BURN IT WITH FIRE!!

The subject matter I'm about to discuss is likely to piss off a ton of people but if you've been around me long enough you know I don't give two shits about that. But I will say I love mods and I love free mods.

Paid mods, is it the evil you think it is? Answer, not really. Everyone is grabbing their torches and pitchforks ready to slay the monster but 90% of you are just followers others, spreading half truths mainly to seem cool or informed. Steam's idea to let mod creators charge for mods isn't as bad as some of you think BUT Steam's lazy half assed approach to the idea is the real problem. Steam has a history of a really hands off approach to things, I mean look at the GreenLight program.

Having no real ceiling when it comes to the price of mods, bad. No system in place to keep people from uploading someone else's mod and charging for it, extremely bad. The list goes on. There are many different ways Steam could of with about setting up a paid program for mod creators, one being a ranking type infrastructure for pricing and having a hard cap of what a modder can charge. Example, a custom quest mod that adds 15 hours worth of content to your game or a package type deal with 4 or more mods can charge $X amount compared to say a silly mod that adds a giant sweet roll to the middle of Whiterun.

Another option is a partnerships subscriber program much like Twitch.tv. If you don't know about it, it's a pay a single amount ($4.99 on Twitch) a month (let's say $2.99 for steam) to your favorite content creator and like Twitch the more "subs" they have the highter the percent of the revenue that person gets. Example: Modder A can go from 75/25 to 60/40 and if your very popular then 50/50 but that last bit could only happens if they have a crap ton of sub. Again like Twitch not everyone is a partner and they have to work pretty hard to get a partnership (in most cases). This way if they want to get paid for their work they must put out quality content(s). Because no one is going to sub if the creator puts out a half assed mod just to make a quick buck.

Yet again, it's not a perfect system but someone that gets paid to problem solve could figure out a better structure than what we currently have. And before some of you try to burn me at the stake, I love not paying for mods, 90% of my games are modded in some way but I can understand the concept and why some modders would want to get paid for their content. And just becasuse there's a option, many modders mod for the love of *insert gane here* and will always put out content for free. This isn't the end of free mods and many content creators think Steam's Workshop as a whole is utter bullshit anyway (before all this happened) so no worries there. Fact of the matter is, it's your money, don't spend it on paid mods if you don't want to. But don't completely hate on a system when it tries to look out for content creators. There's always two sides to the coin but hey, I'm just some geek on the interent, what do I know eh?

#Mods #steam #videogames #modding #Skyrim