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.
The never-ending saga surrounding Microsoft’s proposed $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard has a new participant. Today, Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from the state of Washington, said some things about the subject that were hard to understand.
The senator, whose remarks were reported on by ResetEra, spoke at a Senate finance committee hearing on “the president’s 2023 Trade Policy Plan,” which we are sure was quite interesting.
Senator Cantwell said that she had been told that Sony “controls a monopoly of 98% of the high-end game market” despite the fact that “Japan’s government has allowed Sony to engage in blatant anti-competitive conduct through exclusive deals and payments to game publishers, establishing games that are among the most popular in Japan.”
This 98% statistic is highly deceptive because it ignores PC, Nintendo, and mobile games and instead refers to Sony’s adoption rate over Microsoft in Sony’s native country of Japan, a fact that shouldn’t surprise anyone who is even somewhat familiar with the video game business.
What can we do to rectify these problems and create a level playing field, she said of US Trade Representative Katherine Tai after charging Japan’s Federal Trade Commission with improperly failing to look into this purported “exclusionary conduct”?
It is absurd to claim that Sony has a monopoly on the Japanese video game market, as Luke Plunkett of Kotaku correctly points out, “because Sony doesn’t even have a 98% share of the market for the God of War series, a title they own, as Steam is getting 30% of every sale on PC.”
It goes without saying that we can’t expect elected officials to be experts in every field, but this is a visible step at a time when the ongoing attempt to buy the company is at a very important point.
Is it significant that Microsoft, along with Nintendo, maintains its headquarters in Redmond, Washington—Senator Cantwell’s district—or that Microsoft has given Cantwell more than $500,000 over the past two decades? Let us leave that up to you.
Pizza Possum is an arcade action game in which you, a possum, attempt to consume as much trash as you can without being discovered. It is a web-based sequel to the anarchy simulator Untitled Goose Game.It will eventually be available on the PS5.
We couldn’t help but notice that the possum in the title doesn’t look like the cute Australian possum that comes out at night to visit people.On the other hand, it looks like the horrible North American opossums are the ones that will attack trash cans and cause general chaos.Even though we think the second choice was better in terms of theme, we prefer the first one and are happy to explain why.
Your thoughts on Pizza Possum? Does it possess the necessary mass appeal to successfully skitter along the back fenceline while setting the dog off in the process?
Resident Evil 4 is now out, and the excellent remake can be bought right away.Even though you probably plan to play it all this weekend, you can take comfort in the fact that The Mercenaries, Resident Evil’s almost-required challenge mode, will be available as free DLC on April 7.
The mode’s exact details are still unknown, but if it’s anything like previous versions, you can expect some pretty hard tasks to test your skills.
You’re stumped about something? If you are still debating whether to purchase Resident Evil 4 Remake, be sure to look at our exhaustive guide for the answer or our in-depth review. Are you spending this weekend playing Resident Evil 4? Are you anticipating The Mercenaries?
- Gadgets8 years ago
Why the Nexus 7 is still a good tablet in 2015
- Mobile Devices8 years ago
Samsung Galaxy Note 4 vs Galaxy Note 5: is there room for improvement?
- Editorials8 years ago
Samsung Galaxy Note 4 – How bad updates prevent people from enjoying their phones
- Mobile Devices8 years ago
Nexus 5 2015 and Android M born to be together
- Gaming8 years ago
New Teaser For Five Nights At Freddy’s 4
- Mobile Devices8 years ago
Google not releasing Android M to Nexus 7
- Gadgets8 years ago
Moto G Android 5.0.2 Lollipop still has a memory leak bug
- Mobile Devices8 years ago
Nexus 7 2015: Huawei and Google changing the game