STEAMing Pile...

[Silent_Buddha]

Yes, the point is. People are complaining about Valve making money off modders. When the Nexus is no different. Unlike the Nexus, Valve doesn't generate money from user donations, subscriptions, or advertising. Hence, the only way they'd be able to generate revenue from modders in a similar way as the Nexus is to have paid mods. It isn't as if Steam doesn't have similar costs to the Nexus. Hosting mods costs money.

Additionally, due to their reliance on developers and publishers, they have to get the dev/pubs permission or risk alienating a client. Devs/pubs then have the opportunity to negotiate a cut reducing how much Valve gets not only for maintenance costs, but for profit as well. Anyone that thinks the Nexus isn't profiting (not just money for maintenance costs) is naive in the extreme.

In other words, Valve isn't much worse than the Nexus. It's just that they are far more limited in how they can generate revenue for maintenance and profit of what is still basically a free service on Steam.

Regards,
SB

 

[swaaye]

I figured Valve started hosting mods only as a means to further build their "community". More people hanging around spending money on games on Valve's site. My guess is the plan all along has been to figure out a way to directly make money off mods.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Yes, the point is. People are complaining about Valve making money off modders.

The "point" is miles away from that and I suggest you read about the issue in this very thread before jumping into the typical "blame it on the gamers who act like entitled brats" narrative.

 

[willardjuice]

I guess I don't understand the problem. Modders taking content from other modders is not an issue unique to the Steam mod marketplace. What exactly is your concern and what would you prefer to be done? I could see where some tweaks to the current system (e.g. perhaps extending the return policy) might help, but I don't see what's fundamentally wrong with the current Steam setup. If your issue is simply that you're against Bethesda getting a cut, we'll have to agree to disagree. It's something I doubt Valve has control over anyways (legally).

 

[silent_guy]

I wonder if the uproar would have been (almost) nonexistent if the cut had been 75/25 instead if 25/75. The current situation puts Valve and the game makers in the position of greedy leeches.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

First of all, let me say upfront that I support the idea of paying content creators for their work. In fact, it seems that most people do.
It's not the payment part that is bad (and it's really terrible to claim that). It's everything else around the way this was done that brought a shitstorm to the modding community.

I guess I don't understand the problem. Modders taking content from other modders is not an issue unique to the Steam mod marketplace. What exactly is your concern and what would you prefer to be done? I could see where some tweaks to the current system (e.g. perhaps extending the return policy) might help, but I don't see what's fundamentally wrong with the current Steam setup.

1 - Valve brought down all the free mods that had links to donations in the description and/or forums without prior notice.
2 - Valve/Bethesda approached the modders to sign an NDA that prevented them from contacting other modders in order to solve issues regarding the sharing of profits and/or assets
3 - Not happy with 2, Valve/Bethesda encouraged the first-wave modders to use content from other modders without consent, since they were free anyway.
4 - Direct result of 3 are the instant flamewars happening between modders. No one trusts no one anymore. No one helps no one anymore. Modding used to be a cooperative hobby. That ended overnight.
5 - There's practically no one verifying if the people uploading their mods for the paywall are the actual creators of the mod.
6 - The direct result of 4 is that most mods being uploaded are pirated from Nexus by scammers/opportunists and not by the mod makers themselves.
7 - Any mod uploaded to the paywall ceases its ownership to Valve. So not only are the modders having someone else making money from their mods, they're also losing legal ownership of any assets present in the mods. We're talking about textures, geometry models, voice acting, sound production, animations, etc. Lots of assets that may have been terribly expensive to create and can't be used for anything else (e.g. a standalone game).
8 - The direct result of 5 and 6 is that most mod makers are now pulling their mods from the web, and they're not available anymore (and they might not ever be released again)
9 - Also because of 5 and 6, many great modders who did a fantastic job (helping Bethesda sell their title for free) are now claiming to be leaving the scene for good. The mod community got significantly poorer overnight.
10 - Bethesda is getting a cut for every mod, but provides no tech support for them, unlike what Valve does with TF2 and DOTA2.
11 - Payments are only made after a payout of at least $100 is accumulated. Together with the 25% modder revenue, this means that some mods in the marketplace may bring up to $399 to Valve/Bethesda and $0 for the modders.

