Starting today, content creators can earn even more money. A new update to the Workshop, starting with the Skyrim Workshop will allow content creators to directly sell content to consumers. Content that includes mods, items, maps, skins, and whatever else you can make.
Workshop is now putting mod authors in business via a new streamlined process for listing, selling and managing their creations. Creators contributing to the Steam Workshop have the choice of listing their new creations for sale at a price of their choosing, or to continue to make their work available to players for free. Mods purchased from the Steam Workshop are available immediately for play.
"We think this is a great opportunity to help support the incredible creative work being done by mod makers in the Steam Workshop," says Tom Bui at Valve. "User generated content is an increasingly significant component of many games, and opening new avenues to help financially support those contributors via Steam Workshop will help drive the level of UGC to new heights."
Direct mod sales via the Steam Workshop debuts today with Bethesda Softworks'® award-winning title, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and additional titles will become available across the Steam Workshop in the coming weeks.
Mods on the Skryim Workshop have received more than 170 million downloads to date. The thousands of free mods, items, weapons, and quests will continue to be available at the discretion of the players who made them.
"We think this is a great opportunity to help support the incredible creative work being done by mod makers in the Steam Workshop," says Tom Bui at Valve. "User generated content is an increasingly significant component of many games, and opening new avenues to help financially support those contributors via Steam Workshop will help drive the level of UGC to new heights."
Direct mod sales via the Steam Workshop debuts today with Bethesda Softworks'® award-winning title, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and additional titles will become available across the Steam Workshop in the coming weeks.
Mods on the Skryim Workshop have received more than 170 million downloads to date. The thousands of free mods, items, weapons, and quests will continue to be available at the discretion of the players who made them.
It will be very interesting to see what kind of content people are actually going to try to sell for money. Maybe this will spur people to create the next Team Fortress, Garry's Mod, or Counter-Strike...
... Or not.
You can find out more information, including links to some pay only mods available for Skyrim at the aptly named "About Paid Content" page on Steam.
It WOULD be a great Idea if steam would give the ACTUAL opportunity of "supporting" and allow the person who is downloading the mod to be able to give a donation to the person who created it. NOT make mods payed.
You will all pay £50 for a half arsed game because it has been released by a billion pound company like EA or Activision, then you will pay another £50 for its DLC, yet you won't support independent artists because well... that you think should be free!?
People need their brains testing i swear. Mods are 99% of the time better than the actual game, you should support that, not leach off of it like an ungrateful grub.
I'm all for supporting mod makers but the way Valve is attempting to do it, is not the right way of going about it. Set up an optional donation button. Make it flashing and play a sound, whatever. You put it on the page for the mod and let the public decide from there if they want to help out the mod maker. And make it a proper donation split too with the bulk actually going to the mod maker.
The only thing actually worth a damn would be total conversions or near total conversion mods. Look at Counter-Strike. Look at Team Fortress. Look at Red Orchestra. Look at Dota. Look at Natural Selection. Hell, three of those are now Valve products. Those were all free mods that eventually became paid, full retail releases. That's what should be the case. For a company that has a history so deeply rooted in this very notion, you would think Valve would understand this.
Sure, in the past few years, Valve has made the move to this cosmetic DLC nonsense. And you know what? I'm fine with that for multiplayer games. It makes sense there because others can see your cool gun skin, or your rare character model, or what have you. But putting a price on piecemeal content, much of which is largely unproven in terms of quality or worth, for a single player only game? Haha... you're out of your damn mind.
Allowing mods to be monetized may be good in the long term. It may spur people to finally be creative and make some really kickass total conversions. We really haven't seen anything worthwhile in years though since most top-tier game engines are free or nearly free now. Why mod a total conversion when you can just make a game? Something that would have been a mod or total conversion mod in the past can now skip the middleman and become an Indie release directly. So even the hope that we will eventually see some great TCs out of this is a bit of a long shot nowadays.
And in the short term? In the here and now? You get swords and skins for a couple of bucks. You have previously free mods that you now have to pay for. You have a community that is (mostly) rightly furious at this (the spam/asshole type stuff is a bit much), directed at a company that should know better given their own history in the industry.
In the short term, you get things like this: