Earlier this week on Twitter we asked members of the modding community to send us their opinions on Valve's controversial decision to roll out a program for paid mods within the Steam Workshop. Below are two responses we received.
andrew paterson
Andrew Paterson is a contributor to the Crusader Kings 2 "A Game of Thrones" mod.
Last Thursday in one fell swoop the decision of Bethesda and Valve divided the entire PC Gaming community by allowing modders to charge money for their content. When I saw this, one thought crossed my mind: the feces was truly about to hit the fan.
I am one of the localisation writers over at the Game of Thrones mod for Crusader Kings 2. The aforementioned decision was an incredibly dangerous for mods such as the Game of Thrones mod because it is an owned IP. Anyone remember the Middle-Earth Roleplaying Project (MERP) for Skyrim? Warner Bros. shut down that mod despite the fact it was free. Charging for mods could cause all mods featuring work of another group being unable to be created, be it a Lord of the Rings mod for Skyrim or a Star Trek mod for Sins of a Solar Empire.
So you can imagine my relief when only five days later Valve overturned the decision and announced the end of paid mods. Now many others and I can continue a hobby that makes you feel not only good about your accomplishments but allows you to derive a feeling of pleasure from making people happy. When a group from the forum and myself wrote the localisation for the Daenerys quest line, did I feel part of the community; it made me think of how happy I am when a character is adjusted to be more balanced and now I was helping to deliver a huge feature. If Paradox Interactive had adopted the paid model then this mod that got me into not only modding but also Game of Thrones, Writing and really PC gaming as a whole might no longer exist. Indeed only the other night when the site went down for maintenance my heart skipped wondering had the mod been sent a cease and desist.
The real problem with the system was how it was implemented. Instead of using a pay what you want model, the solid price left people with a bad taste in their mouths, probably euthanizing any chance of modders being paid except through donations for years. Almost immediately I saw mods being ripped straight off of the Nexus and uploaded for £5. Not only this but things like the Skyrim unofficial patches could be sold on there, forcing some players to be unable to use the mods they want.
Now mods are free to flourish, be different. If someone wants to replace all characters in the Game of Thrones mod with Tommen Lannister that’s fine. If someone wants to make a Space Marine race in Skyrim go for it, there’s now no fear of being reprimanded by Games Workshop. Now there’s less chance of huge creator disputes where modder X claims that modder Y has plagiarised some aspect of their mod because there is no money involved. This cannot be anything but a good thing for modding as a whole. I don’t know about you but I am sick of the samey games coming out all the time, I would rather the modding community put out interesting stuff than stuff that would guarantee money.
I hope now that those modders who did take part are welcomed back into this community. And maybe with enough time the community may be healed.
thomas loupe
Thomas Loupe is director and sound designer at Faultline Games.
Once upon a time, over ten years ago, when mods were becoming fully-fledged games themselves (Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, etc.) there was a small group of guys (really, one guy) who decided they'd make a mod for Half-Life. A while later, Charlie Cleveland would release, with his team, what would be called Natural Selection. It's a hybrid FPS-RPG game that no other game did very well, apart from Gloom, the Quake II mod. I grew up during this era and played nothing but Quake II CTF, which was a mod itself. After years of dying to stick my nose into the door of the gaming industry, I somehow landed a free, non-paid QA testing position working with Unknown Worlds in helping them develop Natural Selection 2, the sequel to the Natural Selection mod. After doing work for UWE, the game released and was a huge success, and most of that success which was driven by modders and the modding community. The game had landed multiple indie awards and was featured in PC Gamer magazine as one of the top 100 shooters of all time, coming in at the top 20, I believe. By that time I had landed the QA credit and Assistant Sound Designer credit for NS2. That's when I knew I wanted to do this for the rest of my life.
A group of friends who had released Combat mod for NS2, which also appeared in NS1 by UWE, asked me for some music to help lend their mod some professionalism and I was happy to do so. They were having issues with the engine, so I urged them to join my Teamspeak server, where we would spend the next month or two coming up with a company name and creating our own game. We did this for a while and actually had a working, but terrible prototype of a fun isometric shooter game. Suddenly, I got word that we got an email from Charlie, the co-founder of UWE asking us to make our mod, Combat, into a fully-fledged game. There's something I have to point out here: Unknown Worlds itself was a team of modders, who then created NS2 via their own studio. They thought it was the best idea ever to give their most popular mod a chance at the very same thing.