My concern? I don't play Skyrim anymore, so it's definitely not an immediate concern. But the modding community may die out because of this, and the next Fallout or Elder Scrolls title won't get the same community support as the previous titles, and I find it a bit sad to see it all go away because greediness.

What's fundamentally wrong with the Steam setup? For starters, making their plans secret, preventing modders to prepare for the inevitable theft and encouraging of modders to make money out of open source assets from other modders was just terrible. They started by pitting modders against each other for money, which really couldn't have been any worse.

What would I change?
Each and every single mod would have to go through a very thorough process consisting of
a) Quality of the mod (not let the market flood with horse genitals and transcolored daggers, for example)
b) Certify the authenticity of the assets, either they were made by the people uploading them or not.
c) Mediate the discussion over ownership and revenue sharing between modders.
d) Either offer tech support for the mods, or if they're relegating tech support for the modders themselves then they must get a larger share of the revenue.
e) The $100 accumulated payout before first payment is ridiculous. It's not a reasonable value.



IMO, I think Steam and Bethesda/Zenimax actually don't have the slightest idea of how the modding community works, and they tried to take it over by force overnight.
It was a stupid and reckless chain of events that cost them fans, legitimacy and brand recognition.

I wonder if the uproar would have been (almost) nonexistent if the cut had been 75/25 instead if 25/75. The current situation puts Valve and the game makers in the position of greedy leeches.

Mod makers are getting their assets stolen and Steam is being used as a platform for that, regardless of how much money is going to whom. So no, the uproar wouldn't be nonexistent.

 

[swaaye]

It does leave one a bit speechless.

 

[aaronspink]

Valve are the ones administering the payments, so they take the money, initially. How they distribute the money between themselves and third party publishers is probably trade secrets. IIRC, Valve doesn't even publish sales figures from Steam, so they probably won't disclose this information either.


Simple arithmetics: if you only earn a quarter on the dollar, how much must customers shop for before you, the author, have earned $100?

I think there is some reading comprehension issues. The exact text says "may". My interpretation is that they aren't immediately paying out with every purchase but trying to block (aka group) the payouts. There's not enough detail there to say that you have to sell $400 before a payout is made. In fact, it can be read that they will definitely pay out whenever the balance reaches $100, but may also pay out at other times. I'm pretty certain that they don't want to permanently keep the liabilities on their books. As such, I would assume that they'll also be doing payouts at timed intervals as well.

 

[aaronspink]

The real crime is Valve's 30% take on any game sold on Steam. Damn that's high.

Whether its high or not depends on what value Valve adds to the seller in relation to alternatives. Publishers still make more money through a Steam sale than they normal make through a brick and mortar sale. In addition, buying through Steam is generally both significantly easier, more assured, and provides better support (both short and long term) than buying directly a publishers website. In addition, 30% seems to be roughly the general rate charged by many/most digital distribution platforms. How much of that is chicken and egg, we'll never know (Valve was basically first and set it at 30%, did everyone else just follow or did they come to the same conclusions?). AKA, AFAIK many of the transaction risks are handled by Valve and included in that 30% including I believe the ~4-5% that is required by the monetary transaction providers. Also that 30% includes lots of detailed data mining, a ready market, various library resources and frameworks (aka Steamworks et al), effectively permanent hosting/bandwidth for distribution, etc. While 30% might be high now, its certainly inline with what the industry as a whole has decided to accept through the various other digital distribution systems that have come on line in the wake of Steam and its not like Steam is the only game in town.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Whether its high or not depends on what value Valve adds to the seller in relation to alternatives. Publishers still make more money through a Steam sale than they normal make through a brick and mortar sale. In addition, buying through Steam is generally both significantly easier, more assured, and provides better support (both short and long term) than buying directly a publishers website. In addition, 30% seems to be roughly the general rate charged by many/most digital distribution platforms. How much of that is chicken and egg, we'll never know (Valve was basically first and set it at 30%, did everyone else just follow or did they come to the same conclusions?)

