The past two weeks have been tumultuous for PC gamers, as Valve announced (and quickly terminated) a mechanism that allowed modders to charge for their work. While the dust has mostly settled, there are important lessons from the aborted attempt and how we might better discuss this issue in the future.
A Cottage Industry Built And Dismantled
On April 23, Valve announced that Bethesda’s Skyrim would be the first title to allow mod creators to charge for their work. Revenue was set to be split: 30 percent going to Valve, 45 percent to Bethesda, and 25 percent to the mod creator.
This wasn’t Valve’s first foray into community compensation. The Steam Workshop has allowed users to monetize creations used in Dota 2, Team Fortress 2, and other games. It was recently opened to allow third-party developers to implement this type of economy, which sounds appealing across the board since Valve has paid out $57 million to cosmetics creators since 2011. While mods are most certainly more complex and impactful than cosmetics, the core of a community-based economy exists and thrives on Steam.
However, this latest expansion of the Steam Workshop economy was met with enormous resistance. The outcry from gamers was intense, with a variety of issues deemed problematic. The very nature of charging for mods was found objectionable by some. Others took issue with Valve and Bethesda receiving any portion of the revenue. Some identified concerns with theft and repurposing of assets without permission.
The implementation was clumsy and the communication from Valve up until the program was terminated was lighter than it should have been. On April 25, Valve founder Gabe Newell took to Reddit to address questions from the community.
On April 27, Valve and Bethesda pulled the plug, refunded all purchases, and took the idea back to the drawing board. "We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing,” Valve’s Aiden Kroll wrote. “We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different."
Don’t assume that this is the end of paid mods, though. Kroll hints that the concept might come back with refinement.
"We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating,” he writes. “We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here."
Pictured: Beyond Skyrim Mod
What's Free For You Has Cost For Others
One of the most common refrains during the brief “paid mod” period was, “These used to be free. Why should we have to pay for them now?”
End-users have benefitted from mods for ages, often without recognizing the effort of those endeavors monetarily. No doubt, applying a charge to even a sub-set of items that were once considered available for the taking is a jarring change. But for those on the creation side, this work was never “free.”
Individual creators and mod teams (like those working on the massive Skywind conversion project) have been toiling for countless hours without compensation. While these are absolutely labors of love, they aren’t “free.”
“Time is money,” as they say. In this case, those working on these mods are incurring what’s known as “opportunity cost.” The time spent working on these projects is time that can’t be spent on other endeavors, including those that have revenue potential.
There may also be direct expenses related to working on these projects. The cost of upgrading PCs (some fraction of which could be legitimately applied to this work), software for animation and graphics editing, and other purchases inspired by or solely related to mod creation are out-of-pocket expenses.
While no one was asking end-users to pay for these before, to call these mods “free” neglects the time, effort, and direct cost of creation. Whether gamers feel that mods are worth paying for doesn’t factor in here. That’s something the market will correct for as the paid mod economy matures (if it ever returns).
There are concerns about paid mods that should be discussed, though. Starting with Skyrim, a completed game makes things easier. But what happens when paid mods come to games that are still evolving through DLC, patches, and title updates?