Paid mods
Coming out of retirement/silence for one night and one night only, I want to talk about the paid mods stuff that's been going around. Proposed out of the clear blue by Valve, summarily shouted down by their userbase - the notion is now subject to a back-backlash from some, including the majority of games websites. Yet another "entitled gamers" tale to slot easily into the overarching story that we're all familiar with by now.
After Valve, in classic fashion, bulldozed a change through after a few secretive talks, the notion has arisen of paid mods. Mods are placed on the Steam Workshop marketplace, and people purchase them. The publisher/modder/Valve split is presumably on a per-game basis, but in the case of Skyrim it was 45% Bethesda, 25% modder, 30% Steam. A userbase backlash forced Valve to back off after an embarassing AMA with Gabe Newell, but it was with a quiet cartoon-villain promise of trying again with a new game and a smaller community.
If you're the type that mostly views mods as "fixes" to games, the problem should be clear from the get-go. There's a direct financial incentive for companies to put out games that need fixing in this manner, and not only that, they get more money than the person who did the fix and started selling it!
But mods are more than that, more than you can easily sell, and this notion is too wrong-headed to simply suggest a tweaking of the numbers is all that's needed.
Better mods?
One common notion proposed in the type of infuriating, wrong-headed articles about this - you know, the ones that end in "and why that's a good thing" - is that by having this marketplace for mods, mod quality will go up. Better people will become involved, they will become more ambitious, they might even be able to hire other people. Etc etc. Every problem is solvable by throwing money at it.
When you go from creating something to directly selling it, it would be braindead to pretend that has no effect on what you're creating. That financial incentive to "create better mods" - it applies to a subset of the modding community for a given game. Stuff that fits easily into the developer-dictated Workshop functionality, stuff that can stand alone, stuff that's fine to show on Steam, and crucially - stuff that sells a lot. At these prices, at this (or really any) cut of the take, the only way to make a buck out of it all is to make it up in volume.
That incentive becomes a disincentive when you apply it to anything that falls outside that umbrella. Unless the grand scope of your notion of modding a game is to put doge memes onto a shield model, a lot of the appeal of modding is to transcend what the developers laid out or thought possible. Most Doom PWADs can only be played on limit-removing sourceports, DSFix made a good Dark Souls port out of a poor one by doing some fairly underhanded things with DLLs - in a similar way that one might hack an aimbot into a FPS. And as for the niche - one huge appeal of mods is an ability to do things entirely how you want them, and I mean that for both mod authors and mod users. If you asked me what my favourite "mod" is, I would say goingdown.wad - a difficult, weird wad, hard enough to turn away many people by its third map - pretty niche. If modding isn't about the niche, if it's to be bought and sold like a mass-market game is, then what the hell is it about? Piling more "content" into a AAA game to bridge the gap between DLCs?
(And let's not pretend that the presence of a paid-mod app store changes nothing and that modders are still completely "free" to release their work for nothing alongside this stuff. You can't have it both ways. People are swayed by money - or, more often than not, the thought that their work is worth a direct share of money. I would not call any mod developer involved in this greedy - they were roped into making a quick buck by a publisher and distributor who clearly hold all the power, and better them than someone else, right? If someone's making a killing off their amazing Skyrim SPAS-12 that loads tiny 12-gauge sriracha bottles as ammunition, what does it say about the work that you don't want to sell?)
Outside the Workshop
A lot of mods build on each other to do what they have to do. "Starter packs" for games like STALKER can have the player install 10 different things, and it's not rare for super-ambitious mods in, say, New Vegas to need the player to install script extenders, special launchers, models/texture packs, etc before even thinking about installation. This is how a community of small individuals can create stuff that stands toe-to-toe with big developers - they rely on each other. This is something you can completely forget if each piece of those becomes a seperately-sold commodity. Buying a mod which has dependencies that you need to buy is a nightmare for players, no matter how you dress it up.
A lot of mods are too small (but too important) to directly charge for, and a lot of mods are too large to fit in the confines of however the developer has programmed their Workshop support.
When people take a number of small mods that they've individually paid for and mash them together only to get a desktop crash (common!) - who's to blame? Who takes the brunt work of testing every mod against every other mod in a remarkably diverse scene? If there's money involved, it's gotta be someone. People's expectations differ hugely after they've whipped their credit card out. One reason mod authors can do the things they can do is that they don't have to worry about everyone's setups or requirements, because they're not directly asking for money.