How do you know publishers make more through a Steam sale than from brick and mortar? I'd expect it to be around the same %. The store margin is quite low and even with associated cost, I don't think the costs go past 30%. I think 30% for Steam was possible in the first place because it ends up around the same figure.

 

[aaronspink]

Yes, the point is. People are complaining about Valve making money off modders. When the Nexus is no different. Unlike the Nexus, Valve doesn't generate money from user donations, subscriptions, or advertising. Hence, the only way they'd be able to generate revenue from modders in a similar way as the Nexus is to have paid mods. It isn't as if Steam doesn't have similar costs to the Nexus. Hosting mods costs money.

It could be argued (and is almost certainly true), that Steam has costs related directly to workshop that are orders of magnitude HIGHER than Nexus. I'd be shocked if the storage and bandwidth for mods supplied via workshops wasn't at least an order of magnitude higher than for Nexus.

In other words, Valve isn't much worse than the Nexus. It's just that they are far more limited in how they can generate revenue for maintenance and profit of what is still basically a free service on Steam.

If anything, Valve is more upfront on their revenue generation and has largely been providing a free service to a larger group of users than Nexus has.

 

[aaronspink]

I wonder if the uproar would have been (almost) nonexistent if the cut had been 75/25 instead if 25/75. The current situation puts Valve and the game makers in the position of greedy leeches.

As apposed to the mega leechers over at Nexus...

Those its probably more appropriate to remove the 30% that Steam takes off the top from the calculation as its a pretty reasonable fee for everything they are doing. So in reality, Bethesda is paying out ~36%. Whether that's reasonable or unreasonable, is a matter of opinion. I would argue that's its fairly reasonable overall. After all, Bethesda took the majority of the risk, provided the tools, etc. And its not like they are preventing you giving away the mod for free, they are just taking a cut of the profit, if you are going to sell it for actual revenue.

 

[aaronspink]

How do you know publishers make more through a Steam sale than from brick and mortar? I'd expect it to be around the same %. The store margin is quite low and even with associated cost, I don't think the costs go past 30%. I think 30% for Steam was possible in the first place because it ends up around the same figure.

First of all, in B&M distribution, they are multiple parties in the on the cut. The distributor has to make money, the transit company has to make money, the retailer has to make money etc. It simply isn't generally profitable to any of those to be selling at or under 10% gross margin, overhead alone is generally significantly higher than 10% of gross. Walmart, who is both its own distributor and transporter and retailer, and in top of class in efficiency at all those, maintains gross margins well about 10% on a stage basis. It is not at all unusual for retail media items to have total gross margins of ~50% from publisher wholesale. In fact, that total gross margin was the whole raison d'etre behind Amazon.com which even with their lean prices and distribution maintained a 25.9% of the last 5 years (and that includes all the DD/AWS margin as well which is significant!). Similarly Best Buy is at 24%, Staples is at 26.5%, Gamestop is at 29.4%, Walmart at 25%, all 5 year averages. Some of these gross margin may or may not include the distribution costs partially or fully. The reason Steam was able to take off like it did with the publishers was because they actually ended up making more money with a steam sale than with a B&M purchase. In fact, if you remember any of the discussion around the steam pricing at the beginning, the main issue was that the steam pricing = retail pricing was too high, because the publisher was making more money off each steam sale. In addition, each Steam sale had significantly lower risk associated with it, because it was entirely digital and the publisher never had to pay for physical distribution or manufacturing.

So for physical distribution, its basically impossible to sell with wholesale vs retail gross margin under 30%. And that's not even getting into things like unsold copies, etc. For an example, for typical CD music sales, roughly 50-55% of the revenue is shared between distribution and retail. Same for DVD/BR sales. So that 30% that Steam started with and everyone followed, actually represented an excellence deal to the publishers. Then factor in that Steam allows for cutting out publishers entirely or going with a "thin" publisher, and its even more advantageous. Its also why no one balks at the cuts that places like the iTunes store or Google Play store take (~30-40%).

 

[Grall]

As such, I would assume that they'll also be doing payouts at timed intervals as well.

