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Skyrim 98% to 86% rating on steam (as of this posting)
10 years ago
A few days ago, Valve announced that Skyrim would now allow modders to charge for their content. The community is speaking and have downvoted Skyrim's 98% rating down to 86%, as of this posting. It's likely to continue to drop.
I encourage anyone who has Skyrim for the PC to either review the game negatively or change their prior review to a negative one.
The modding community has made the Elder Scrolls games what they are. New content, fixes, improvements, complete overhauls, new mechanics.... By people who loved the game and what they did. It was a community effort with mods sharing their work with one another.
I'm not interested in writing a lengthy journal about the pros and cons of the paid mods, but know this: high quality mods have been removed, others have taken down their free content so it doesn't get packed with paid mods, and the modders, if they sell, only make 25% of the sale.
The most important thing is that this is a terrible precedent to set for future games. It allows game publishers to release their game and then rely on the fanbase to create content to make them more money.
Go downvote Skyrim on Steam.
I encourage anyone who has Skyrim for the PC to either review the game negatively or change their prior review to a negative one.
The modding community has made the Elder Scrolls games what they are. New content, fixes, improvements, complete overhauls, new mechanics.... By people who loved the game and what they did. It was a community effort with mods sharing their work with one another.
I'm not interested in writing a lengthy journal about the pros and cons of the paid mods, but know this: high quality mods have been removed, others have taken down their free content so it doesn't get packed with paid mods, and the modders, if they sell, only make 25% of the sale.
The most important thing is that this is a terrible precedent to set for future games. It allows game publishers to release their game and then rely on the fanbase to create content to make them more money.
Go downvote Skyrim on Steam.
Not to mention that people are removing their content from Nexus so that others don't steal their work and try to make money off of it. Nexus mods is suffering too.
SkyUI is now a paid mod, and most other mods depend on it to function.
Still, there is so much hate going on right now. Just watched a thread where gabe is getting downvoted to hell for a comment he made. well. Im gona sit back and watch him get a nasty sunburn from this one.
Go downvote Skyrim on Steam!
I mean, there are literally only 17 mods that are available as being paid, and 90 that are under review. And this is out of a total of over 25,000 other mods that are still free on Steam alone..
Plus, the whole thing is optional for the modders themselves if they wish to make the content they made paid or not. (Granted the percentage is still too low at 25%.)
Plus, modders who make the content but still want to make money can still do so through donations on Paypal or whatever, so this process doesn't impede upon them at all and only gives more available options for those who do want to legitimately take part in this system if they wanted to earn some money that way.
The only legitimate issue that I've seen stem from this whole thing is that a verry small few number of modders have had some of their content stolen and used to make money. But for whatever reason, unlike something like here with art and artists who have their's stolen and they get the community to shut the thief down, what the whole modding community and yourself are doing is just attacking the whole thing for, at least to me, not really a good enough reason. :/
One reason in the principle of Bethesda doing it in the first place. Mods are, for a lot of people, what make the Elder Scrolls games great. I would never by an ES game for a console because the mods are what make a mediocre game a great game. I bought Skyrim with the intention to use mods, and I don't appreciate, as a consumer, the idea of gaming companies relying on outside communities to sell their games. Considering that Skyrim is/was one of the top 20 sold games on Steam consistently 4 years after its release, there's a strong correlation that the mods were keeping people interest. Bethesda made money from those sales.
Another is the ethics of it. The modding community shares resources with each other, and it wasn't uncommon for one mod to depend on others or be designed to be paired. Model resources were the most often shared and depended on. Modders have removed content from Nexus and Steam purely to avoid other modders using their resources and making money off of them. Note, it's not the same as them not wanting other modders to use their content.
Yet another is there is no quality control. You get 24 hours to "return" a mod, but there's no guarantee the mod will be supported or work. A day is hardly enough time to test a mod out, especially the bigger ones, and mods often conflict with each other. One update to a mod could break several others, etc.
Gamers who mod Skyrim don't have one or two mods. It's not uncommon for there to be 25 or more. I think I averaged around 40 for Skyrim. I do not want to pay $60 a game and then anywhere from $0.99 to $100 for 40 plus mods. See the first point I made about Elder Scrolls games being defined by the mods. I want to send the clearest message to Bethesda now that I can as a consumer for their next games.
