
Valve CEO: 'Pissing off the Internet costs you a million bucks in just 2 days' - alexcasalboni
http://uk.businessinsider.com/valve-ends-paid-skyrim-mods-2015-4?r=US
======
morsch
Gabe said that just the additional email they received over a few days cost
them a million: "That's like 1% of the cost of the incremental email the
program has generated for Valve employees (yes, I mean pissing off the
Internet costs you a million bucks in just a couple of days)."

That seemed preposterous to me. It can't be the additional hardware expenses
to store/process the mail, those are negligable. I suppose it's simply the
time the support staff have to spend to weed out all the irate mails. But can
that really amount to a million dollars? Existing solutions for combating spam
must be sufficient to classify those mails and throw them away or send out the
boilerplate message the support staff would have sent otherwise.

~~~
detrino
It's probably just a PR move. By pretending to have been financially hurt by
this campaign they both stroke the ego of the internet gaming crowd and make
it seem that they have been sufficiently punished.

~~~
caractacus
Quite. There's nothing quantifiable in what gaben said but a statement like
this is more than enough to have that million dollar figure quoted and re-
quoted in discussions about poor gaming company decisions, how to cut losses,
the right way to respond, etc.

------
bontoJR
I don't really get why giving only 25%?

I mean, as a service I don't see any high cost to justify a 75% retain fee.
The idea was definitely great, but execution was very poor. I would have been
furious with them if I was a modder investing time and, sometimes, money to
only get 25% on the price I was deciding for my mod.

This was a huge failure at so many levels... I hope they learned from this
lesson.

~~~
clinth
> I don't really get why giving only 25%?

Valve took their ~30% platform charge, and left the remaining amount to be
split per the discretion of the publisher of the game, in this case Bethesda.
Bethesda chose to give mod makers roughly 1/3 of the money left, resulting in
a final split of Valve 30 / Bethesda 45 / mod author 25.

~~~
ohitsdom
Honest question- why should Bethesda get any money from mod sales? You need to
have purchased the game to use the mod, and mods add something to the game
experience that Bethesda didn't have to pay for themselves.

~~~
probablyfiction
Because modders are using Bethesda's copyrighted intellectual property as the
base for their mods. Bethesda deserves a cut because it's their IP.

~~~
swalsh
How are mods their IP? if you add an asset, or you REPLACE an asset. In most
cases that's YOUR IP. When I added a M1A1 tank to Battlefield 1942 as a kid, I
made the model, I made the textures, I wrote the code for it. The fact that a
user places those new assets in a directory in such a way that someone else
reads and uses them doesn't mean i'm using their IP.

~~~
lawlessone
So if a modder builds their mod on top of someone elses mod , charges for it
and refuses the pay other modder you'd be ok with that?

~~~
pikzen
We do the same thing with code and as long as the license is respected, things
go smoothly. There's no reason it can't work with mods.

~~~
delecti
> as long as the license is respected

That seems to leave a pretty huge area for a license that requires payment.

------
venomsnake
Hmm ... the problem is that Bethesda were getting 45% ... which is absurd. I
already paid for the game, the publisher should get at most 5-6% ... if the
scheme was 10% valve, 10% bethesda, 80% mod creator - it would have been a
different reaction.

~~~
DanAndersen
Why should Bethesda get anything at all? Unless they're going to the trouble
of making sure their official patches don't interfere with popular mods or
something like that, they aren't providing additional value beyond providing
the game that was already paid for. I think one of the issues in this wasn't
just that mod creators would have gotten a small fraction of profit, but
because Bethesda's behavior was somewhat rent-seeking -- attempting to
normalize publishers getting a cut of sales that they hadn't gotten before,
for doing no extra work.

~~~
pnt12
They provide a platform with fine support for mods. That's some extra work and
cost in the development of the platform which allows modders to spend less
time and money to finish their mod.

I agree the percentage is ludicrous, but I don't find a small fee unreasonable
at all. Developing a customizable system is hard. We may argue that they may
sell extra copies based on that feature, but we'd never have objective data to
back up or refute that claim.

~~~
DanAndersen
But they already provided the platform and didn't require a cut before. That's
the whole point, that this would be a net negative change from what was
before. If we lived in a world where there wasn't a previous modding community
and mods weren't a thing, and this was a new option to allow fans to make
"non-official DLC" and sell it, then it may be more acceptable.

But given the state of the existing mod communities, doing these things for
free or donations and usually out of a love of the game, normalizing an
environment where Bethesda gets money for doing no additional work is going to
be understandably resisted.

~~~
profinger
This is like the John Deere article posted about last week. Bethesda must see
the game as "rented" from them rather than purchased.

Example:

    
    
      If you rent a house and you have a party and make a meal, you are allowed to use the house to your fullest extent and eat as many meals as possible etc but the house is still owned by the landlord.
    
      If you purchase a house and you have a party and make a meal, you have complete freedom and own the house outright.  
    

Your meal is your mod and your house is Skyrim. They built the house and
apparently think that they're just renting it to you even though you flat out
purchased it from them.

------
sleepyeng
Relevant Forbes Article:
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/04/24/valves-
pai...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/04/24/valves-paid-skyrim-
mods-are-a-legal-ethical-and-creative-disaster/)

My big hangups were:

-Bethesda gets a cut, but offers no guarantees concerning compatibility and user support.

-Mods usually use other mods for back-end functionality or as an augmentation. i.e. using a new cloud generation mod for an overall weather mod. It generally devolves into a legal tangle of who owns what and who gets what.

-The steam green light and early access marketplaces are becoming clogged with low-effort garbage that unscrupulous devs are trying to make a quick cash in. Steam has no structure in place to stop that from happening in the paid mod store.

-They poorly and shoddily introduced monetization in a model that didn't have one already in place, skewing incentives and placing the community under tension.

------
donatj
I really don't understand being mad at having the option to buy things. Don't
like it? Don't buy it. What makes me mad is the inability to buy the apps I
want as in the Apple App Store.

~~~
ihsw
That's short-sighted -- one of the largest complaints was nefarious users
profiting off of the works of others. From day 1 there were free mods being
sold by random jackasses whom have no affiliation with the project.

The only remedy Valve offered was DMCA takedown notices or similar self-
directed policing.

~~~
ItsDeathball
Considering that Bethesda's mod tools give Bethesda ownership of any content
created with them, would a mod maker even have legal standing to file a DMCA
takedown?

------
jebblue
The whole Valve team are doing a great job with Steam, I hope gamers get on
board with supporting companies that push the realm of gaming platforms, or at
leave Valve.

------
logfromblammo
~ When asked how much it would cost to piss off the Internet for 3 days, GabeN
was unable to answer, until it was explained to him--yet again--that 3 is the
number that lies between 2 and 4. At that time, he replied, "Now you're just
making up fake numbers. The only thing I know of that goes between 4 and 2 is
'Dead'." Thus, the Internet remained pissed off, and Valve failed to earn a
million bucks. ~

------
deathhand
There is no such thing as bad publicity

