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It looks like the near-future world is a world wherein you have a choice between paying for auto-installing mods or doing work (negligible if you're computer-savvy, onerous if you're not) to manually install them for free.
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Apr 23, 2015 20:22
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Hobo Siege posted:I see where they're coming from with this. Every popular game suddenly having an around-the-clock dev team of loving THOUSANDS sounds like a dream come true, but consumers are going to be incredibly resistant to paying for stuff that used to be free. A 25% cut isn't going to be enough for someone to quit their day job with the sort of sales I'd expect to see. There will probably be a pretty strong market for cheat mods.
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Apr 23, 2015 20:36
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Alasyre posted:I think you can include .esm files on Steam now. Wyrmstooth got an update on Steam and it uses Wyrmstooth.esm. Hahahahaha Also, in the future monetized Workshop mods are going to come with an exclusivity agreement forbidding the modder from offering his work free elsewhere, with corresponding aggressive efforts at shutting down mod "piracy". This is all about Valve and Bethesda/other publishers getting rich off other people's work.
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Apr 23, 2015 20:48
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Pakled posted:So, in addition to Valve/Bethesda taking a 75% cut, there's also this: I don't see anything objectionable or shady about that specific thing, honestly. Valve and Bethesda aren't in this to make $300 and bank fees really are a thing.
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Apr 23, 2015 20:50
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Thug Lessons posted:I don't think they can do this, because the unofficial patches use content from other mods, including mine. Which means the unofficial patches will probably have been removed from nexus by this time tomorrow. You had better back up your mods folder right loving now.
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Apr 24, 2015 02:20
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KakerMix posted:Right, so what is to stop Bethesda from deciding that for Fallout 4 or the next Elder Scrolls saying that sites like Nexus can't host mods anymore because of a TOS like they do with the selling mods part (doesn't count for Steam obv.)? Right now Bethesda gets 45% of that 75% cut selling mods, which is better than 0% than they'd get from Nexus and Bethesda is a for-profit company so.....? Correct. "All mods not hosted by the Steam Workshop are illegal" is precisely the next step in this game. e: They won't do it for already existing games but they sure as poo poo are going to do it for future games.
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Apr 24, 2015 03:04
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Bholder posted:By the very nature of modding it is pretty hard to make it "illegal" outside the workshop or whatever. No, it's very easy. "We own the game therefore we are allowed to dictate what channels modded content for this game are allowed to go through" is a thing they very much are legally entitled to say. If you're saying the community won't stand for it that's a separate issue and remains to be seen, but there are no technical roadblocks here.
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Apr 24, 2015 03:15
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Police Automaton posted:It's not even Bethesda titles, it's every game supporting the Workshop on steam (eventually). This will have big implications. A bizarre conclusion of all this is also that game companies now can passively make income by making their game moddable and leaving stuff out for the players to fill in. Mr Scumbag posted:Hahahaha. But it literally is now, and not only will modders fix it, BETHESDA will get paid for it. This has created an environment where developers can profit off not patching/fixing their game. Ding ding ding! Show these contestants what they've won. JerikTelorian posted:The second major part of this is that modding Skyrim often means having dozens or hundreds of mods. For many, this means an exorbitant price (2-3x the game release price or more). You're essentially destroying that style of play, which is very popular. In the short term this may happen but the system will eventually be tweaked--the customers will end up paying more like twice the release price for the mods, which customers will grumble about but will pay. The long-range plan for the publishers (Valve is just taking a cut, this is about the publishers' plans) is shifting to a system wherein they can rush out a buggy barely-more-than-alpha game and then get paid while modders who are making a relative pittance do all the patching work for them. The tax liability on mod sale income will be much less than the tax (and insurance) liability on employees. This is about co-opting modders into being de facto low paid independent contractors.
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Apr 24, 2015 17:29
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We're only at about square 4 of the Chutes-and-Ladders board of this specific issue, but here's the big, important thing you should learn from the experience: I don't know Bethesda's history, but it is clearly now being run by the same kind of people that run EA. From here forward you can expect EA-esque shortsighted business practices (gently caress quality, ship it and book the revenue now) and you only have yourself to blame if you give them money for any of their future products. I doubt this fiasco is going to be The End of Skyrim As We Know It, as some fear. But Elder Scrolls 6 is guaranteed to be a SimCity-esque shitstorm.
