The Steam Workshop's New Paid Skyrim Mods Aren't the End of the World, I Promise

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

Yesterday Steam announced a brand new system that will allow modders to sell their content on the Steam Workshop, starting with one of the most actively modded games out there, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

Since that initial announcement people have been, to be perfectly frank, losing their shit. They've been losing their shit on the Steam forums, they've been losing their shit on Twitter, they've been losing their shit on Reddit... Phrases like "modding is dead", "this will kill mods" and "it's the beginning of the end for modding" are being bandied about even more frequently than they are when some ill-advised developer/publisher starts sending modders Cease and Desists -- and that's saying something. But this isn't the end of the world or the death of the scene, I promise. It's just a change, and like anything else it has its pros and cons. 

As someone who ostensibly got her start writing about games by reviewing what amounts to paid, user-created mods, let me try to assuage some of the fears and concerns you may have about this new aspect of the Steam Workshop... And maybe plant a few new ones in their place.

"People should make their game mods for the love of modding, not for profit."

This is the complaint that I've seen the most, and the one I want to address right out of the gate. If you work on something that others benefit from, you deserve to be paid for that work.

The end.

Next topic.

Okay, maybe I should clarify just a bit more since this is something our society seems to struggle with regularly. "But it's not even real work! You should do it as a hobby/for the exposure anyway!" is not something you will generally hear directed towards lawyers or engineers or most other 'professionals', no matter how much they enjoy what they do. No, the definition of 'real work' tends to exclude creative fields more often than any other. As eager as we are to admire this kind of work, to assign prestige and worship the people who produce it, we don't seem to value it all that much when it comes down to actually paying for it. The argument goes that practically anyone can write if they want to, and painting is fun so it's not really work, and you didn't even go to school for that or maybe you did but that wasn't a real school, right? If we actually wanted people to be paid in proportion to how hard and not-fun the work they do is, minimum wage employees wouldn't need to fight tooth and nail to get enough money to actually live on.

There are so many excuses like this, and honestly they're all garbage.  I don't care if that modder goes on to be a full-fledged game developer (as many do) or if they already are a full-fledged game developer (some are) or if they're a 13 year old making mods instead of doing their homework (do your homework, though). Spending five seconds to install something that someone spent five months developing doesn't qualify me or anyone else to define whether or not what they did was 'real work'.

"Mods are built on top of a developer's pre-existing work so it's unfair to charge for them."

I have good news for you, my friend, because in Skyrim's case both the game publisher and Steam are getting a bigger slice of the pie than the modders themselves. Developers/publishers participating in the paid creations program are able to decide how to split what's left after Steam takes its piece between themselves and the modders. Right now, users selling their Skyrim mods get a 25% cut, which is pretty low considering that they likely did 100% of the work creating their mod. It's not ideal. That said, it's still better than the big fat zero everyone gets otherwise.

"Modding will die because no one's going to mod their games if it costs them money to do so."

Consider The Sims, a franchise that has had a booming modding community for well over a decade. Among that community there are paysites, and they've been there for a while now. While these paysites do not explicitly sell their mods, they often have paywalls or donation tiers, meaning that certain content is locked away for paying visitors only. Many players hate these paysites, while others are happy to pay for high-quality custom content. Not every modder wanted to follow the paysite model, so there was never any shortage of free mods to download.

The modding scene did not crumble to dust. 

Maybe you won't necessarily have free and immediate access to anything and everything, but given the variety already present in the Skyrim community you will probably still be able to find cool things and have a good time no matter what.

"Skyrim's modding community is highly collaborative and adding payment into the equation will only hurt that."

It's true that Skyrim's modding scene (not to mention those surrounding other notable Bethesda games) is even more interconnected than most. It's standard for mods to rely on other mods to function or use assets from modding resource packs. Because of their scope, many mods aren't even creditable to one single individual but instead whole teams where each member specializes in one facet of production. Payment complicates all of those relationships, and things can't go on as they are unchanged as a result. It's one day in and paid mods already have their first copyright dispute casualty.

Welcome to.... Just about every other creative community. Art, music, writing... It all sounds very familiar. People will need to clearly define their stance on the subject, and once they do collaboration will still happen, because people like collaborating. They'll seek it out no matter what, but now they'll just have to outline their terms a bit more carefully. In some cases the language necessary to clarify what a mod can or can't be used for is already in place, because in online creative spaces we are so used to tacking on disclaimers about commercial use and giving credit and so on and so forth that it's almost second nature.

This doesn't prevent misuse of mods and modding resources of course, but it never did. Not in Skyrim, not in Second Life, not on TurboSquid or Flickr or DeviantArt or any other creative marketplace or community. That's just something we'll always had to deal with to some extent, whether there's money involved or not.

"Some mods are great but many aren't, and I don't want to risk spending money on something flawed, falsely represented, that may break with the next patch or that conflicts with something else I already have installed."

I'm not in love with the fact that mods can apparently be sold without any sort of curation, vetting, or reviewing process in place on Steam's side of things, but there have been people reviewing Skyrim mods on blogs/forums/YouTube for years and I doubt they're going anywhere. If anything, I expect we'll see even more of them. It's also already been announced that if you're unsatisfied with a paid mod you will be able to request a refund within 24 hours of purchase. That's a better arrangement than people who drop $60 for a lacklustre AAA game on Steam get.

That refund amounts to store credit only, which will be a big drag for some of the more ambitious mods that this program is likely to encourage, but with money changing hands mod creators will have more of an incentive to actively support and maintain their mods than they do otherwise. Given how many of my favorite mods have been orphaned over the years, I would be lying if I said this wasn't a big part of why I'm invested in seeing this do well.

"People are already abusing this system by uploading and selling content they didn't create."

They always have, and the only real difference is that now they can make money from it. This is personally my greatest concern with paid mods. It remains to be seen whether or not Steam will commit the resources necessary to make piracy more trouble than it's worth, and I'll admit I'm sceptical that they will. As a veteran of another game content marketplace where piracy runs rampant, the only real consolation I can give you here is that success inevitably equals visibility, and visibility is a double-edged sword. 

"...Look, it's just... This thing I used to get for free may not be free any more."

That sucks I guess, but that thing was never really free. It was free to you, but not to the service hosting it or the person pouring hours and days and weeks and months and yes even years into creating and supporting it and dealing with people telling them to kill themselves when it conflicted with some other mod they'd maybe never even heard of. 

Just because the burden wasn't yours doesn't mean it didn't exist.

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Janine Hawkins (@bleatingheart on Twitter, Iris Ophelia in Second Life) has been writing about virtual worlds and video games for nearly a decade, and has had her work featured on Paste, Kotaku, Jezebel and The Mary Sue.

Comments

[Ciaran Laval]

Someone charging for Mods is going to need to sell 400 bucks worth to be able to get their 25% cut to the bank because you need 100 bucks before you can withdraw. That is not a healthy position at all.

If Valve really want to encourage paid modding, they will lower that bar.

[Issa Heckroth]

Surely there will be big fallout over this. Fine when you have created every scrap of a mod, but many modders (just like in SL) dont create models directly, but use others and arrange them into a mod. So people will likely be charging for mods where most of the content was picked up for free. I cant see that sitting well with the people who create original meshes.

[Kitty Revolver]

Iris, what do you think of the ad-fly stuff for the sims 4? I haven't seen many established modders that normally have paywalls with their sims 1, 2, and 3 stuff use paywalls for 4. This is especially true of TSR, where that was a paysite for any of the high end modders, it has been at least six months into the game (and one expansion) and they haven't clapped up. Granted they have premium membership. Also don't forget there was a bootleg site for The sims 3 to get all the paid third-party content for free.

Personally I like the ad-fly model, sure I have to wait for like 5 seconds, but I am assuming modders are being paid by the ads. (obviously pennies but still they add up for the bigger modders).

[Issa Heckroth]

@Kitty Revolver - I am just guessing, but its fairly likely that money is going to bandwith costs and modders dont see any of the cash. Thats how nexusmods.com works so I would guess its the standard model. Someone has to pay for hosting all those mods.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

And "this" is one of the reasons I'm not overly fond of self-identified "hardcore PC gamers"

1. You think SL users are drama filled whiners? PC gamers are WORSE!

2. PC gamers are cheap. The fuss is really about a bunch of dudes whose expectations are to buy or pirate a game and then they expect to mod it and play lots of content without spending any more money. As I've said at times, PC gamers love spending money on hardware but for some reason hate spending money on software. And THAT is why publishers sometimes consider the PC platform to be an afterthought.

Me I'm mostly a console gamer. I expect to have to pay for content. So when I came into SL, having to pay for nice things made sense for me and I was willing to put my payment info in and hit the buy L$ button.....many many many many times.

The fact that there is "some" free content is a "bonus" it shouldn't be expected of "all" content, either in games or SL.

[Janine/Iris]

@Issa Lots of modders who put their stuff up via mediafire or whatever on their own blogs use adfly to monetize, separate from ads on places like the Nexus or TSR.

@Kitty I'm in favour of it, but it's an absolute pittance. That's why a lot of modders moved to Patreon, where they can get a few dollars out of one ardent fan instead of a few pennies out of a dozen regular fans. It's not perfect but I think that's been a good step. I always kind of wanted to see mods available somewhere like itch.io too, where 'pay-what-you-want' is an option.

[Metacam Oh]

I think this is a great idea, I wish Minecraft would do this

[Ezra]

In my experience, gamers always meet new business models with aggression until someone demonstrates how it can be done right.

DLC for example, I believe it hit a new stride that continues to this day with Oblivion's Horse Armor; lotta people hated it and Bethesda made up for it with every DLC thereafter for Oblivion. Now DLC is common place, games like Mass Effect made it awesome, and I don't think gamers complain about it as universally anymore.

Episodic gaming I remember seeing backlash at first during it's recent resurgence the last decade. Penny Arcade received skepticism for their game that was made episodic, and Valve made episodic gaming look a lil bad with the long waits between Half Life 2: Episode One and Episode Two. Then Telltale comes along with The Walking Dead (I know, I know, Sam & Max but people really started paying attention with The Walking Dead) and probably everyone that's played it and other Telltale games since are cool with episodic gaming, and developers like Capcom with their recent Resident Evil PC games are following the Telltale formula.

There's other examples: microtransactions in free-to-play and buy-to-play games is another big one. The point is though, even if a new business model and means to new content has problems at first, quite often things work out in the long run and in short order becomes wanted and expected among gamers.

Game developers directly implementing hooks into their game for custom content creation and distributing over profit sharing marketplaces is going to be a thing, Steam Workshop or not. I believe Workshop will grow to be the most prominent example, but like Metacam mentioned it'd be smart if Mojang did this with Minecraft as well, and I wouldn't be surprised if EA does similar with the Sims 4.

I believe in 3-4 years this won't be contentious, just a reality.

[Ciaran Laval]

I'm amazed at how many Second Life folk are giving this idea a thumbs up. How many Second Life content creators would be happy with LL taking 75% of their sales and only allowing them to cash out once they had $100 in their balance, which would be $400 of sales?

I mean seriously, the Second Life model is head and shoulders above this insulting nonsense.

[Ezra]

@Ciaran

Gabe has said in an AMA that its the publisher that sets the revenue split per game: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/33uplp/mods_and_steam/cqojzpq?context=3

Right now, Bethesda has zero competition, but future publishers and games will obviously compete on revenue split to attract content creators' time. I imagine 25% is the worst rate of a popular game we'll ever see, and even for Skyrim as it continues to age and competition arises, Bethesda will be forced to change the rate.

[Issa Heckroth]

The most insulting thing is this is Bethesda. Who have always supported free modding. Going straight for 75% smacks of sheer greed. A am not against charging a little for mods, but I hope this falls flat on its ass.

[Ciaran Laval]

This looks like it's dead in the water for now.

http://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop#announcements/detail/208632365253244218

[Issa Heckroth]

yaaaaay!!! :)