The Glade 4.0

This is probably the ideal implementation, but it would be a huge project to implement it on a years-old modding community.

As I said, Skyrim is a terrible test case for this reason. A fresh game would probably pose its own challenges, namely that you can't guarantee it'll have an active mod community to test it out with.

Probably the best thing they could have done is use one of their own properties (which don't exist outside of Steam, and thus don't have mod communities and aggregators besides Workshop) as the test case.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Skyrim (or any Bethesda game) is a terrible case for demoing this. Because Bethesda allows the community to finish their console-UI games on PC.

I think there is a path to paid mods, but it will need to happen as the product come to market, not as they fracture the ever-living-shit out of a years old community.

Still, a 75/25 cut for mod makers still kind of sucks.

I don't personally believe every single thing in the world needs to be a path to revenue. I think that it's OK to do things for enjoyment and experience, without a direct revenue stream. However, it seems like the world is moving in that direction, and that's OK. I'm not against a skilled creator making money, but I am against creating a marketplace that incentivises thieves and recolors being the creators. (See: Australia between 3 and 6 A.M.).

My take on this has mostly been that people are complaining about the possibility that someone might make a profit. I know profit is highly offensive, but this was never going to destroy PC gaming.

So artists bang on constantly about wanting to be compensated for their work. I don't know where they got this huge sense of entitlement from, but they won't shut up about it. To make matters worse, a healthy chunk of what goes into creating a Skyrim mod is digital artwork of some fashion, whether it be modeling or skinning, and creating a venue where they can charge for their work seems like a good way to address their unreasonable demands for financial compensation. Then, Valve and Bethesda are going to take their cut because that's the cost of not having to write your own game or distribute your product yourself.

But then everyone starts ***** because now some of those free mods are going to cost money. That's really where it started. Everything else came later. You begin with the people who, like Taly, just had a heart attack at the thought that something might cost money, and now have to go pirate games, movies, books, and music just to make sure it's still possible. The next group that comes in are the software mod version of the pretentious indie hipster musicians that want to look down on all the musicians that make money for selling out. They're whining about everyone who will pop up to write mods for money rather than for the love of the game.

Finally, you have the modders who want to be fairly compensated for their work crying out that someone might steal their work and rip them off. This is a fair grievance, and deserves to be discussed. Too bad you can't hear them over the cries of outrage over the thought of the nude wood elf mod having a $2 price tag.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

My take on this is "people complaining" are customers. There is, evidently, strong demand for user-moddable games where nobody can charge for the mods, and people are free to use and reuse other people's modifications. The demand for paid user-mods is much weaker. Therefore, market-forces spoke up and Steam and Bethesda listened to them, because they're profit driven companies and that's the smart thing to do.

Everything about the result here is pure capitalism. Nothing wrong with that.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

There's also the fact that Skyrim, in particular had significant need for patches and bug fixes, as well as player demand for systems that were poorly implemented or unpopular. While there's a grey area between "fix/patch" and "mod" some of the latter are definitely the former.

The official patches for Skyrim already ended with a lot of fixes undone. I don't think it's good to set a precedent whereby in the future, buggy games can be released and the developer can rely on "paid modders" to do the fixes and get a kickback instead of actually patching the game.

This really has nothing to do with people "not liking profit"; although there is always that crowd that feels game companies should hand out their products at prices tailored to unemployed college students or the few people in poor countries that have a computer, as well as the fedora-wearing SJW that is worried if the modder is getting a "fair" cut - becuase Bethesda is a corporation and therefore bad and does not employ people or anything. Really, for the most part this has to do with the community wanting TES in particular to stay a mecca of community modding. That's a large part of what the series is about.

If they want to **** up some other series with crappy mods made by Russians or something, I'm a lot less concerned, although I think the entire thing will just end in lolsuits.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

DE, I don't think the ethical hazard in releasing buggy games and relying on the free modding community to fix them or implement new, in-demand features is significantly different in kind than the ethical hazard of doing the same but with paid mods that the developer gets a kickback from.

In both cases, the developer has a financial incentive to leave the game buggy. It's just a matter of whether they get their fix for free or at a profit, both of which are more profitable than paying employees to do it on the publisher's dime.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

There's a pretty significant difference there. In one case it's a matter of "****, the deadline is here, **** it we'll get it out and patch it later", in the other it's "don't even worry about debugging it, we'll make more money letting the modders fix it and charge for the patch." In the worst case, they could then release their own "free patches" which introduce more bugs for modders to "fix".

After all the melodramatics about EA over the years its amazing anyone thinks this is a good idea.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."