Yeah, thisstuff sounds incredibly poopy. (AMA threads on reddit are one of the few things I find interesting or useful about reddit. That said, I have zero intention of wading into that cesspit and will wait for a general summary on better sites.)
From what I've read of the articles, yes, Valve and Bethesda are shooting themselves in the foot over the whole paid mod thing. Gabe dodged the question in the second link about how "75% is a bit of a steep cut to be taking out of every sale" by saying the developer of the game sets the shares. Because he didn't talk about the 30% that Steam was taking for itself.
I guess you can liken the cuts to be the same as how it seems to work on digital music services. Where the platform itself takes a certain cut, and gives the rest to the rightsholder (usually about 30% to itself, 70% to the others. Then the rightsholder gets to pick the percentages from the remaining 70%. In both setups, the actual person that does the work (either an artist or a modder) gets the tiniest fraction of the deal. Although I suspect musicians would love to have the 25% share compared to what they really get. >_>
But anyway, the introduction of the store is basically tearing apart the skyrim community overnight. You have people blaming the company for being greedy and trying to cash in, you have modders calling other modders that use the store sellouts. You have modders forcing the sellouts to take down their mods because they're using other people's mods as a base for their own without permission. You have modders removing their mods everywhere (including free download sites) because they don't want their stuff to be used in the store in that very kind of scenario. And of course the modders doing that are likely going to stop modding for the community altogether.
All because Bethesda wanted a big cut of the pie, their probably going to find Skyrim's lifespan drastically shortened. I hope they have their next game in the series ready to be released soon, I think they're going to need it.
(Essentially they're too lazy to make their own paid DLC. I guess that's the next step in the slope - release half finished games and then make the community finish it, and force them to sell it on your store for pennies to the dollar.)
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chiming
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Date: 2015-04-26 12:55 am (UTC)From:I guess you can liken the cuts to be the same as how it seems to work on digital music services. Where the platform itself takes a certain cut, and gives the rest to the rightsholder (usually about 30% to itself, 70% to the others. Then the rightsholder gets to pick the percentages from the remaining 70%. In both setups, the actual person that does the work (either an artist or a modder) gets the tiniest fraction of the deal. Although I suspect musicians would love to have the 25% share compared to what they really get. >_>
But anyway, the introduction of the store is basically tearing apart the skyrim community overnight. You have people blaming the company for being greedy and trying to cash in, you have modders calling other modders that use the store sellouts. You have modders forcing the sellouts to take down their mods because they're using other people's mods as a base for their own without permission. You have modders removing their mods everywhere (including free download sites) because they don't want their stuff to be used in the store in that very kind of scenario. And of course the modders doing that are likely going to stop modding for the community altogether.
All because Bethesda wanted a big cut of the pie, their probably going to find Skyrim's lifespan drastically shortened. I hope they have their next game in the series ready to be released soon, I think they're going to need it.
(Essentially they're too lazy to make their own paid DLC. I guess that's the next step in the slope - release half finished games and then make the community finish it, and force them to sell it on your store for pennies to the dollar.)