We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we'll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.
We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing. 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.
To help you understand why we thought this was a good idea, our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid. We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it.
But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop. 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. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here.
We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing. 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.
To help you understand why we thought this was a good idea, our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid. We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it.
But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop. 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. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here.
Thank you to both Valve and Bethesda for ultimately doing the right thing in the end. Seriously, just add an optional donation button and that would be amazing. There is literally no way anybody could be upset with that.
On the other hand, making a game from scratch would gain more than a total conversion, even with its own revenue splitting options.
On the other other hand... Humble Bundle's donation solution beats the ever living crap out of this system. Showing the average donation might even encourage more donations though it shouldn't unlock anything more than the mod itself unlike Humble Bundle. It was right in your freaking faces to let us decide on the split, and yet you built a paywall system instead that made mods so unattractive and horrendously abused. It didn't encourage better mods.
I understand the viewpoint that mods were only free before because they couldn't legally charge for them, and that a legal way to compensate for their hard work would change things showing mod authors deserve money, but not necessarily be entitled to them.
So if that's the case, just let us decide how much of our hard earned money goes to these mod authors. I donated to Sven-Coop and I am absolutely happy to do so. I believe Natural-Selection's premium membership donation is a wonderful idea, even if it made a minority of members conceited at times (thankfully few and far between).
So a payment option is fine for Skyrim mods, but let us judge the mod and determine if it's abuse, or quality work deserving of reward, and let us decide how much goes to each party. Humble Bundle doesn't seem to show gamers abusing this to screw developers. And also future titles run the risk of incompatibility from updates, and virtually no course of action to get any support to resolve this issue.
There were examples of better systems, and somehow their first attempt resulted in a paywall for skinned swords... If this was on CS-Nation's Skin Of The Day... I would've immediately abandoned this site, and wouldn't be here today.
I believe that eventually (sooner or later), they will try something similar again and they are just trying to figure out what is the best way to do it.
I still say copying the Humble Bundle donation system would work best. Let us decide on the split, and most would just hit the default which would give a cut for VALVe and the dev/publishers anyways. At the same time, I don't think we should be allowed to donate amounts you can't split like $0.01 USD or any similar value in a different currency, so a default minimum in the most widely accepted international currency (I prefer USD over Euro) may be a necessary evil. I take back the increasing average idea though, since unlike Humble Bundles, it doesn't end so it'll just inflate to absurd numbers.
I'd have to give credit to Bethesda in being open-minded enough to allow modders to get money out of it. Balancing between protecting your copyright and letting someone get paid for UGC is quite a hassle. I get that they're getting a cut as well, but previously modders didn't even have a legal way of getting anything. This is different from Nintendo, where options were available to claim ad revenue from all games until Nintendo stepped in and took a cut. In the case of modding, there was no way available to get money out of your work aside from a PayPal link and a prayer that you aren't hit with a cease and desist.