A lot of mods can't be made "better" with a system like this, because there's no space for them. And with such a direct incentive to be in that space, these mods will wither and die. Unless, of course, you acknowledge that people can be motivated to do excellent work without a direct financial reward - heyyyy, wait a minute!
In addition to this, the problem comes from the other end. With money comes people just looking for a quick buck. The App Store, as you know from all the horror stories, is rife with copycats, cloners and chancers - and mobile applications have a legitimacy that's hard for mods to match. Is that the sort of environment that small, vibrant mod scenes should have thrust upon them?
In favour of donations
I want modders to get paid for what they do, but their work is too dependent, too unpolished, too wild and often too personal to fit into a "Pay $X for this neatly-sequestered content!" model. A donation model is player-friendly, modder-friendly and dictates much less about what a "product" should look like. There is a counter-argument against donations, one of which is here - and admittedly from someone with more experience in this than I have :
I started publishing mods two years ago. Since my first mod was released on the Skyrim Workshop my mods have received over 200,000 individual downloads and two donations. That means 0.001% of users donated.
And to all the people who say a donate button will help. I’d like to talk about the workshop ratings system. On every mod page there are two buttons that you can press (whether you have subscribed to the mod or not) that contribute to a mod’s overall rating. Giving a thumbs up is optional, but very much encouraged by creators. Most users simply do not rate.
My most popular mod has been downloaded by over 70,000 people of which less than 1.5kof them have rated it. That means 98% of users didn’t take the time to rate the mod (and that is above the average for most mods on the Workshop), an act which takes one click, and costs nothing to do.
This is a struggle many App Store developers have fought with over the years. Users, players, have better things to do than even to click a simple button - regardless of how free or well-made what you've done is. This is because the App Store, and the Steam Workshop, are both incredibly impersonal places. Your work is a floating thumbnail in a big grid, something to be checked off and then forgotten about. Either you can throw yourself upon that impersonality fully and start directly charging - how many of those 200,000 downloads are going to turn into sales if nobody gives enough of a shit to click a button? Isn't it stupidly easy to pirate a mod if it comes to that, given that people are used to getting them from dodgy filesharing sites? Are you really ready to say the phrase "Mod DRM"? - or try to embrace a way to be more personally-involved with your mods users, to make them care enough to throw you some cash.
Patreon, for example, is brilliant for funding work that you can't package as a product. It's simple, flexible - and it really encourages people to create a close bond with who they're supporting. I want to see stuff like this thoroughly de-stigmatized for modders, and I want mod users to feel more comfortable with the notion of supporting free stuff that they love. I encourage anyone reading this post to think about the mods you use and to think about how you can support the author, because the "users" have been falling short on this for a while. The distant monkey's paw promise of a job at a game studio is no longer an effective way to keep modders going, and if anything good has come from this it's that realisation (and, possibly, the fact that some people are starting to see that Valve is not some benevolent force always looking out for players).
Valve's spiel used to be to defeat pirates by building good relationships with your users. People are always going to want things for free (and they're always going to get them for free, in the case of video games). You can call it entitlement or whatever until you're blue in the face - the fact of the matter is, you need to create people who want to support you - and I can think of no worse way to do that than to bung a mod up on some dismal marketplace and hope for impulse purchases.
To put it simply, this is an attempt to bulldoze an impersonal, market-driven ideology onto something which is, and should always be, community-driven. You could say it's an earnest attempt to get modders paid or another way for Valve to line its pockets, it doesn't matter hugely. Modders should get paid for the work they do, but they should do this by embracing their community and by really trying to make a go of donation models - their work being more important than some discrete, packageable "product" for Valve to profit from. Steam Workshop could take measures to let communities grow, they could allow a "tip jar" - but they have no incentive to do this, apart from to do it poorly and then to claim that their market-driven app store shite is a superior model. To let mods become a bought-and-sold commodity in a store has moral, technical and legal implications, but the worst implication is that they will be torn from the notion of community that has driven modders to stand on each other's shoulders and do amazing things.
Not everything fits into 99 cents.
(Still working on Blue Revolver, by the way. Video, if you're interested. I'd hate to see if something pisses me off enough to make me write again like this has, so don't expect any writing for a while.)
