Valve - Payment Feature Being Removed From Skyrim Workshop - News
by Craig S , posted on 27 April 2015 / 3,971 Views
It looks like Valve is backing down away from the paid mod feature it recently introduced, and which caused substantial community backlash.
In an official post created just now, Valve has announced that the payment feature for Skyrim mods is being removed:
"We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we'll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.
We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing. We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different."
"To help you understand why we thought this was a good idea, our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid. We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it.
But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop. We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here."
Expect Valve to instead adopt a donation-type system for mods. This alternative was mentioned by Gabe Newell in his AMA on Reddit a couple of days ago.
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The right way has already been laid out - include a "donate" button in the Workshop. OR do it like Humble Bundle - allow people to set their own price-point and to determine to whom the money goes!
I disagree that including a "donate" button is the "right way" to do things. Just because there is an option to donate doesn't mean that people will feel charitable enough to donate what the modder deserves. A donation model can work for some, but it will not work for everyone. Also, ignorance is rampant among consumers of almost any base, so deciding who the money goes to will also cause a lot of trouble as well. The idea wasn't a bad one, it was more of a poorly implemented one, with some rather poor foresight.
The reason Humble Bundle can exist is because the games you get from them are games that were being sold already, not free games. They also give you a reason to pay for games while also giving to charity, so the number of participants and the willingness to pay larger amounts of money is much higher. Not at all the same thing, not at all as simple as how you make it.
People don't want to pay, simple as that. Most people don't and will not donate. Most people just want the mods for free, that's all. After all isn't one of the benefits of being a so-called #Pcmasterrace free mods?
Good.
Well, now they know for the future not to have paid mods done like this, but ( As most people have said ) in the form of donations. Money will only to to the good mods and can't be taken advantage of.
Complain all you want about this gen being the worst.
But we -as consumers- have never had so much power in any previous gen.
I'm not sure how this is even relevant. PC doesn't have generations.
Thank god. If I thing a mod deserve's money, it'll be in the form of a donation.
Eh. I think a good portion of that 75% revenue stake went to Bethesda. This wasn't about making money so much as encouraging modding as a career. Better, and greater mods would have come of it. Sad to see that the community put a stop to yet another great invention.
40% to Bethesda, 35% to Valve, 25% to mod dev.
Look, the principle isn't the issue for a lot of people. It's that Valve is doing it. Valve is just utterly incompetent when it comes to moderating anything. Even if their intentions were admirable, under their current setup it would have been an absolute cluster ****. AND the Workshop has file size limits and a painfully basic installer. "Bigger and better" mods wouldn't have been possible there. Heck, many of the current big mods can't work on Workshop, especially those that require SKSE or are Total Conversions. So Enderal, Ethas, Andoran, etc. wouldn't have benefited from this anyway.
Better mods would have been a minority. Unfortunately some were abusing the system by re-adding free mods that others made as paid ones and breaking up whole mods that were very good into small bundles that had to be paid for. A donate button would be a great thing to have but having a system like this was a bad idea.
Good, good. The way they were doing paid mods made them seem like just another evil company, so it's nice to see them think twice about it.
