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As beloved as it is, Valve took a big hit to its reputation when it tried to introduce paid-for mods earlier this year, causing it to drop the idea less than a week after it was introduced. Valve always made out like it hadn't given up on the idea though and that's now clear as day. It's launched a developer run item shop for games on Steam, which lets the makers of different titles sell DLC content through it, as well as incorporate user-made items which they feel are good enough to sell in an official capacity.
Described mostly as a tool to make things easier for developers, the item stores remove the need for those making games to have to worry about incorporating a store within them. They don't need to worry about payment processing or even building the UI for it: they can just use Steam's store.
And indeed that's a nice feature to have, but it's the ability to sell user created items which might draw the ire of some. Home-brew cosmetic item makers can create and submit them to a game's store. From there the developer can decide if that item is worthy of being sold alongside the official digital merchandise, before setting a price and putting it in the store. All proceeds are said to be split between the modder and the game maker, though Valve didn't specify in what percentage.
The first Steam game to support the new item store is Rust, with a number of cosmetic item options for players to dole out a few pounds for. It's not clear if more than just cosmetic items will go on sale in the future, though it seems certainly possible.
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KitGuru Says: This seems like a better implementation for paid mods than Valve tried before, but it seems hard to imagine modding communities being the same when money can be made from their endeavours.
Rust may be the first, but it’s pretty clear this is being released to coincide with Fallout 4. Not really sure how I feel about it. It all depends on whether this item store locks out or outlaws mods from other sources, whether this replaces steam workshop and whether modders can put items on the store for free (by which I mean no cost to both the modder and consumer) if they so desire.
if thats the case we’ll see a sharp decline in mods for bethesda games, at least quality ones. one of the best things about the mod setup in skyrim right now is the availability of shared user created resources, lots of mods rely on other mod author resources to generate their content and as long as credit is given no one minds. but with paywalls in place we’ll see mod authors withdrawing their blanket consent on resource usage in fear someone will steal their work and sell it.
as i see it, if you create a mod and you wanna share it for free just upload to workshop and done… IF you wanna sell your mod though, you will have to submit it to the developer who checks it and deals with the selling through official channels… it can be a good boost for big mods
not at all the point. check out most large scale mods, like this one for instance.
http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/52248/?
the mod author has built a mod that revolves around collecting items in game, and to facilitate this he’s gotten permission from dozens of other mod authors to use, or in some instances completely merge into, his mod. a paid mod system wouldn’t allow for this, because lots of mod authors both dont want to sell their work and don’t want others to profit off of their work. this mod in particular is an extreme example, but a very large number of mods on nexus and elsewhere rely on resources generated from other mod authors, resources that many mod authors themselves would withdraw in fear of having their ip stolen and sold.
we’d end up with a system where every mod author would have to start from scratch, since there’d be no shared modder resources to pull from. quality of works would go down because of this.
that can already happen, on the other hand as the dev has to check and maintain their own stores if there is a complain about a mod they will have to remove it. steams own store has failed because steam woulndt be able to do this for every single game they are selling, but the individual dev teams can do it. on the other hand this all is just human stupidity. im a modder. if i make something i cant or dont want to sell but give to everybody to enjoy. if someone makes a big mod and he wanna include my job and sell the mod, well, i gave it for free to everybody so do it, i dont care. its just all about “hehh, i rather dont do shit just make sure nobody will make 10 penny out of my work”. its a bullcrap. and modders arent thinking this way
This isn’t as bad as it probably sounds for the purpose that it already exists in games and that the whole existence of this isn’t necessary. Plenty of games take player created content from workshop and put them into the game as buyable items. The only point of this that I can see aside from creating a cleaner UI than the game itself may offer is that Steam get to take more of a cut for creating a store around it