Hello everyone,
I would like to address the current situation regarding Arissa, and Art of the Catch, an animated fishing mod scripted by myself and animated by Aqqh.
It now lives in modding history as the first paid mod to be removed due to a copyright dispute. Recent articles on
Kotaku and
Destructiod have positioned me as a content thief. Of course, the truth is more complex than that.
I will now reveal some information about some internal discussions that have occurred at Valve in the month leading up to this announcement, more than you've heard anywhere else.
I'll start with the human factor. Imagine you wake up one morning, and sitting in your inbox is an email directly from Valve, with a Bethesda staff member cc'd. And they want YOU, yes, you, to participate in a new and exciting program. Well, shit. What am I supposed to say? These kinds of opportunities happen once in a lifetime. It was a very persuasive and attractive situation.
We were given about a month and a half to prepare our content. As anyone here knows, large DLC-sized mods don't happen in a month and a half. During this time, we were required to not speak to anyone about this program. And when a company like Valve or Bethesda tells you not to do something, you tend to listen.
I knew this would cause backlash, trust me. But I also knew that, with the right support and infrastructure in place, there was an opportunity to take modding to "the next level", where there are more things like Falskaar in the world because the incentive was there to do it. The boundary between "what I'm willing to do as a hobby" and "what I'm willing to do if someone paid me to do it" shifts, and more quality content gets produced. That to me sounded great for everyone. Hobbyists will continue to be hobbyists, while those that excel can create some truly magnificent work. In the case of Arissa, there are material costs associated with producing that mod (studio time, sound editing, and so on). To be able to support Arissa professionally also sounded great.
Things internally stayed rather positive and exciting until some of us discovered that "25% Revenue Share" meant 25% to the
modder, not to Valve / Bethesda. This sparked a long internal discussion. My key argument to Bethesda (putting my own head on the chopping block at the time) was that this model incentivizes small, cheap to produce items (time-wise) than it does the large, full-scale mods that this system has the opportunity of championing. It does not reward the best and the biggest. But at the heart of it, the argument came down to this: How much would you pay for front-page Steam coverage? How much would you pay to use someone else's successful IP (with nearly no restrictions) for a commercial purpose? I know indie developers that would sell their houses for such an opportunity. And 25%, when someone else is doing the marketing, PR, brand building, sales, and so on, and all I have to do is "make stuff", is actually pretty attractive. Is it fair? No. But it was an experiment I was willing to at least try.
Of course, the modding community is a complex, tangled web of interdependencies and contributions. There were a lot of questions surrounding the use of tools and contributed assets, like FNIS, SKSE, SkyUI, and so on. The answer we were given is:
[Valve] Officer Mar 25 @ 4:47pm
Usual caveat: I am not a lawyer, so this does not constitute legal advice. If you are unsure, you should contact a lawyer. That said, I spoke with our lawyer and having mod A depend on mod B is fine--it doesn't matter if mod A is for sale and mod B is free, or if mod A is free or mod B is for sale.
Art of the Catch required the download of a separate animation package, which was available for free, and contained an FNIS behavior file. Art of the Catch will function without this download, but any layman can of course see that a major component of it's enjoyment required FNIS. Was this a risky, perhaps bold, thing to go ahead with? Yes. Was it a bit crappy of me? Also yes. But it was a risk I took, and the outcome was largely dependent on the FNIS author's reaction to the situation. He was not happy, so I took steps to resolve it. I did not "steal animations" or "steal content".
After a discussion with Fore,
I made the decision to pull Art of the Catch down myself. (It was not removed by a staff member) Fore and I have talked since and we are OK.
I have also requested that the pages for Art of the Catch and Arissa be completely taken down. Valve's stance is that they "cannot" completely remove an item from the Workshop if it is for sale, only allow it to be marked as unpurchaseable. I feel like I have been left to twist in the wind by Valve and Bethesda.
In light of all of the above, and with the complete lack of moderation control over the hundreds of spam and attack messages I have received on Steam and off, I am making the decision to leave the curated Workshop behind. I will be refunding all PayPal donations that have occurred today and yesterday.
I am also considering removing my content from the Nexus. Why? The problem is that Robin et al, for perfectly good political reasons, have positioned themselves as essentially the champions of free mods and that they would never implement a for-pay system. However,
The Nexus is a listed Service Provider on the curated Workshop, and they are profiting from Workshop sales. They are saying one thing, while simultaneously taking their cut. I'm not sure I'm comfortable supporting that any longer. I may just host my mods on my own site for anyone who is interested.
What I need to happen, right now, is for modding to return to its place in my life where it's a fun side hobby, instead of taking over my life. That starts now. Or just give it up entirely; I have other things I could spend my energy on.
Real-time update - I was just contacted by Valve's lawyer. He stated that they will not remove the content unless "legally compelled to do so", and that they will make the file visible only to currently paid users. I am
beside myself with anger right now as they try to tell me what I can do with my own content. The copyright situation with Art of the Catch is shades of grey, but in Arissa 2.0's case, it's black and white; that's 100% mine and Griefmyst's work, and I should be able to dictate its distribution if I so choose. Unbelievable.