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Apr 24, 2015 19:05
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I very much doubt they pulled the plug. Probably some kind of maintenance. That or Valve and Bethesda are hashing out some kind of conflict.
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Apr 24, 2015 19:38
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I think if anything it's more likely Valve, who is just the middleman taking a middleman's cut, is having second thoughts after seeing the internet firestorm than that Bethesda is; they went into this having made a conscious decision to not give a poo poo about customer experience in the name of revenue right now. But more likely this is a temporary outage while something behind the scenes gets hashed out. No way did they decide in less than 48 hours to pull the plug because of internet outrage that Bethesda and Valve had to know was coming.
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Apr 24, 2015 19:48
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Octal posted:It looks like they closed off the discussion forums on every paid mod. This is my shocked face.
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Apr 24, 2015 20:04
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BillBear posted:Valve shutting down people who are criticizing this poo poo is straight up childish, they have some serious problems interacting with their own community. No, it's a calculated business decision. They want people who don't know any better to hand over money before anyone alerts them that they're being fleeced. I'm sorry, I lost track; is Chesko the guy that wrote that reddit post? If so he was pretty drat naive and Bethesda/Valve took advantage of him. A fact that based on that reddit post he still doesn't seem to quite understand.
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Apr 24, 2015 20:16
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oblomov posted:Yeah, I mean not much that could be done. I am kind of said to see this sort of implementation as I think it's going to be terrible over the long term and I wonder how it will impact Bethesda's next game (Fallout 4 most likely) in design. That's missing the forest for the trees. Wonder instead what this move says about Bethesda's entire business model when you're pondering whether to give them money for Fallout 4 or whatever their next game is.
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Apr 24, 2015 20:44
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Bethesda/Valve were somewhat short of entirely forthright about their plans with the modders they approached. To put it gently.
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Apr 24, 2015 21:00
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Praetorian Mage posted:The next version of SkyUI is going to be paid-only: Well, then. I guess this IS The End of Skyrim As We Know It after all.
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Apr 24, 2015 21:33
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ANIME IS BLOOD posted:This. And if Valve does nothing to address this besides vanishing dissenters down the memory hole, I'm emptying out my wishlist too. Nah. I mean you will, but a few weeks later you'll come right back to Steam because that's where fun games are. And if you don't you'll be in a very small minority. Gamers have disposable money and no impulse control. Valve knows this. As for me, I'm kinda sad that I'll have to give up Skyrim when told in the near future it's going to cost me another $50 or whatever if I want to play it with basic mods that are pretty much required to make the game not excruciating. But I'll just move on to something else, which likely as not will also be on Steam.
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Apr 24, 2015 21:41
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Mega Comrade posted:You say this but a lot of comments on the internet are saying exactly this. That petition that has 46000 signatures just says mods should be free an gives no reasons why. I have no problem acknowledging that for me it's mostly I don't want to pay for mods. Not in the scenario where the game I already bought at sticker price is essentially unplayable without them--sure as poo poo not when rather than the guy who poured dozens or hundreds of hours into fixing gamekilling problems getting paid for his trouble, he gets paid an insulting pittance while the studio that pushed out the broken game gets most of the money I would be shelling out. There are layers here. I'm repeating myself, but for Bethesda this is mostly about turning modders into very low paid and benefits-free independent contractors to do all the patching work after they shove a not-nearly-done game out the door.
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Apr 24, 2015 21:56
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El Generico posted:It sold over two million copies. Ah, the power of deliberately deceitful marketing. Which by the way included legions of paid shills all over the internet, including this very forum.
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Apr 24, 2015 22:00
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Thug Lessons posted:A change.org petition doesn't mean everything but you're deluded if you think that the companies involved don't give a poo poo about bad press and bad community reaction. These are big companies that have public relations divisions, (Valve less so because they're notoriously secretive and unresponsive, but it definitely applies to Beth and Zenimax). They're not going to shut this down but it definitely can't hurt to complain Valve and Bethesda knew exactly the firestorm they were going to provoke. They went ahead with it anyway. It was a carefully reached business decision. It will prove fatal to both companies in the long run, but it will work out gloriously for their current executives, who will steal a large portion of the short-term revenue and skidaddle before the long term drain-swirling commences. In short, EA.
