Steam Workshop now lets people put prices on mods.

I would think they would support bugfixing. Especially since broken mods won't sell, give the author a bad reputation, and quickly plummets the mod's rating.

Yeah, the author would need to update it. Rubbing nuts in peoples faces is often not a viable long-term business strategy. (See also tehtrekd's response just now.)

We aren't talking longterm. We are talking nomadic one game after another just creating skins and models.

You are describing large team mods, where rep would be important, longevity would be important, ect. Someone makes a single little shaped piece of dilly dally for Kerbal Space Program, we all know how often that game updates, and after an update it no longer mounts without instant exploding because of some new collision. That guy won't care, he is already selling other cheap junk to the Escapists community.

Those are around $0.60 right now for Skyrim. That's not quite $10. It's not like you can expect high quality support for less than a dollar. For 10 dollars the stakes are a bit higher and you would expect that business to at least want to keep a good reputation and keep its mods functional as to not lose sales.

aw common!!

why does none ever understand prices decided by THE MODDERS (not by corps) is a GOOD thing?

it means mod count (not to fuckking mention quality) can't go lower but CAN (and almost necessarily WILL) increase.

as for the price?

you set it by paying or not.

and modders are used to working for free (that sentence I just said sound like poison to me, but you know.... to each his own, who am I to judge? I'm like the only one left who isn't petitioning for a return of slavery).

being used to this, they won't ask for much. I know I wouldn't. And only in the case of a very big mod.

but I can really understand modders appreciating a pittance for their day-in day-out hard work.

Jesus

I mean what the hell, man?

Yet.
If Steam/pusblishers/IP owners start making money from modders selling mods through their services, they may very well legally enforce people to distribute mods only through those. Then they start selling modding licenses/SDKs/ask hosting fee to push modders into increasing prices.

It's a mod. After it has been sold at the peak of it's creation, which is why they call it a "hayday" for a reason, there is a much smaller margain that will buy it "later down the line". You have money in hand off that mod, why go back to do more work for literally a fraction of the cost?

.60 I can understand, but someone mentioned 10 dollars for a single model with sounds. I might buy it for a game that wasn't being updated anymore. I can see Valve getting sued for this the first time a game gets updated and mods breaks and the mod buyers want refunds and get lawyers and enough lawyers make a case winnable and damn the EULA in the process. I hope it rattles their cage and wakes them up, to either moderate or undo this. They either need to keep some basic rules in place, or not do this. They are responsible for the money, and they know it, and they are profiting off it, and despite all that they hide behind EULA to make everyone else in the transactions seem at fault, the customer, the developer, not Valve at all.

Also, I see other mod sites and sources making a competing force against this decision and the anti-mod-sales communities banding together and pulling all the mod userbase away from steam and into GoG and Nexus and suitable alternative sites. That too would serve them right. Even if they undo their decision on mod marketplace, the competition may retain their playerbase and Valve may never get those Steam users back again.

heh, reminds me of the latest Silicon Valley episode

You would go back and fix it to keep a good reputation. And fixing a bug is usually much less work than building it from scratch.

About the $10 mod, that was me that brought that one up, I think. It was $6.25 and it was more than a model, it was an entire new character. Also the developer behind it seems pretty dedicated to it and still releasing updates. He will even release it for free on Nexus after a certain amount of time and the previous version is still available on Nexus. So that would be a modder you can trust, i.e. has a good reputation. I mean, in the end it all boils down to trusting the software company you buy stuff from. The higher the price, the more trust is required. Stricter rules for bug fixing, as you say, may be helpful though. The FAQ was kind of vague about that one. "Ask the modder politely to fix it".

EULAs aren't really legally binding anyway. I mean nobody reads those things. I'm not sure if they have been tested in court.

I suspect only a small margin will be paid mods though. As others have mentioned, most of the mods are by hobbyists that just do it for fun. We'll see.

Also, I'm not sure if you'll see an exodus from SteamWorks. It's nicely integrated and all that. And although I've never used it, I hear it works pretty well.

Actually, I can think of better mod databases and loaders. Nexus and independent designed modloaders. Kerbal and Skyrim and all has one. Same with FTL, they have a forum, modlist, github, modloader, ect. Which gives a big **** you to steamworks.

This is exactly what I'm thinking, and from what I can tell Valve ISN'T treating them like a product. Games need to be properly submitted one of several ways to get on Steam. Mods don't. You just upload them and ask for money.

