" presented data showing the effect paid user content has had on their games, their players, and their modders. We believe the best should be paid for their work and treated like the game developers they are."īethesda noted that only eight percent of Skyrim players have ever used a mod, and it wants that percentage to increase. "But we also believe our community wants to reward the very best creators, and that they deserve to be rewarded. "We believe most mods should be free," the Skyrim maker wrote. People said they would have been perfectly happy had the mod been free, but that it wasn't worth shelling out cash for. Many objected to the fundamental idea of paying for a mod, but the biggest complaint was that it was not worth the money. When the first paid mod popped up on Steam last year, a $7 Portal 2 mod called Aperture Tag, it was flooded with negative reviews. When it's free (and unauthorized), who cares? But when money enters in to the equation, players have higher standards. One of the caveats of playing with mods is you know that you might break your game by doing so. On the other hand, traditionally, paid downloadable content from a publisher has traditionally meant a higher standard of quality. This is how some gifted modders can push out bug fixes for games like Deadly Premonition in less than 24 hours after the game is released. QA isn't a bad thing, but it can hamstring the development of fixes if said fixes only work for most users, not all. Mods aren't subject to quality assurance standards from publishers or console makers. Mods can do things that traditional developers often are not able to. They expect me to shell out money for mods that were previously free, for a 4 year old game? Fuck that," said one commenter. In this case, Bethesda's 45 percent seemed excessive to players and modders.īut for some purists, the issue wasn't about percentages-it was about money entering the equation at all. The game's publisher determines how much it wants to skim off the top. But Valve's cut, just like on iOS, was indeed only 30 percent. Some contrasted this unfavorably to Apple's App Store, in which content creators receive a 70 percent share. In the case of Skyrim, 75 percent of the profit from a mod's sale was split between Valve and Bethesda, with only 25 percent making its way to the mod creator's pocket. Many think that the profit-sharing model is unfair to modders. Valve boss Gabe Newell even took to Reddit to address the controversy directly and "to make sure that if people are pissed off, they are at least pissed off for the right reasons." A petition calling for Valve to remove the pay-for-mods system quickly garnered more than 130,000 signatures.
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