Gaming
Paid Mods Creators Faced Abuse And Death Threats
Valve’s attempt to introduce paid mods to the Steam workshop came to a close yesterday when the company announced it was cancelling the program. The move to allow modders to charge for their work on the Steam Workshop incurred the internet’s wrath in a big way not least due to its atrociously mishandled roll-out. The community seemed to feel almost betrayed that Valve and Bethesda would simply go ahead and introduce this scheme without first discussing it with the public. Even worse, the two companies remained largely silent on the matter for several days before Gabe Newell, Valve CEO, finally took to Reddit to defend the move. That didn’t go so well, with most of his comments downvoted to obscurity. Valve and Bethesda both took a hit to their popularity, Valve in particular. But when you’re a company, hate is easy to deal with. For individuals, it’s much harder.
Two days ago, a Skyrim modder called James Ive told Polygon he’d faced abuse and death threats from the gaming community. Ive, who creates mods under the name Jimo, was one of the modders charging for his work on the Steam Workshop. There was also an artist named Thiago Vidotto, who created weapons for Skyrim based on DOTA, who received messages saying that he was “destroying the gaming world.” Meanwhile Ives was faced with “countless death threats, attacks and hateful comments… Just about everything you can think of.”
Valve’s actions may have brought the paid mod debate to a head last week, but it has actually been going on for some time. There are modders that work exceptionally hard to create superb and original content for games. For Skyrim, a great example is the Falskaar mod. Created by Alexander Velicky, it adds an entirely new land to the game as well as 20-30 hours of extra gameplay. Since creating the mod Velicky has been given a job at Bungie, but until then he was receiving nothing but donations for his work. For most, it would be hard to imagine putting so much time and energy into a project for so little financial return, but this is how the modding community has been going for years. There have always been arguments on both sides. It’s hard to argue that modders like Velicky would have been unjustified should they have chosen to charge for their work, but the community wants mods to remain free and available to everyone.
Valve’s ill-fated plan to enable modders to make money off their work should have worked. It should have benefited the community and helped modders, but instead it was so mishandled, it had to be shut down less than a week after it began. The absence of a pay-what-you-choose slider and the fact that Valve implemented the plan without warning riled up the community to the point of no return. Two days ago, I wrote about the risks of giving 75% of the revenue from mods to the developers and Valve. Gabe Newell said on Reddit, “Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers.” I hope it’s become clear to Gabe by now that giving just 25% of the revenue to modders was never going to make them any better off than they are relying on donations. In fact, the decision to give them only 25% makes it look suspiciously like Valve didn’t care at all about the interests of the modders.
Now, not only have modders missed out on an opportunity to monetize their work, but any future attempts to monetize mods will also have to deal with the fallout from this attempt. And we can only hope this whole fiasco won’t discourage modders from continuing to create awesome content for the games they love.
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.
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.
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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