If mods were handled more professionally I wouldn't have a problem with people charging for them. They aren't though.

I don't see how mod creators don't see how this is bad for them. That 25% cut is more than fair. The implications involved with a submission system this shoddy aren't.

If you're unable to use the software without agreeing to the EULA they're considered legally binding. If you can access the software before agreeing, they aren't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProCD,_Inc._v._Zeidenberg
EDIT: I can only speak for the US. EU is probably all over the place on the issue.

I'm undecided by whether I hate this, like this, or don't really care.

I like it because I'm always for supporting content creators, especially now when more people will be encouraged to make more, high quality mods with an incentive of money. It creates more opportunities for modding to grow like it has never grown before.

I hate it because modding has always been traditionally free, and because it was free, mods could easily depend on each other in order to work. Now if someone makes a mod that is paid for, any other mods that originally used it won't work any more until the person who wants to use these mods have bought it. On top of that, modding makes games unstable, increases load times, and generally make a game not run as it should. Furthermore, the way Valve has implemented this is very messy. Anyone can submit a mod to be monetized, which means that someone could start monetizing off of copyrighted or stolen content should they go unnoticed, which then creates a whole bunch of other legal issues.

Finally, I feel like this is too much of an enabler for bad things to happen. Mod piracy is now a thing that exists. Game developers might become more lazy and start to rely on modding communities to make their half-finished games sort of run better with extra content and unstable bug fixes that just makes playing games a complicated mess.

On the flip-side from that though, developers could be more encouraged to really put some effort in to adding decent mod tools and support on top of their already existing fully finished game instead of growing lazy thanks to the promise that if their game gets a good modding community, they'll benefit from it now more than ever. More and more games could become open instead of becoming more closed (which has been a growing trend over the last decade) thanks to a new market for them as well...

There's so many things that could very easily go wrong with this whole scenario, but if things went right with this then it could be one of the best movements in the modding industry. Instead of a rich and thriving modding community we could end up with a stagnant collection of thousands upon thousands of half finished nickle-and-dime mods from people desperately trying to make a quick buck before we delve in to a game crash of '83 type scenario.
Steam Greenlight or similar model won't help it at all since we all know how good that has been at keeping poor games off of Steam.

Although, that 25% cut for the content creators is a bit harsh, no matter how you look at it...

EULA's are a take-it-or-leave-it type of contract which adds no choice for the other party to make changes to it. They're also forced on you even after you purchase a game/system, and not having the option for a refund almost completely voids an EULA.
This means that they hold a lot less weight in court as opposed to fully negotiated contracts, and have often been overruled on multiple cases.
In Steam's case this should, within theory, mean that most of their EULA's are completely useless in the first place simply due to Valve's no-refund policy.

All within theory though, I'm not actually a lawyer and have only learned this at College.

I'm for it, this could allow modders to make money and create mods with more quality due to their earnings. Also I read that Valve allows you to refund the mod within 24 hours, so if the mod is terrible you can just ask your money back and dislike the mod.

True, when looking for mods, I would go to the forums associated with the game first as well. But I don't know what other people are up to. I'm not even a Steam user for games, but I know many people like Steam.

I'm pretty sure that those aren't meant as a stab against Steamworks though as all of the games you mention have non-Steam versions as well. That kind of requires being independent of Steam. Additionally, Nexus was founded in 2007(source), while Steamworks was only launched in 2008(source).

Actually, that's a good point, as paid mods are Steam-only, which is kind of sad for the non-Steam users. So I'd prefer Uber's mod market idea.

I think you mean to quote tehtrekd there for you first quote, eh? I didn't say that.

The second quote was indeed me, but yeah, I'm obviously not a lawyer.

you're just an apocalypse theorist.

Lol, maybe. On the upside, if paying for mods will be a thing people may start moving to donate instead, and that could push other branches of information industry to PWYW/donate/crowdfunding as well.

Forced labor isn't really comparable to bedroom programming.

it is if everyone gets their panties up in a bunch at the prospect of you maybe eventually getting some money if there's anything left as scraps after steam has gone through it.

as deathbydemin well pointed out most you could possibly get "charged" or "ripped off for" (jesus) is five bucks, wtf!

Thats five bucks you could have used on a pizza, or a really good indie game that's on sale or two moderately good indie games that are on sale. Never disrespect the almighty five bucks.