3 Commando Brigade

Valve introducing ability to sell mods for money

Good round-up about the topic.

I dont think it is a bad idea that people can get money for their work. However the way this works right now in steam is utter s**t. Taking a "cut" of 75% just for providing the service is s**t.

Is it terrible that somebody who is putting in countless hours into something for other people, can actually get some money for it? You probably wont get rich for it, but in some form you can get repaid for the time spend. I think you had no problem with RHS winning money in the MANW Contest. It is not exactly the same thing, but I guess most people have no problem with people getting rewarded for all the stuff they do.

However this new development is raising some (interesting) questions. Especially the support of paid content looks like a potential minefield for me. Can I sue the creator of a mod that I bought, when his mod broke my game? Who is responsible if a patch breaks a mod that I paid for?

I like the general idea of rewarding mod creators for their work while at the same time being all legally sound and signed-off by the original game creator.

I don't like the idea of 75% going to valve/not-the-mod-creator. That's just plain greedy in my eyes. 
I also see a great issue with the fact that updates in the vanilla game will always have a significant risk of breaking mods and valve/steam are notorious for their 'though sh*t" approach to customer service.
24h refunds are neat, but don't help me when an update a week later breaks the mod. What if the mod creator stopped updating the mod? (Maybe he even has a good reason like...I don't know...being dead or something)

Valve really screwed up what could have been a great thing xD

I think it's a shame that money is involved as it changes the landscape a significant amount and not I think for the better - on the other hand if Modders have worked for something they ought to be able to get something back for it...

That 75% will be split between Bethesda and Valve - it's most likely 50% Be 25% Valve  -  so I think some people are missing the point slightly...

Still too much I think - 50/50 would be fairer I think with a scale of max charges - e.g.

Simple addon like a "Sword" = 20p
A Skin = 30p
A Simple Quest = 40p
A Longer Quest = 50p
A quest with new dungeons, NPC's etc = max £2.50


etc..


That would seem to be a little fairer ?

I dont think creativity and earning money is no contradiction. If this would always be the case, there would be no creative games (or any other things at all) on the market. Of course people can get greedy, but to give you a bit of a exaggeratedexample. Do you think the Mona Lisa would have been painted for free?

However the system in its current form and especially when developers and publishers of games are so deeply involved, can have a very bad influence on the entire market. It could lead to a situation where developers and publishers will only allow mods that make money. Modding has always been some kind of grey area. Some companies simply tolerate modding, some support it and some dont want it at all. I am afraif that we might come to a point where mods will only be allowed to be published if the company behind the game gets their cut. It also takes away the responsibilty of the company to deliver a good game that works. There are a lot of mods out there, which simply fix broken things in a game. I dont want to see that a developer can do a bad job and in the end earn money, with a fix that somebody else wrote.

Agree re Arma - I was referencing SKYRIM a SP game with no requirement to run mods - unlike our Arma community

Let's keep things on realistic terrain here. CUP is an APL-SA (share-alike!) mod. It's open-source and since it's a port of A2 content that's released by BI with a "non-commercial use only" (+other restrictions) license, there's no way we'll see CUP becoming a paid for mod unless
1.) Every single person who has ever contributed *anything* to CUP agrees to re-license their work to a non-share-alike license
2.) BI re-license their A2 data packs (either generally, or just for CUP) to a license that allows commercial use.
BI could have easily approached @CUP before they released and offered them a deal to make @CUP a DLC rather than a free mod...they didn't (or if BI did, @CUP turned them down), so I don't expect them to suddenly want to go commercial.

This is one of the main reasons why I love open-source: peace of mind. No matter what kind of crazy monetization madness lies in our future, we'll always have ace3, cup, tfar, tmr and probably many more available to us for free since they are all open-source projects and couldn't go commercial (without an insane amount of effort) even if they wanted to.

Yep... at this point what is the difference between valve and pirate bay.... "we're just linking to content... we don't check if it's copyrighted'

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Good Guy Tripwire Interactiv does not allow mods for money for Killing Floor 2.

Quote from the user agreement: