Paid Skyrim Mods: Is This The End?

Update: Valve and Bethesda have now reversed their decision, removing paid mods from the Skyrim workshop and refunding any purchases made. It’s good to see them listening, and hopefully they’ll use the feedback gathered to improve the system for whatever game they try it with next.

Bethesda just announced that they’ve added support for paid mods for Skyrim on Steam Workshop. This is the biggest change that’s happened to modding their games since the release of the Construction Set for Morrowind, over a decade ago.

There’s a lot of fear and uncertainty going around about what this means for mod users, other mod hosting sites, and the community in general. Below are my opinions on the matter.

It’s Not The End Of The World…

Hard Work Deserves Reward

My personal opinion is that if Alice spends her time creating some content, she should be able to charge for it, if she so wishes. Through the Steam Workshop, Valve and Bethesda get a cut of any purchases of her work, which is ostensibly for the distribution cost and asset licenses respectively. That’s fair enough.

Allowing people to charge for mods also brings new opportunities. With the potential for a return on investment, modders, texture artists, writers and modellers will probably be more willing to spend time and money on their work, increasing its quality, and professionals may decide to enter the community too. There’s scope for some pretty fantastic creations to be made.

No End To Free Mods

This isn’t going to happen. How am I so sure? Because we have free modding utilities.

Skyrim’s modding utilities have always existed outside of Bethesda’s copyright control. They could always have cost money, but they don’t. Not only that, but most of Skyrim’s modding utilities, including all the most popular, are licensed so that you could sell them, even if you have nothing to do with them. That doesn’t happen either: at most, we see an option to donate to their developer(s).

I think this is down to the creators wanting others to see/use their work. When there’s no monetisation, there’s little point in sharing otherwise. The introduction of paid mods doesn’t remove that desire, it just gets balanced against the desire to make money.

Opinions amongst mod authors obviously vary, but from what I’ve seen, only a small minority would exclusively offer their mods as paid. I expect most mod authors will go for a pay-what-you-want system on Steam, and still release their mods for free elsewhere.

The Steam Workshop Is Already Limited

I’m not alone in thinking that browsing for mods on the Steam Workshop is a painful experience, though the actual install process is smooth. There are also issues with forced updates (great for mod authors, not always for users), and a lack of support for things like the Skyrim Script Extender, complex install procedures, and in general more complicated, ambitious mods.

Given all the limitations, other mod hosting sites won’t be going anywhere: they’ll lose some authors to the Workshop, those who only want to make money, but as I’ve already said, modding will always be about more than that.

…But You Can See It From Here

A False Economy

Many people will be perfectly happy to pay money for mods, in support of their creators. However, on the Steam Workshop, mod authors only get 25% of revenue, and can only access that money when it has exceeded $100, ie. when people have paid at least $400 for their mods. That is, quite frankly, utterly ridiculous. For example, if you make a payment through PayPal, they only take ~ 3.4% of it.

That means if a modder gets $399 of purchases on their work, they see nothing, and Valve and Bethesda get $299.25. With that kind of minimum payout, and such a low return, I can’t see how modding for money is going to be economical. Sure, if you’re good you might make money off it, but chances you could make much more money using that time and those skills in other ways. This will be a barrier to the opportunity for more professional-quality mods.

The Steam Workshop is for making Valve and Bethesda money, not mod authors. Valve have already started to remove donation links from the descriptions of paid mods on the Steam Workshop. Bethesda can’t be bothered fixing long-standing bugs, but have found the time to make more money off modders. Yet they’re both selling this change as “supporting” mod authors.

Trading Freedom For Uncertainty

Skyrim is Bethesda’s IP, and they can do what they want with it. The community exists in faith of Bethesda’s goodwill. However, introducing such large changes without any open dialog shakes that faith. Bethesda did a great thing in making modding tools available, but other than that there is practically no communication or support. There’s risk in investing time and effort into the worlds Bethesda creates. Why release mods for their games, if they’re just going to turn everything upside down and make life more complicated for you, without any warning? It’s the old “house built on sand” thing. You might as well have your fun elsewhere.

Though I’ve said above that sites like the Nexus won’t disappear, Bethesda could easily turn around and make it against their EULA to distribute mods anywhere but the Steam Workshop. I can see that happening for the next game they announce (and they’ve got that E3 announcement coming up…). Yes, EULAs aren’t necessarily legally binding until tested in court, but who has the money lying around to do that?

It seems to me that Bethesda don’t care about their communities. Sure, they’re a business, but there must surely have been a less divisive, more rewarding way to introduce paid mods.

Less Cooperation, More Competition

There’s already been real damage done to the community. Users only have so much money to spend on mods, and are going to be less experimental and adventurous with trying out new mods if they cost money, so I think there’s going to be a relative decrease in mod usage.

This means that modders who create paid mods will be in competition over users’ wallets, and would probably be less willing to share their knowledge and skills as a result. It’s not a given, of course, but I expect people will at least start off conservative while they get used to the new market. Who is going to make modders resources, or write tutorials? Some people aren’t interested in money at all, but lots of people won’t want others making money off their work.

There’s probably also going to be a hit to collaboration: unless you really need the other guy’s skills, would you be willing to split the revenue with them? I know I’d be strongly tempted to go it alone. I think that’s a shame, because I started off modding Oblivion by joining an existing team, and have come such a long way as a result.

Scope For Abuse

Most modders aren’t very good at telling people what they’re allowed to do with the stuff they’ve shared, and I think they’ll need to step up their game. If you release something, slap a software or artistic license on it, preferably an existing, well-known one that’s been vetted by lawyers. State whether or not you want to allow other people to redistribute, attribute, modify, or sell your work. Remember that you can put a non-commercial license on it for general use, but then also offer a commercial license to anyone willing to get in touch with you about one.

We’ve already had cases of paid mods being taken down because they used assets made by someone who didn’t want them used commercially. A clear license would help avoid such situations. Stolen work and assets, where someone re-releases another’s work as their own, is already a problem in the Skyrim modding community. It’s not a big one, but then there has been very little incentive to act like that. However, there’s now a financial incentive, so I think this is will be a growing problem.

Valve has said they will respond to DMCA takedown notices, but that requires the rightful owners to become aware of the theft in the first place. Just look at YouTube: even Google, with all their algorithms, and record companies, with staff who are paid to do little but look for cases of copyright infringement, can’t deal with the problem effectively. How is a single person who probably mods in their spare time supposed to do so?

Not only is there a significant issue of theft between mods, but there are also issues with licensing surrounding the tools to make those mods. Many texture artists and modelers use student editions of software for which commercial licenses can cost thousands of pounds. What are the chances that all the new swords and armours for sale were made using legally licensed software? Not high, I’d guess.

Great Content, Overpriced

The trouble with charging for mods is that it’s hard to get right. On the one hand, you want to charge what the mod is worth, but on the other it can be hard to convey that worthiness to shoppers.

The best comparison I can give is against my Steam library. If I divide the total cost of my Steam library by the number of hours I’ve played in it, I get under £0.25/hour. That gets me some truly unforgettable experiences, weighted against the risk of disappointment.

While it’s not a fair comparison, I do feel that mod authors need to match their prices against that kind of return. I think the mods I consider essential are worth £2-3 each, but I wouldn’t pay that much, because it would mean paying more for mods than a whole game, which just seems silly.

Hopefully, this one will sort itself out as the market adjusts.

What About Sales Elsewhere?

Bethesda’s announcement is very curiously worded so that it neither suggests paid mods are limited to the Steam Workshop, nor that they are allowed through any other site. It would make sense for them to limit paid mods to the Steam Workshop, as otherwise they can’t ensure a cut goes to them, but it’s mildly disconcerting to see such an obvious point go unaddressed.

Final Thoughts

I don’t think this change is going to affect mod users that much, but I do think it’s going to make life more difficult for authors and fracture the community. I think paid mods are fine in principle, but this particular implementation doesn’t do anyone in the community any favours, and exploits mod authors. There are many issues I haven’t touched, like Valve’s miserable excuse of a refund policy, and the nature of paid goods vs. mods, but I didn’t want to end up too pessimistic…

If you want to give a modder money, do it directly. Don’t go through the Steam Workshop, there you’re just throwing more money at people you’ve already paid for their work.

We’ve already seen people taking down their free mods in fear they’ll be stolen and sold on the Workshop, or because they depend on mods that are getting paid-only updated. Mod authors who have decided to try out the new system are getting a huge amount of abuse from players who see them as “selling out to the man”, and trying to stir up a witch-hunt. Some of what I have read is quite frankly sickening, and I think people need to take a deep breath and remember that there’s no place for such vitriolic abuse. I only hope that when the dust settles, the community will still meaningfully exist. We had a good thing going, for a while.

LOOT will remain free for the foreseeable future, but I’ll be keeping a close eye on how the market develops. I’m not above monetising my own work to match market trends, eg. charging to use it with paid mods, but as things stand I have no interest in doing so.