Steam/PC Mega Thread

[apsham]

The Skyrim marketplace was full of clones of other mods, impossible to tell on first glance which one actually worked, if there was a better one, if one mod was going to break another. It was a huge pain in the ass. And instead of improving their system like the Nexus did - they decided to add money into the equation which will only guarantee more bullshit, more people trying to cash in and more confusing junk.

[SeanDMan]

gabe's response was "money will be the great equalizer", in that good mods will make good money and bad mods will not.

Which is of course what you say as headnof a company with no quality control or customer service.

[Bobfoc]

Judging by the horrendous quality of some of Steam's Early Access games, I'm not encouraged.

[Rocky]

Thief Collection. $8.99. Never played any of the series. Worth?

[MDK]

It's a steal

>_>

[SeanDMan]

So deciding that they were jealous of how much bad publicity Valve was getting, Konami decided they wanted some negative headlines too so they cancelled the new Silent Hill.

[Troy Maskell]

Just waiting for EA to announce something to remind us they are the most evil company on earth

[thatshortguy]

Konami has also delisted itself from the NYSE. A move of self-preservation, but the PR won't be any better for the next while.

EA probably looks at this and goes 'meh, the drilldos we're gonna require with Madden will be enough for now'.

[Benji]

Kojima is off and they cancel PT. Konami sounds like a sinking ship.

[Berober]

Broken Age Act 2 is out for Kickstarter backers, and it'll be up for everyone else tomorrow.

Downloading it now, looking forward to this one, the first act was a really fun little teaser

[thatshortguy]

Kojima is off and they cancel PT. Konami sounds like a sinking ship.

It sucks. I knew all of this going into today, but it still doesn't stop me from being overtly annoyed by the whole thing. Konami is Yoko Ono and we're not going to get another Beatles album.

[Quom]

Valve have changed their minds about paid Skyrim mods

Removing Payment Feature From Skyrim Workshop
28 APRIL - ALDEN
We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we'll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.

We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing. We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different.

To help you understand why we thought this was a good idea, our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid. We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it.

But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop. We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here.

Now that you've backed a dump truck of feedback onto our inboxes, we'll be chewing through that, but if you have any further thoughts let us know.

Source

[Benji]

What a petty statement

[Quom]

I can see what they were going for but it really needs some form of quality control, The teenager that made the Falskaar expansion for Skyrim blew my mind and really deserved to earn something for that expansion (although I guess he did since Bungie hired him). Likewise if Beyond Skyrim ever releases that will likely be massive and deserve rewarding. Horse armour and swords and stuff, not so much.

I dunno, I get that there is Patreon and stuff and I get the arguments that being paid a small amount doesn't actually encourage people to complete tasks or whatever, but there is definitely fan made content that is on par with stuff created by the developers and really does deserve some form of reward.

I really hope they enact a pay what you want type of thing so if you download fan made content and like it you then have the option to give money to the person that created it. The other option If Valve really wants to push modding and encourage it is why don't they pick a game and say in X months time we will give a paid internship (including travel and rent) to the top modder or a cash prize of $25k or whatever?

I think a lot of concern was A.) Total lack of quality control and the workshop being a fuck to navigate so it was impossible to find things worth having (which people will overlook when stuff is free), B.) You were only entitled to a refund in the first 24 hours no matter the circumstances, C.) A lot of content was either stolen or relied on other mods to work.

They were more than a little stupid to add it to an existing game with a massive modding base (especially without asking major modders in that scene for input), likewise they were Valve and seem to put everything back onto the consumers behind the guise of 'we are so brilliant and have such a small team and no bosses that we just can't do things like quality control and support'.

I actually think they were being honest in the press release, but it shows how out of touch they can be with their customer base.

[Benji]

Oh yeah, I agree, I just thought that the press release was hilariously passive aggressive.

[Dan]

These people who make really awesome mods usually get hired by game companies anyway.

[Bobfoc]

A "Donate" feature would be a much better solution than paid mods, in my opinion. It's remarkable what some modders do for free, often on top of their full-time jobs, and I like the idea of compensating them for their efforts. Allowing people to tip them if they like is much more attractive a proposition than being turned away by mandatory paywalls concealing potentially shoddy creations.

[Dan]

I don't think Valve or Bethesda could take money from a donation though. I might be wrong but I'm sure I read someone saying that on Reddit.

[Herr Matzat]

My Backer key just arrived.

[Ruki]

Is that a tactics RPG that is like the Power Rangers? Because that is pretty cool.