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Apr 24, 2015 22:02
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I tried to be subtle about this but, guys: El Generico is a shill. Attempting to engage him is just giving him another opportunity to shill for his company.
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Apr 24, 2015 22:12
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oblomov posted:Eh, it's likely they did not make any money but indeed lost money, lost reputation and lost the franchise. You bet your rear end they cared. They did in fact make money. They skimped on their servers and it bit them in the rear end on PR, but even that goes to show that EA knew every step of the way what they were doing: rushing out a lovely game in snazzy packaging, marketing the hell out of it, brazenly lying to everyone, killing the SimCity brand for good in exchange for a quick revenue influx and jumping in the getaway car. Some people got fired but they weren't actually the ones that drew up and executed this plan. EA decided it was finished with the SimCity brand and decided to cash it in one last time via the power of false advertising. The only thing that didn't go according to the plan was their servers proving inoperative--which is just a classic Dilbert case of managers slashing costs without listening to the frantic pleas of their engineers, and happens at large companies everywhere.
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Apr 24, 2015 22:17
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Pakled posted:For what it's worth, I'm not a fan of accusing someone of being a shill without definitive proof since I've been on the other side of those accusations and it's pretty silly to be accused of being a shill when you just have an opinion that differs from the majority I don't make that accusation lightly.
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Apr 24, 2015 22:20
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No, the 'everybody wins' scenario is the publisher puts out extremely buggy poo poo but embraces (heretofore free) modding, which drives game sales. This is basically Paradox's business model, and was Bethesda's up until two days ago. Now Bethesda has decided to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs because its current executives will get gently caress-you rich from the feathers, and don't give a poo poo that there won't be golden eggs anymore five years from now because by then they'll be long gone.
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Apr 24, 2015 23:26
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Posted this sarcastically in the joke thread but it got me to thinking: how hard would it be for Bethesda to put out an unavoidable official patch that, for instance, breaks the old version of SkyUI just after the new one goes up on the Workship for  ? I don't think they're quite that evil OR stupid but it made me wonder...
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Apr 25, 2015 03:46
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Killsion posted:The day modding became We're going to need a good epithet for it a la "The September That Never Ended".
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Apr 25, 2015 04:32
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AlmightyBob posted:The do not update option has been gone for years Pretty sure this is the case. There is nothing stopping Bethesda from pushing out a patch to break the free version of SkyUI as soon as the paid version is up and at this point it wouldn't surprise me if that's what they do. *Everyone* uses SkyUI because the default interface is hideous and painful.
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Apr 25, 2015 08:54
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Rinkles posted:I believe the creator said they wouldn't abandon the free version of SkyUI, insofar as basic functioning is concerned at least. The creator said SkyUI would still be available free but would see no further updates; all versions from here out you'll have to pay for. It would be simple enough for an official patch to come out soon that just so happens to break the current version of SkyUI, followed a day later by a SkyUI update that fixes it--but you only get it if you pay the because the free version isn't getting any new updates, I already told you all that why are you freaking out??Piracy will of course be an option but I myself have barely passable mod-fu and will probably decide it's not worth the hassle of setting everything up manually and just not play Skyrim anymore. YMMV.
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Apr 25, 2015 09:04
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I would certainly HOPE Bethesda isn't evil or stupid enough to attempt such a thing. But I'd have said that about the entire pay-for-mods concept two days ago so I can hardly blame anyone that wants to put on a tonfoil cap right now. I think Praetorian Mage is right and Skyrim will mostly be fine and this is mostly about future Bethesda games, which anyone who buys one is a fool who deserves to be parted from their money.
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Apr 25, 2015 09:10
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Trixie Hardcore posted:It would be great if mod authors could be compensated for their work, but everyone buying into this fantasy scenario where mod authors can make a living modding and the quality mods will flow like wine are fooling themselves. Especially not now that the first wave of paid modders have proven they will take on all the risk & labor and turn on each other for obscenely small rewards. It's like dropping a minor healing potion or something in the middle of Riften  Poultron posted:I think Valve's heart was in the right place with this, lol Wow, people STILL think St. Gabe is the Champion Of All That Is Good About Gaming, huh?
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Apr 25, 2015 17:03
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They're still there and it's down to 93% as of ten minutes ago.
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Apr 25, 2015 17:18
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scamtank posted:I'm willing to believe that the backwards baseball caps at Bethesda had this wonderful idea to harness some of the endless energy of the mod community for some modest dollar signs and Valve just pulled a Chesko and went "I dunno but I don't mind money, it's your funeral I guess" without either one anticipating the degree of this shitstorm. If it were Valve's initiative, I think there would've been more than one game released in 2011 serving as the experimental cohort. I think you're selling Steam way short to suppose that, imagining it as Gabe and some of his buddies when in fact it's a megacompany now with all the departments and so forth that implies. Much more likely is that the Steam Workshop was brought forth in anticipation of Thursday. For Bethesda this is all about deriving a continuous passive income stream from effectively enslaving modders to do their patching for them at what works out to below minimum wage with no benefits or other tax liabilities associated with employees.
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Apr 25, 2015 17:20
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iGestalt posted:This raises an interesting point. If they were to do this and also sell their mod, they would be committing fraud (As I understand it. Which would be a huge loving legal hailstorm for the content creator. No one would ever be able to prove in court it was fraud, though, because you'd have to prove it to a judge or jury that doesn't know and doesn't give a drat how video games and mods work, with a lawyer on the other side who will actively thwart you from explaining it to them.
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Apr 25, 2015 18:49
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Cantorsdust posted:Pirating paid mods might work fine for Skyrim since it was designed for independent mod files. TES 6 will have its mod interface built directly with Steam Workshop in mind, and adding in outside/torrented mods won't even work. Calling it now. Congratulations on correctly predicting this morning's sunrise
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Apr 25, 2015 18:57
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Demonstrating how Bethesda figures they can get away with this because they're exploiting every modder's dream of working for a Game Company.
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Apr 25, 2015 20:14
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Some highlights from browsing the sea of negative reviews on Steam:EpeGlab posted:2 words : Paid Mods gently caress PAYING FOR MODS posted:Skyrim (2011-2014): best example of pc gaming/mod community BatChan posted:In one fell move, Valve managed to shatter a thriving community, burn their goodwill, ignore all criticism, and have me leave Steam. Phil Collins posted:The mods are too cheap. Nevore posted:A shoddy port of a console game. Mods are it's only redeeming feature and thanks to Valve's mercenary ethics they're soon to be behind a pay wall. SciFi311 posted:This review was giving its opinion for free, but is now behind a paywall. Please purchase my two bits on the Steam Sweatshop. FaZeMoonman.KKK posted:I mean if you enjoy paying for patches and bugfixes that should be in the game, go for it! jzeth7 posted:What's being advertised here is a buggy and threadbare game that looks nice. It's up to you if you want to buy it, just be aware that's what you're getting, and if you want to fix it and add decent content and a UI that wasn't designed by H.P. Lovecraft, you'll have to pay once or twice again the cost of the game and pray to Talos it doesn't break.* Numitor posted:A game that I loved to play ( and create waifus in ) - the community helped to extend the longevity of the game until recent changes by Valve and Bethesda with paid mods. It's unfortunate what they've done to the game and it's community. I would not recommend this game or future TES installments with the way the company is going for turning mods in to microtransactions. ✰κίη ςℓάyΣЯ✰ posted:Paid mods is the latest innovation that bugthesda in collaboration with valve have brought to the table for skyrim. Although Skyrim is not dependent on mods but it is still a good option for the players cause who doesn't want to pay for something that may or may not work & could possibly harm your saved game.
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Apr 25, 2015 21:48
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lol, he's saying exactly what executives the world over say, which is: nothing. It's just buzzwords.
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Apr 25, 2015 23:15
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Jaramin posted:I think they really thought there would be some minor backlash that would blow over really fast. Instead they triggered a huge shitshow. I wouldn't be surprised in Bethesda is talking behind closed doors about bailing on the arrangement with all this bad public sentiment, especially after what happened with ESO. No chance in hell.
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Apr 25, 2015 23:57
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This just in, CEOs lie, film at 11
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Apr 26, 2015 00:50
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Apr 26, 2015 01:16
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