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Steam tries to monetise the modscene, hilarity expected


Melan

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So, wait, is it "false equivalence" or is it "used to justify piracy", or both? I never did the latter, only the former.

 

And for wether it is false or not, you have to agree that a lot of humankind is paid *once* for work they do, while a few others have arranged it so they get paid smaller amounts, but every time their work is used. This is a fundamental difference and for me, an inequalence.

 

So, how come you say carpenter's work (a table) is different from an authors work, or a musicians? How can authors and musicians be *special*, but carpenters, software developers and strangely enough, artists (like animators, painters or even voice artists) working for game companies etc. are *not* special?

 

You can't just brush that aside by "False equivalence". Either all humans are equal, or they aren't.

 

(Supply and demand warps the image, nobody would pay to see me play golf, but Tiger Woods got rich from it. But that doesn't explain why entire professions are treated inequal, and then inside the profession you got on top of that the supply&demand thing)

With the latter I meant that people can take that comparison and run with it where ever.

 

Carpenters do neccessities (and sometimes luxuries), where as games and music are luxuries:

This means carpenters have a lot more solid marketable career, where game developers/musicians/artists are at risk more. Sale of older games can help keep them afloat.

 

Carpenters have an objective job where as music/games/art is subjective.

From what I know of carpentry, if someone hires a carpenter typically that person tells the carpenter what they want in the area.

Music/Art/Games follows guidelines to a degree, but everything is a lot more ambiguous. You can copy your last thing closely (assumign it was successful) which will be the safer option people will say it's getting stale and it'll get run into the ground (currently what AAA is doing), or you can try something new which is risky.

 

You wouldn't download a tabl- oh.

4awZR3n.jpg

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The "carpenter vs. artist" is a over-done comparisation, but you can see that the model of "everyone is equal, execpt these" breaks down when you compare "music composer vs. song text writer" or "music singer vs. game voice artist" to even "music composer vs. game music composer".

 

In all these cases it's explained magically by "but but but these are TOTALLY different cases!". This leads to hilarious lawsuits and strikes like the "author's strikes" (which put several TV shows on hold), and the "voice artists want to be paid more".

 

You can explain all these differences, but at the end of the day the guy holding the camera is wondering why he is paid a flat rate "per hour" while the gui writing the show is paid "everytime it's used" ...

 

And the current trend is that more and more groups want to be paid "everytime it's resold" or even "everytime it's used". You can laugh about the carpenter or plumber comparisation now, but wait until you pay a very small fee to Google everytime you adjust (or not adjust) your heating... see https://nest.com/or the various "software subscription models" for a start.

 

My my criticism of that is that this model is simple not sustainable if the entire world does it. And it leads to a lot of ill sideeffects (the "I want more money, too" is only one of the immidiate ones).

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

 

"Remember: If the game lets you do it, it's not cheating." -- Xarax

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Carpenters do neccessities (and sometimes luxuries), where as games and music are luxuries:

This means carpenters have a lot more solid marketable career, where game developers/musicians/artists are at risk more. Sale of older games can help keep them afloat.

 

Carpenters have an objective job where as music/games/art is subjective.

 

 

Codswollop. This has nothing to do with objective vs subjective or luxury vs necessity (try to argue that an ornate wooden end table is either objective or necessary).

 

It comes down to control of reproduction. The easier it is to reproduce something, the less people want to pay for it. A car takes a lot of effort and resources to create, and you can't "copy" them, so people are willing to pay a lot for one. A table takes a fair amount as well, and also can't easily be copied. But how much would you pay for a car or a table if you could reproduce one yourself, quickly, for a few dollars, by scanning someone else's? Probably not very much.

 

That's the problem with most forms of art. It takes a huge investment of time and energy to create the original. Reproductions can now be created with little or no time and effort, and there is often little difference between the original and the reproduction (in things like music or games, there is none). So people don't want to pay for the original if they can have a reproduction for much less, which means the artist, who put in all the original investment of time and energy, can't make very much money. Their solution is to try and protect the original, by not allowing people to make copies (copyright laws). Since that has had limited success, the other approach of treating ALL reproductions as if they were the original has become popular.

 

With the development of 3d printing taking off, this notion of ownership is going to become more convoluted.

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I think, the main problem here is, the way of duplicating and distributing the creators work. When you build a table, the person buying it has no means of duplicating it and give the duplicate to another person. If you have information in digital form, it is possible to duplicate it as often as you want and with the internet it is possible to share it with anyone you want. That is why I do not like the comparison between purely digital work and crafts that create something in real life. It is comparing apples and oranges. I think for a carpenter it would be a better comparison if you chose not a table, but the new table design. This can be easily stolen, copied and redistributed.

Copyright law, by design, converts apples into quasi-oranges (for a limited time). Its job is to make e.g. books behave like tables so that they can be put on a market as commodities. So the analogy is naturally false, but the whole legal and economic structure we're in is designedly unnatural.

Some things I'm repeatedly thinking about...

 

- louder scream when you're dying

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Codswollop. This has nothing to do with objective vs subjective or luxury vs necessity (try to argue that an ornate wooden end table is either objective or necessary).

 

It comes down to control of reproduction. The easier it is to reproduce something, the less people want to pay for it. A car takes a lot of effort and resources to create, and you can't "copy" them, so people are willing to pay a lot for one. A table takes a fair amount as well, and also can't easily be copied. But how much would you pay for a car or a table if you could reproduce one yourself, quickly, for a few dollars, by scanning someone else's? Probably not very much.

 

That's the problem with most forms of art. It takes a huge investment of time and energy to create the original. Reproductions can now be created with little or no time and effort, and there is often little difference between the original and the reproduction (in things like music or games, there is none). So people don't want to pay for the original if they can have a reproduction for much less, which means the artist, who put in all the original investment of time and energy, can't make very much money. Their solution is to try and protect the original, by not allowing people to make copies (copyright laws). Since that has had limited success, the other approach of treating ALL reproductions as if they were the original has become popular.

 

With the development of 3d printing taking off, this notion of ownership is going to become more convoluted.

You're right with reproduction control and I ignored that and went into some more fundamental things that make them different. However, I still feel they're just inherently so different without considering reproduction that the comparison is not valid.

 

I mentioned it's sometimes a luxury, and should have said sometimes subjective. If you have a hole in the side of your house from some random disaster, there is nothing subjective or a luxerious about fixing it. My argument is in the first world everyone needs furniture and building repairs, but not everyone needs games/art/music.

 

 

The "carpenter vs. artist" is a over-done comparisation, but you can see that the model of "everyone is equal, execpt these" breaks down when you compare "music composer vs. song text writer" or "music singer vs. game voice artist" to even "music composer vs. game music composer".

 

In all these cases it's explained magically by "but but but these are TOTALLY different cases!". This leads to hilarious lawsuits and strikes like the "author's strikes" (which put several TV shows on hold), and the "voice artists want to be paid more".

 

You can explain all these differences, but at the end of the day the guy holding the camera is wondering why he is paid a flat rate "per hour" while the gui writing the show is paid "everytime it's used" ...

 

And the current trend is that more and more groups want to be paid "everytime it's resold" or even "everytime it's used". You can laugh about the carpenter or plumber comparisation now, but wait until you pay a very small fee to Google everytime you adjust (or not adjust) your heating... see https://nest.com/or the various "software subscription models" for a start.

 

My my criticism of that is that this model is simple not sustainable if the entire world does it. And it leads to a lot of ill sideeffects (the "I want more money, too" is only one of the immidiate ones).

I'm fine with all your comparisons except for the carpenter vs artist, and cameraman vs writer one. They just muddy the waters between intellectual property and labor and they're not the same.

 

I'm not even advocating that the system is perfect or even good I just dislike that comparison. The thing that matters at the end of the day is whether or not they can sustain themselves doing it, and if I had to pick a career between carpenter and artist I'd go for carpenter, because I have a lot more faith in not starving with labor.

 

Even with the protections and the 'per use', anything with intellectual property is 100x more risky than just getting a labor job. You can't use the word equal with apples and oranges.

Edited by ShadeDrifter
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It's funny how much conspiracy is coming from some folks. It's a choice of modders - no one forces to sell mods. GabeN already mentioned Beth was the one to setup the cuts. Another company can say "I want 20%, Valve gets 20% and modder gets 60%".

 

Where is the indication modding will die because some people can charge for their mods?

 

Of course if everyone decides to charge for their mods, and people would only pay for really good ones, modders with crappier mods will throw in the towel and won't make mods (at least it's a possibility). That would be modder's fault entirely though.

 

Not every community can and should function as a market. Many religious groups, for example, would be upset if someone took money for performing their rituals, especially if they came from the outside. Charities are a somewhat closer example - they exist to provide some service to others for free, and trying to turn a profit would actually upset people contributing to them..

 

Modding community was always about fiddling with a game and freely sharing results. It existed in this form for at least 20 years. Trying to bring any sort of change to a society requires a lot of research and a bit of tact. Valve, however, decided that modders will surely abandon their heathen ways as soon as they get a whiff of dollars and came out with a plan that was insulting on several different levels. It didn't protect unpaid modders from having their work used to create paid mods, Bethesda cut was so egregious, because the company charged over 30% just for the privilege of creating content for their game, which actually brings them customers. Neither them nor Valve were responsible for anything - they wouldn't curate the items to ensure they are not someone else's mod stolen and repackaged, they also wouldn't provide any technical help. If a mod didn't work, Valve suggested finding its author and asking them on forums to update it. You could refund it in 24 hours, but it would come in Steam Wallet pseudo-money.

 

Then there is the matter that the people chosen by Valve to be the first modders - entrepreneurs went completely bonkers after being presented with money and support of two big corporations. Many of them felt already like captains of industry, calling everyone opposed to the new scheme entitled children who would rather exploit them and prevent from making modding their day jobs, rather than giving them the payment they deserve. Some of their mods were of extremely poor quality, like an armor that had to be worn by entering a console command. The fishing mod depended of another one whose author didn't even want it on workshop. The author of another one , which used to be free, made a paid version and updated the existing one with popups pestering the player to pay him. Combined with grandiose claims of proponents of the new system, which was supposed to bring a fresh wave of better, more polished mods, it made an extremely poor impression.

 

It's not that this was even possible, because there were nothing in the Valve model that actually incentivized people to polish their mods or risk making something more complicated than cheap reskins. It had a low revenue rate and very limited market, which meant anything more niche or expensive to make would be unprofitable. People who wanted to make things for free still could do it, but it was pretty clear neither Valve, Bethesda nor captains of industry have any interest in keeping it that way.The new system encouraged mod authors to freeload on content already provided in workshop and no one seemed to be interested in preventing them from doing this. Entrepreneurs, in turn, would hide their work beyond a paywall, giving nothing to community in return.

 

In short, it was a terrible and abusive model, implemented in the worst possible way. If not that, I doubt the outrage would be so egregious.

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Maybe you need to make that point one more time...I don't think all the people claiming that they were forcing people to sell mods have gotten the message.

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Not sure if you are being sarcastic :/

 

Funny that while people were crying about paid mods in Skyrim community, DOTA2 and TF2 communities said nothing. And after Valve pulled the plug on paid Skyrim mods, DOTA2 and TF2 mod markets are still wide open and no one complains. Go figure :rolleyes:

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Even with the protections and the 'per use', anything with intellectual property is 100x more risky than just getting a labor job.

 

That's because intellectual property doesn't really exist. It is a legal fiction invented out of thin air in order to create a market where there wouldn't otherwise be one.

 

That isn't necessarily a bad thing — I earn a living from intellectual property after all — but the further away from natural reality the law gets, the harder it is to enforce. Every illiterate redneck can understand "This is my car, and if you try to steal it I'll blow your head off with this shotgun". Try to explain to a computer scientist why calling OpenGL functions in a certain order could potentially be against the law, on the other hand, and they'll probably think you have some kind of mental illness.

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Though I'm a bit late to the party, I just want to say that I'm glad they reconsidered this move and cancelled the current effort after public pressure. I'm not sure what the future will bring on this front, but I'm relieved that Steam saw reason and understood that it would be running into enterprenurial and legal issues if it kept this idea in place for weeks and months to come.

 

 

Since all the maps, textures, models, def files, audio assets, and all other non-software components aren't under GPL, then this statement isn't exactly true, is it? Without any of the aforementioned assets, you don't really have "The Dark Mod". You have a bunch of code that won't work.

 

So no, someone could not legally sell TDM.

 

Looking at it this way, you're right. :) Sorry I spoke too soon. :blush:

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