pc modding community in chaos following valve's greed

So for those who dont know, last week steam enabled paid mods for the game skyrim, traditionally mods have been made by hobbyists for popular games and provided to gamers for free, donations were an optional thing.
This system has worked for over a decade.

Then steam split the community by offering modders a way to make money from it by charging for their mods, these people pulled the free versions from nexus (the site which hosted free vrsions) and added to the steam workshop.

Since then a legal mess has entailed as some mods have copyrighted content which never became an issue as wasnt sold for profit and other mods contains work from other modders.

Long story short already a previously popular modder who was drawn in by the paid mod scene, has now pulled his content, kept the free version pulled, deleted all his social media accounts and quit the internet. Its turned into one big mess.

All this because of greed.

Some info here.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/72850/discussions/0/61...
https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/33qcaj/...
http://www.destructoid.com/the-first-paid-skyrim-mod...

Edited by Chrysalis (Sun 26-Apr-15 12:05:49)

Long story short already a previously popular modder who was drawn in by the paid mod scene, has now pulled his content, kept the free version pulled, deleted all his social media accounts and quit the internet.

In other words, he/she will now tout all their future work under a new name and be rewarded handsomely, without being boycotted as a traitor because of their previous works.

There's greed on both sides then. Creative people usually end up being fisted by suits, but without a marketing machine behind them they wouldn't make a penny anyway, so it's difficult to blame either side entirely. Either way, Joe Bloggs just has to accept it or vote with his wallet.

Shame really.

that could possibly happen but obviously it would have to be new content to fool people into not knowing its the same guy, also there is rumours now valve will pull the paid workshop, the backlash is huge and they only made about 2k profit on the first day.

aside from the legal minefield valve entered into on these mods, alot of steam's end user agreement has been illegal in the EU for years, and will be even more so soon when the UK law gets updated again.

Edited by Chrysalis (Sun 26-Apr-15 12:50:47)

That's why I said "future works" but yes, I hope they do pull it. If the original developer doesn't profit from it at all, why should the modder and Steam?

It's value is in the fact it's free, otherwise it's paid DLC by another name.

Edited by mrnelster (Sun 26-Apr-15 13:21:19)

exactly.

so its happened.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTEWJ-iV28g