My tuppence worth or two cents (Valve, Bethesda and mods)

Obviously, my writing life also revolves around my gaming life so forgive me the indulgence.

So, the dust is settling around the ill-judged move to start a pay for mods model for Skyrim on the Steam Workshop.  Well that firmly puts my stake in the ground.  I think that neither Valve nor Bethesda thought it through properly and in the initial announcement that paid mods were no longer being continued they said as much, so fair play to them for that.  Out of all this, the already fragile community itself suffered most.  One of the cries on the Steam Community Forums was that there was no initial dialogue with the users about it.  This makes me laugh.  The response and backlash on the forums shows exactly why Valve would be reluctant to open up such a channel with the users, the immaturity knew no bounds and was for the most party utterly vacuous and without anything meaningful to say, usually filled with memes, videos, bigotry and expletives.  * slow clap *

However, that said, and obviously would be in my interest, I'm not totally against the idea of amateur creatives being able to make a few quid.  I've a few of NPC mods on nexus, and initially would have considered upping my game to maybe jump in if it seemed to be working out alright for the modders.  If only it were that simple, eh?  After this moment of fancy, and after thinking it through a bit more and reading up on some of the real sources of actual modders invited into the initial launch, the current style of modding is too much of a 'shitty mess' for it to be so cut and dried.  There's so many shared resources being used, tools created by other modders, shared textures, meshes, the whole kaboodle, because everyone is just doing if for the love of it and is happy for others to make use of it and thus extend the life of the game and their notoriety into the bargain.  So who gets paid?  Does the guy who made the skin textures you used for your follower mod need paying?  The possibility of mods being downloaded from a free site like Nexus or the other place(...), to then sell on Steam was another issue that there was little in place to challenge or avoid that possibility,  And then with what turned out to be a meagre percentage of the total for the modder (25%), what about the supporting talent, like voice actors, artists, musicians, story and dialogue writers, and so on?

In short, my opinion would be that the modders themselves need to organise before this can really be attempted in earnest, and treat what is a hobby now as a business, with agreements over assets between themselves in place.  We are hoping, however, that this has not been so bad for the community that Bethesda pulls support for mods completely in future titles such as the impending Fallout 4, which they have been very supportive of thus far, providing the Creation Kit for Skyrim and letting us run riot.

'Gaben will provide' Book of Steam 1:14