Monetized Mods

[Stormweaver]

Only Valve can piss off a giant chunk of its customers with a stupid idea, backtrack on it and then come out on top cuz they listened to the community.

Hey! How about asking what the community thinks of a certain feature before fully committing to it? I guess when you run a monopoly, market research is not that important...

I dunno man, there is still a huge pushback on r/PCMR against valve - and elsewhere. If anyone hasn't seen this yet, I reccomend it for a hearty chuckle.

Eyes are turning to bethesda though, since it's come up that this isn't the first time they floated the idea of selling mods, and the 25% figure popped up again. Between that and various discrepancies in claims regarding the sucess/failure of the paid modding system...I doubt anyone will be forgiving anyone any time soon.

@FC - 30% is valve's standard cut across the board. Same with GOG.com as well IIRC.

[FlowerChild]

@FC - 30% is valve's standard cut across the board. Same with GOG.com as well IIRC.

Yikes...that's more than I thought. The figure makes more sense for mods then :)

[Wafflewaffle]

I know a lot of people hate his guts but TB is good at doing this kinda of stuff:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aavBAplp5A

Also

@FC - 30% is valve's standard cut across the board. Same with GOG.com as well IIRC.

Yikes...that's more than I thought. The figure makes more sense for mods then :)

Just out of curiosity FC, publishing costs, printing and stuff, in the old ages of gaming (You know 5 years ago) were probably way higher then Valves cut right? You think 30% is too harsh of a cut for indie developers?

[Stormweaver]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aavBAplp5A

Just finished listening to it, it's worth having on in the background.

Lots of good points made - I don't agree with some of them, such as the general view that the outrage was not 'the community' - A lot of what I saw was from people claiming to be from other communities not wanting to see this happen to them, or fans of indie titles where the majority of a title's value comes from the modding scene itself, and being pissed at the way the whole thing was handled and at the precedent it could set.

It's good to hear the perspectives of the owner of the nexus (a major modding website for skyrim and others) and a skyrim modder though.

[FlowerChild]

Just out of curiosity FC, publishing costs, printing and stuff, in the old ages of gaming (You know 5 years ago) were probably way higher then Valves cut right? You think 30% is too harsh of a cut for indie developers?

Yeah, if I remember right back in the 90's a decent publishing deal had the dev seeing about 10$ a box on a 50$ game after everyone else in a chain got their cut all the way to the store itself. I didn't deal much directly with publishing beyond that point in time though (and even then I was never the guy that set those deals up, but was a secondary participant at various points so I was aware of the general figures), so my data may be grossly out of date.

So yes, in relation to that, Valve's cut is WAY more favorable to the developer than the old way of doing things, and represents close to an inverse ratio of what it used to be. For some reason though, I had always been under the impression it was lower, like around 10% or so, so my "yikes" wasn't at it being particularly high relative to other distribution methods, it was just based on my own surprise at how off my previous assumptions had been :)

[DaveYanakov]

One of the more interesting things to shake out of this kerfluffle was the early-release concept gaining traction. The bit where a dev would release a finished product a week or a month early to those willing to pay for the priviledge seems like a way better method than early access.