bringing in new ideas, but the fact that they made a pigs ear of Greenlight suggest that they are perhaps not the quickest in learning from their mistakes.

[cHeal]

I think it could have worked if you could charge where you could prove all assets and content were created by you, or already existed within the game. So if you modded a new world area into Skyrim using entirely the vanilla assets then you could sell it (with Bethesda rightly grabbing a substantial slice) but if you used even 1 single asset created by another person, that person could DMCA your mod. That could have worked.

Take the rights quagmire out of the picture and allow people charge for what they create only. Something like Falskaar could have been sold in such a scenario and I don't think anyone would have an issue with paying a few dollars for it.

[Lee]

It could have also bred a level of no more sharing code/assets or concept within the modding community if there was even the slimmest chance of money changing hands at some point. Be another form of IP/copyright stifling creativity again.

[Reiver]

The problem with the Skyrim and generally the Bethesda mod scene is that the barrier to entry is very low, for this experiment the last thing you want is a host of shoddily made crap being the flagbearers. https://imgur.com/a/bqcla?gallery
Although the protest mods this spawned (extra apple lite being my favourite) also show the best of not stifling ideas behind a skill wall.

Still, the modding scene for those games is full of absolute dreck and finding the flecks of gold in the dung heap is almost a game in itself, certainly a very time consuming one. Even then, when you move into that level of customisation of experience, it becomes very hard to settle for the prescribed options. Finding a great looking armour set, for example, only for its stats to be game breaking and the ease of its acquisition even more so. Curation and community input are vital when there's so much out there which means a saturated and mature modding community was a poor testing ground for this. Although if they'd stuck it out i'm sure things would have settled.

I'm not against charging at all. I've been PC gaming almost 20 years (fuck, just realised that) and the number of games that have been "saved" by mods is massive. I'm a big TW fan but if it wasn't for mods Empire would have been my last. Shogun 2 I played for less than an hour before modding it. I think i've played over 300 hours now. While CA still deserve my cash for creating a base, the guys behind DEI for Rome 2 deserve something for providing the majority of my enjoyment from that game.

Thinking about it Rome 2 or Attila would have been a better game to have rolled this out on. There would still be a lot of drama but the modding scene there would be more suitable. Although the high level of cooperation and compilation most of the mods rely on could make it destructive...

[DjchunKfunK]

Nexus have given their take on the whole paid for mods issue.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/04 ... paid-mods/

[Lee]

Hmm thought I would reuse this thread instead of making a new one about Bethesda paid Creation club scheme but it's went how anyone cynical was thinking it would happen. But they had to do so all in day one of it going live
it seems