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Valve Announces Devs Can Now Charge for Steam Workshop Mods

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Valve changes its modding policy to allow devs to charge for Steam Workshop Mods causing a community uproar

There are a long list of advantages to gaming on a PC but one of the best is being able so mod many of your favorite games. Mods can allow the community to come together to fix a broken game, add hours of new content, or almost turn it into a new game altogether. Games like Skyrim have shown us how far and how crazy the modding community can be with a game they love. What makes game mods so amazing though is that they’re done for free, the most creators ever ask for is a small donation.

The people behind these mods often pour hundreds of hours into development simply for the love of the game or to gain recognition in the community around it. Now one of the largest modding communities in the industry is about to change all that. Valve has announced that they’ve changed their policy to allow developers to charge for mods related to their game. The new policy will start with Skyrim, the Steam Workshop’s most heavily modded game.

Valve’s Tom Bui opened up on their reasoning behind the change that’s left the community divided on the entire issue:

“We think this is a great opportunity to help support the incredible creative work being done by mod makers in the Steam Workshop. User generated content is an increasingly significant component of many games, and opening new avenues to help financially support those contributors via Steam Workshop will help drive the level of UGC to new heights.”

Its great to see Valve trying to increase their support of the modding community; helping them earn money for all the time they’ve spent creating our favorite mods. The only problem is that they’re taking something that’s always been free and putting it behind paywall. It’s only natural that only a small portion of the community is willing to support the change. The rest of the community has gone into an absolute uproar starting a petition to have the policy reversed which has already received 4,000 signatures.

Naturally, Valve doesn’t have to change the policy no matter how many signatures the petition gets. Instead of trying to force the policy to be reversed they should focus on how to keep modders accountable. Before if you downloaded a mod that failed to work you could simply uninstall it. What happens when you buy a mod that doesn’t work out? Can you rely on the creator not to scam people? Valve’s response to those questions is that users can be refunded in 24 hours but that doesn’t offer any real guarantee.

If the past is any indication the PC gaming community will simply find a way to work around the changes. Creating alternate versions of mods that have been put behind a paywall or leave the Steam Workshop and find their mods elsewhere. There are certainly options out there for them including the Nexus, that offers many of the same mods as the Steam Workshop. Only time will tell if Valve will keep the change in place or crack from the pressure from the community and reverse it.

Just like most other people are here, Ryan is very passionate about gaming and technology. When he's not writing about video games, you'll likely find him talking about the latest gadgets.

Gaming

Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made

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As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.

Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”

You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

 

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.

The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.

The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.

The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.

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This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive

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Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.

For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”

Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.

Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.

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