Age of the Geek

Modifying the mod scene
 
PC gaming has many advantages over console gaming and one of the most prominent is the ability to mod your games. There is a large community of gaming enthusiasts who love nothing better than to open a game up, see how it works, and tweak things to their liking. These people then share these tweaks with their friends, who share them with their friends, and so on and so forth.
     Mods can come in a variety of forms. Some are purely superficial while others can drastically change the nature of the game. “DOTA 2,” one of the most popular e-sport games in the world, owes its origin to a mod for “Warcraft III.”
     And speaking of Warcraft, you won’t find many hardcore “World of Warcraft” players who play the game using its default user interface. Addons for boss timers and damage meters are standard fare for anybody who spends their evenings raiding.
     There are even games where modding isn’t just a feature, but one of the primary selling points. Games like “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” which boasts more than 25,000 mods, including one which turns all of the dragons in the game into fire-breathing monsters with the face of the late Macho Man Randy Savage. For many people, Skyrim itself isn’t really a game so much as a sandbox for people to customize to their liking.
     Unlike Downloadable Content (DLC), which is additional content created by the game developer and sold separately from the game itself, mods are content that is made by the fans, for the fans. The modding community is a dedicated group of fans that pour countless hours into making games more interesting.
     Last week, Valve, the company that has a near monopoly on PC gaming distribution, turned that community on its head when they implemented a system to allow PC modders to sell their mods.
     This rollout was a disaster in so many ways that it’s hard to determine where to start. It didn’t just open up a can of worms. It’s more like Valve boss Gabe Newell took a forklift and ran it into the worms aisle of a wholesale retailer.
     On paper the whole thing seems reasonable enough. Modding can be a lot of work and it’s not unreasonable to establish a system where modders can get paid for that work. However, it’s a far more complicated situation than that.
     Valve’s first misstep was grossly overestimating how much of a cut they could get away with for establishing this system. The split is reportedly 30 percent to Valve for distributing the mod and 45 percent to Bethesda for making the game in the first place, leaving only 25 percent to the modder that actually did the work. From a purely public relations standpoint, it’s hard to make an argument that you’re supporting the modding community when they are receiving the smallest portion of the pie.
     It hardly ends there though. One of the reasons the modding community is so robust is that they can give away things that aren’t necessarily legal to sell in the first place. The above mentioned Randy Savage mod, for instance, is already in a legal gray area due to the unlicensed use of his image. Trying to sell that mod at a profit puts it well outside of that gray area and into the realm of copyright violation.
     Beyond that, even completely original mods aren’t entirely original. Within the first day of this rollout, one mod had to be taken out because it used animations developed by another modder. This sort of thing isn’t much of a problem when the only benefit to putting out a popular mod is a boost to your online reputation, but once you start putting money into the equation it changes everything. The question of what belongs to who suddenly becomes a lot more relevant and Valve implemented this system without having a solid way to determine that.
     One of the biggest fears about this program is that it will turn the modding scene into something that resembles Apple’s App Store, which is flooded with knock-offs hoping to make a few bucks by cribbing off of the most popular app of the day. Right now there doesn’t appear to be many safeguards to keep people from straight-up taking somebody else’s mod and selling it as their own.
     And all of this ignores the biggest issue of all. This is not professionally developed content.
     There is no guarantee that the mod you pay for will work properly, or that it will work in conjunction with any other mods you may have downloaded. And while Valve is offering a 24-hour refund policy, that doesn’t mean much if the mod stops working down the road and the modder doesn’t feel like fixing it.
     When a game developer comes out with DLC, it comes with the expectation that it will work and will continue to work throughout the lifespan of the game. Fan-created content has no such guarantee. You get what you pay for, which up until now, was nothing.
     Right now the modding community itself is in the middle of a full-on revolt and while Valve hasn’t yet walked back from this venture into selling amateur work for professional prices, it doesn’t seem likely they will go much further down this road. Gabe Newell has already announced they will be introducing a “pay-what-you-want” option, allowing users to pay modders via the more accepted method of the virtual tip jar. I have a feeling that mods asking for money up-front will find themselves pushed out of the market once everything settles down.
     It will be very interesting to see how this all plays out. For a long time I’ve been wondering where gamers would draw the line en masse when it comes to tacking on additional costs to what are supposed to be finished products. It looks like this might be it.
 
     Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and has the urge to play "Gratuitous Space Battles" with the Star Wars mod.