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Gabe Newell's Impending Disaster
10 years ago
General
Valve has just been rolling out the initiatives lately in preparation for the release of the Steam Machine console. All the hype and build-up has lead to a new initiative that could land Valve in so much legal trouble it has the potential to completely nuke Steam.
The initiative I am talking about is setting up a paywall in Steam Workshop. They are encouraging (forcing?) players to sell the various mods they make for their games. Aside from the obvious issues with quality....Well, the only reason the mod community is allowed to exist in the first place is because the assets they create, which almost always borrow from someone else's IP, are handed out for free. Modded content is very rarely ever completely original. Now that Steam is allowing people to sell IP content that they do not own the rights to, I am expecting an avalanche of lawsuits to snowball onto Valve in the next couple of months.
It is a pity, as I have probably spent thousands of dollars on Steam over the years, and will lose all my games if Valve goes under. You can bet that I'm not going to spend a dime more there unless they can somehow buy their way out of US copyright law.
The initiative I am talking about is setting up a paywall in Steam Workshop. They are encouraging (forcing?) players to sell the various mods they make for their games. Aside from the obvious issues with quality....Well, the only reason the mod community is allowed to exist in the first place is because the assets they create, which almost always borrow from someone else's IP, are handed out for free. Modded content is very rarely ever completely original. Now that Steam is allowing people to sell IP content that they do not own the rights to, I am expecting an avalanche of lawsuits to snowball onto Valve in the next couple of months.
It is a pity, as I have probably spent thousands of dollars on Steam over the years, and will lose all my games if Valve goes under. You can bet that I'm not going to spend a dime more there unless they can somehow buy their way out of US copyright law.
This has been going on for a while already in different forms. After Maxis got shut down, an ex Maxis developer started developing mod content for Cities: Skylines and is now making money off of a Patreon.
It's a really awesome way for skilled developers to expand the life span of games and be able to give those mods further work and focus to make them a high enough quality to be worth your cash.
I doubt Valve will encounter much legal trouble. There's no way they're going to open up the floodgates with that kind of risk. That's why the only game available to do that right now is Skyrim.
Also, Valve has so much money I doubt they could lose a single battle against a publisher/developer. Remember, Valve is practically the one paying those companies since we're buying their games on Steam.
Modders who make original content that adds something genuinely new to the game deserve to be compensated for their work. No question. A lot of time and effort can go into mods like that.
But the vast majority of the mods out there do stuff like put The Master Sword from Legend Of Zelda in the game, or The One Ring from Lord of The Rings, or...ect, ect. I could go on and on. Remember the My Little Pony mods? What if someone makes Mandalorian armor? Gunblades from Final Fantasy? It has all been done. It has all been overlooked because no money has changed hands.
But now Steam is wanting that to change, and however well meaning their intentions I fear they might have just shot their balls off.
Plus, what about bugfix mods? How much are you willing to pay to get a game you already paid for to work? In a particularly bad scenario, what you end up with is essentially hostageware. What if a mod that you purchased is incompatible with another, or poorly made and breaks your game? As Steam Greenlight has shown us, there is no QA in an open market. Mods are no longer risk free.
I loved how Valve did it with donations for TF2 mods and picking and choosing user created content to sell.
But opening a general market for mods from a large community of modders is a disaster waiting to happen.
http://www.pcgamer.com/paid-for-sky.....tter-of-hours/
Mod sites like the Nexus are basically designed around the basic premise that nobody is being forced to pay for mods unless they specifically desire to. Now that the concept of paid mods is out there, I don't know if the proverbial genie can be put back into her bottle.
And, as we've seen, this paid wall has the potential to really lower the overall quality of the mods we see. It may also negatively impact Skyrim sales, since most people buy Skyrim on PC in particular because "You get all of those cool free mods."