I have considered this possibility, but if so, why isn't that part of the initial wave of information going out then? It's very strange, IMO.

 

[Grall]

If your issue is simply that you're against Bethesda getting a cut, we'll have to agree to disagree.

Don't really see why Bethesda deserves a cut. They've already sold the game once, moneygrubbing money from mods too is like getting paid multiple times for the same thing. Awesome if you're a moneygrubbing lawyer like that fucker who owns the company, but otherwise? No. They're not doing any additional work, why should they be getting any additional pay?

If you own and operate a freight company, do you pay royalties on all your income to the manufacturer of your vehicles? No, you don't. You don't pay royalties to the maker of your work clothes either, and so on, so why the hell should Beth get more money? Seriously here. They're not doing shit to deserve it.

 

[Malo]

A great article by the Nexus owner explaining the whole service provider thing after the blowup.

The system works by presenting the mod author with a list of "Service Providers" when they go to upload their file. They're informed that they can choose to support none, one or more of these Service Providers and that any cut is taken from Valve's cut, and not from their cut. The cut percentage is 5%. Ergo, if a mod author does not select any Service Providers then the cut remains 25% to the mod author, 40% to Bethesda, 35% to Valve. If the mod author picks one or more Service Providers then the cut changes to 25% to the mod author, 40% to Bethesda, 30% to Valve, 5% shared between one or more Service Providers.

 

[Davros]

Does the article explain why Bethesda is getting a cut ?

 

[swaaye]

If Valve is going to try to profit on game mods, you can count on the publisher of that game demanding a cut. The donation thing people were doing was already skating the line.

 

[MfA]

I don't care about percentages ... I care about ownership, Valve is being completely irredeemably fucking EVIL here. They are misusing their near monopoly to be fucking bastards.

"Valve is the sole owner of the derivative works created by Valve from your Content, and is therefore entitled to grant licenses on these derivative works."

"Indirect Distributions of Contributions. Valve or the Publisher may charge a fee for the right or chance to later obtain one or more Contributions (for example, the sale of a key that can be used to unlock a crate containing a set of content). In cases such as these, where a fee is charged indirectly for the ability to acquire content, Valve and/or the Publisher may determine what revenue share will be paid for any Contributions that are ultimately distributed, and how such revenue share will be allocated amongst multiple Contributors, in its sole discretion."

 

[steveOrino]

Does the article explain why Bethesda is getting a cut ?

The reason is Zenimax isn't content with the TES lifespan being extended years past release with mods. They want a piece and what better way to make modders and potental modders believe this is a great deal for everyone.

I have modded and used mods for every game since Morrowind and the only reason why the community is as big as it is was because it was a vast idea, time and resource share dump where no one expected monetary compensation for their hobby. People would make a mod for themselves release it and if the mod was popular enough it could be extended through updates, suggestions, user made patches (for compatibility with other mods), and ultimately maintained by others once the original creator was finished with the game.

The division of the community is and will continue to be toxic. Long term modders I know from this game and past games are absolutely sick at this. People who create modder resources have already pulled and discontinued their work for the game. Already there have been stolen asset disputes (animations from the fishing mod that was taken down) and you better believe more will follow.

If the argument is:

Hey, I spend 1000s of hours on making this and I want compensation for that time! It will make my mod better!

The modder is going to have to understand that:

A. Will have to compress that time spent making sure the mod features work well, void of bugs in order to keep customers happy and maintain reputation.

B. Using one of the modding communities greatest perk of asset sharing is going to be next to impossible so a feature strip and or more time generating assets that they may or may not be proficient in. (Wet & Cold's isoku removed all of Winter is Coming assets and replaced it with crappier versions of his own when Nivea told him to go fuck himself when permission was asked.)

C. Having less potential end users try the mod due to market saturation and or cost.

D. Having to deal with the fact that anyone can copy feature sets and sell them for less.

E. The lose all distribution rights to the mod.

If people think thats worth 25% then they are nuts. You would be better off spending the time making a F2P game on the app store.

A truly sad time for PC gaming. I hope it was worth twenty five fucking precent.