STEAMing Pile...

So these game mods, do they add anything to the gameplay? Do they invent new stories or something like that? Or are they just replacements for existing graphics assets?

 

Gabe Newell himself doing an AMA on reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/33uplp/mods_and_steam/

The thread was opened 2 hours ago and it's reaching 6000 replies. It's completely impossible to keep track of what's happening since even the page is taking ages to load some comments.
I guess we'll need to wait until someone does the hard work of summarizing whatever comes out of this.

The mods can be anything you might imagine. They can be replacements and/or additions for graphics assets, sound assets, animations, UI changes, radical changes to the graphics pipeline in the form of implementing different shader effects, anything.
There are huge mods, like Falskaar, that bring entire new maps, towns, fully voiced characters, new quests, new storyline, new weapons, new everything. It's practically a huge DLC.


Everything you see in that trailer was developed from the ground up from modders for free.

 

Even hats?

 

One hat coming right up!

 

They are not taking ownership, they are taking a non-exclusive right to distribution. They pretty much have to do that in order for any system to work. They need to be able to pretty much indefinitely provide what the customer has paid for.

 

Where does this quote come from? I doubt the first clause is legal (a derivative work may still contain other material to which the original creator holds the copyright), and given the unclear origin of the content contained in many mods I am rather surprised that they'd want to claim such ownership in the first place (since that also entails responsibility).

 

The reactions to the AMA are pretty brutal. Newell avoided all the difficult topics. Things are not good when an AMA gets compared to the Rampart AMA.

 

Sure, that's pretty much the deal they give developers right? Maybe we will sell it, maybe we will make a porn game out of it, maybe we'll even give you some part of the money we're making on it ... no guarantees though.

 

little less fantasy and hyperbole and we could have an actual discussion. And yes, its pretty much the same deal they do with everything they sell.

 

considering the ridiculousness of 90% of what I saw when I took a look... Hell 99% of the people on that AMA don't even have the basic facts down. That AMA needed a massive dose of moderation and doesn't appear to have gotten any.

 

There is also the upcoming Enderal that is supposedly comparable to Skyrim size-wise http://www.pcgamer.com/the-making-of-the-biggest-skyrim-mod-ever/ . The creators already said that it will be completely free and won't sell it in the workshop http://sureai.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=136&t=7057

 

In general, I like that Steam offers a controlled way for modders to make money.

With Steam support, a mod should get much more attention and hopefully generates money for the modder.

I think it is fair that Valve gets a cut and the original dev of the game as well.

It is imo up to the publisher to use this great opportunity in a smart way.

 

Isn't the whole point of asking questions to clarify things? If only softball questions are answered, you're going to get the opposite effect of what you were trying to achieve in the first place.

Either way, it's pretty spectacular how badly a gamer's darling like Valve has anticipated the reactions of the public.

 

Funnily enough, Skyrim is available to play free this weekend.

 

there is a difference between clarifying and having to deal with thousands of trolls with no interest in the actual answers.

 

... and not answering at all

Anyway, I don't want to give the impression that I particularly care about mods. Just fascinated about a company being unable to understand its audience, whether they're trolls or not.

 

They give absolutely zero shit about the reaction. Why else would they ask a few select modders in secret and slap the ones who agreed with a non disclosure agreement? So what if the community is throwing a fit. This is all for the future where modding as a hobby is a distant memory and the publisher has an army of content creators making nickel and dime content for them that in-house devs would be doing for a full wage. Its why Zenimax is getting such a huge cut.

Fixed that for ya.

_____________________

This is why its easy for the businessmen/layers in the background to dictate terms without pressure from the other party. All they had to say was "WE WANT YOU!", "BE THE FIRST!", "CHANCE TO MAKE MONEY!" and the ones who did, agreed without batting an eyelash. Like in many industries, these guys negotiate contracts all the time and getting modders to agree to these terms is literally 'fish in a barrel' tier easy.

 

I think you're make too much of a big deal about the NDA. It's standard practice in the tech world to sign NDA for pretty much anything.
Companies like to control a story for promotional and competitive reasons, and don't want to see things leaking before they're ready to release it to the public. I wouldn't see anything more sinister in t than that.
Though, in this particular case, some early leaks may have been useful to judge the reaction of their customers...

 

You can't propose for a single person to sell assets that are also the product of other people's work and at the same time prevent that person from contacting anyone about it.
Even worse when the assets become property of Valve the moment they go behind a paywall.


The NDA would've made sense if all mods were hats or 3d models for swords, stuff that most probably would've been done by a single person.
But for content that was generated through dozens of modders picking up and expanding on each others' work, these NDAs were the most underhanded shit I've seen in a long time.
And Gabe still believes that the community will self-mediate and self-police on issues regarding theft of content. They're ludicrous. They have no idea what they're doing.