SkyUI is a mod that a significant amount of other mods depend on to work. It has been announced that further versions will be paid mods. Other modders that rely on SkyUI are stuck between deciding whether to upgrade their dependencies and require their users by at least one mod, or to forego any improvements, bug fixes, etc. That sort of decision doesn't foster the sharing of ideas and content and love of modding that the community original has had.
Large, high quality mods that were abandoned were often picked up by other modders to be maintained and grow. There's little possibility a quality paid mod would be picked up by another person. How does the money work then? What motivation does the original modder have to share or allow someone else to take over?
It motivates mods to be small and simple rather than complex and interesting. There will be an increase in cheap mods that are basically microtransactions for item reskins, and that type are going to be the most profitable.
I'm sure there are more. There are 19 paid mods now, but already one of the most renowned modders had pulled their content completely and stepped away from the scene (Chesko). Nexus, a bigger hub for mods than Steam Workshop, is suffering from creators removing their content. So yeah, while there are only a handful of paid mods currently, the repercussions are deep.
If modders try to use other's content to make money, then my point still stands in that the community can flag that content and make sure that it either gets taken down or is made very public that it is a scam mod. It's already done with things like art, so I don't know why people are making new excuses specfically for modding.
Once again, with something like quality control, the community has the ability to rate/flag/report/etc that content if it doesn't match people's expectations. You know those shitty quality mods that were put in the package that was offered? People quickly learned about them and reacted appropriately in making it known to others what they were in regards to their quality. Yet nobody seems to acknowledge that fact and is continuously just hopping on the bandwagon.
You are not entitled to free content. It is up to the creator of the content, whether it be the main game creators, or the mod creator, if they wish to charge for something or not. Maybe it's even bad business in some cases, especially with things like the dilemma between Nintendo and Youtube. But if the creator of the game allows for others to make a profit off of their work while having certain conditions, then it is not changing anything in regards to those who wish to continue making mods for free. However, if a mod maker wishes to possibly make money this way (even if it is only 25%), then they should have the ability to do that. And you as a consumer are not entitled to anything. You aren't entitled to having whatever you want just because you don't want to pay for it. If the creator of the content, in this case mods, wants it to be free, then it's free. But if they wish to be compensated for their work, then they should have the right to be able to put their work out if they wish. With all of the complaints that people have with this system, nobody seems to have thought about those who truly do wish to use this new system the way it was intended, and most of the counter arguments seem to be stemming from this false sense of entitlement that people feel that they deserve to have whatever they want for free and forbidding others from being able to charge for their work beyond asking for donations.
Just because the community (majority) may want something like SkyUI to remain free, it isn't yours or anyone's place to tell the original creator of it what he/she can or cannot do. If they want to charge for it and risk creating a divide elsewhere, then that should be their own choice to make.
I understand that you and many others fear for splits in the modding community and in being able to grow mods the way you may want, but as I've stated, that isn't up to you to decide what others want to do with their creations, regardless if it is self serving or not.
If it was a split of 70% to the modder and the remaining 30% split between Valve and Bethesda, I think a lot of people would be a lot more willing to have paid mods. I would be even more happy if Bethesda didn't take any cut of the money because they are being compensated by increased game sales.
Money aside, my main contention is what it is doing to the modder community. More than likely, SkyUI will be replaced by a competitor, and it should be imo. But I'd rather have a world where the question of replacing SkyUI with a competitor doesn't exist because it undermines a lot of principle the community is founded on.
Lastly, it isn't my place to decide. It's not my community, and I am a beneficiary of it. However, it's not Bethesda's or Valve's place to decide either, at least without consequences, and I think what's happening is deserved. Mods for ES exist as far back as Daggerfall, and Bethesda decided to support and foster the community by providing their toolkits. Bethesda is also a beneficiary of the modding community.
I would be far more convinced if the desire for compensation came from the modding community. It didn't. It was injected by Valve and Bethesda so they could harness the creative power of the community and reap 75% of the income. The modding community should be the ones holding Bethesda and Valve hostage, not the other way around.