After some legal paper-signing, we were on our way to creating our first game ever, NS2: Combat, which would be its own standalone game, with brand new maps, new weapons, a totally unique leveling system and a slew of improvements to the current engine that drove the game. We couldn't have been happier. We made the entire game with our own money, and the biggest monetary contributors were myself and Alex, another Director and an amazing lead programmer. I worked for a year straight at core game mechanics, designing systems, playtesting, taking feedback from testers (who were voluntary, just as I started out with UWE) sound design and even creating the music for the game, all while being responsible for the entire project, just like the other Director was. Everyone was extremely excited for the release, and there was still much we had plans for, like creating an out-of-game leveling system where you could choose perks (similar to League of Legends masteries) to tweak your build even further. Ranked games and paid tournaments, and much more. Our community began to grow and we felt like we did something fantastic. October 31 came too soon and on release day we watched our game go live. We watched all the positive comments pour in and we felt so amazing.
Then something unexpected happened. We began getting hate and negative feedback from community members of NS. Apparently, people were displeased that Unknown Worlds were trying to fund the development of their new game, Subnautica and some other projects, and because they were our publisher, UWE did not deserve any more of their money. We went from having a successful game from a mod from a game that was a mod, to being the red-headed stepchild of the world, almost instantaneously. Comments saying we had done no work whatsoever. Comments saying that the work we put in was tarnished by greedy publishers. Comments saying we deserved nothing at all because the game "should have stayed a mod." Time went on and we found our game began to falter miserably over the harsh criticism in our reviews. This caused people who were interested in the game to not buy it, and those who were left because there was nobody left to play with. What was and still is a wonderful game to this day that could have had an amazing future with tons of free updates (of what used to be a mod) was the exact same thing I am seeing today and saw about a week ago when paid mods went on the Steam store.
Nobody ever took the time to play our game and see it for what it was, it was literally dead the moment it came out. The thousands of dollars of my own money spent to make the project even a possibility in the first place would never be paid back, and I would never understand what I, as a modder-gone-developer, did wrong. We had long-term plans to take Combat and make it something that existed in the world of Natural Selection, make it familiar, yet make it a comparison to what Arma is to DayZ, or what Gloom was to Natural Selection.
What I found was that everyone wanted our game to be completely free. The year-plus we had worked on this game, every single day of the week, was demanded to be priced as free. When I saw how people were reacting to paid mods on Steam, all I could do was be upset, infuriated at the fact that many people were trying to say mods should be free. All the money, time and effort our team spent on making Combat something that was different, yet familiar in the same universe was treated exactly the same way. I began to wonder if it was actually our fault or if it was just that people didn't think that because we didn't create the engine from the ground-up and re-texture every single asset, that it wasn't worth the money.
Today, I'm writing because I know the answer. The answer is that many people don't understand all the hard work and dedication that goes into mods. That some people want to do this for a living (not just modding, but game design) and modding is our only way to get noticed as it provides the ultimate "real-world experience" that anyone could possibly have. Many people are not familiar with how much time and re-design goes into making mods work. Our team re-coded many parts of the engine for NS2 to make sure Combat would actually work, because of the things we had to do to make Combat functional, we had to release the game on its own. However, people still argued that the things we did to make Combat stand out could still somehow be merged into what was essentially a different game engine now. Because of this, I have been out of work, looking for something... anything at all that I could apply my passion to, and sometimes I fear those days are gone and that maybe I should just do other things with my life, regardless of whether game, game music and sound design are all I know or not.
In closing, I wanted to provide you with some kind words of encouragement to discuss this with me further. I'm always available via this email and have many other methods of contact. I'd be happy to tell you more details and explain to those who aren't modders how much paid mods can actually make a difference to people's entire lives, not always for the worst. I hope this short story doesn't end up sounding like a sob story, but rather a very real story that could have been a major success if the paid mod workshop was around.
from PC Gamer latest stories http://ift.tt/1EGtecz
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