Are you kidding have you never even heard the joke about TF2's obsession with hats? Those are microtransactions. Dota 2 and TF2 are some of the worst offenders for microtransactions.
I assumed that by "microtransactions" you were referring to something in-game that was sponsored and run by the developer. Also, the hats are purely cosmetic, and add zero value to the game.
I think you're missing the bigger parts of the argument here. I agree with you in that people should stop complaining about having to pay money to mod authors that deserve it. The problem is that Steam is a flawed platform already and adding this on in it's current poorly planned implementation has just made it worse.
I was under the impression we were more debating the concept, not the actual execution. Now that you mention it that does sound more convincing, but in theory I still think it's a good idea.
A good system I think should be curated, but Valve don't seem to have any interest in hiring staff to handle things like that and customer service. A good system would also be designed to encourage bigger and better mods rather than shitty mods.
That's kind of exactly what they're doing. If a mod sucks and I monetize it, I get zero dollars. If a mod is great and I charge $2 for it, then I'll make money. I'm incentivised to make good modes.
I believe that giving content creators free access to ALL your dev tools and IP content in exchange for a portion of their revenue would encourage more people to make things like Falskaar that have literally hours of content and are the size of any other Skyrim DLC. Unfortunately the system they put in is nothing close to that, and there's also evidence of them censoring all the negative backlash and dicking around content creators. The problem shouldn't be that they want money, the problem is that it's a horrible implementation.
Doesn't Skyrim already have full-access modding tools? What more do
I seriously recommend reading
this post from a mod author (not the one Scarecrow posted earlier, this one is from the author of the first paid Skyrim mods and why he's not doing it any more).
Alright, I'm going to quote the passage from now on.
Things internally stayed rather positive and exciting until some of us discovered that "25% Revenue Share" meant 25% to the modder, not to Valve / Bethesda. This sparked a long internal discussion.
This makes perfect sense. Why the fuck would you receive majority revenue for something you made with Bethseda's engine, with Bethseda assets to play on a Bethseda game, to be played by other Bethseda players, the money going into Bethseda fueling future engine updates to make the shit you're doing easier.
My key argument to Bethesda (putting my own head on the chopping block at the time) was that this model incentivizes small, cheap to produce items (time-wise) than it does the large, full-scale mods that this system has the opportunity of championing. It does not reward the best and the biggest.
This is so fucking retarded. The logical fallacy here is that he's implying that:
A) People need to spend money
B) All mods are worth the same amount of money
A shit, mass-produced mod would have to be almost free, or else nobody would buy it. Good mods that take time to build would be higher priced, since the value of labor actually plays into account. To the player, this paid content adds a different level to the game. You can either pay $0.50 for some cool ass horse skin, or $5 for several hours worth of DLC. It'd be dumb to price the horse $5, and the DLC $0.50
And 25%, when someone else is doing the marketing, PR, brand building, sales, and so on, and all I have to do is "make stuff", is actually pretty attractive. Is it fair? No.
Like wtf how much more do you want. All YOU'RE doing is making cool mods, which is the funnest part. You're not having to bother with the thousands of other issues involved with game distribution. You make a mod, upload to workshop, and make money.
Sure, the system isn't perfect, but other than the fucking horrible Megaupload system, Steam is a really good distribution platform, and they want a cut.
It pretty much highlights from an insider's perspective why the system is awful, and it's pretty easy to see how much better it could be.
I'd rather the discussion focused on that, rather than the knee-jerk "it's my money and you can't take it!!!!"
EDIT: It's also pretty clear both Valve and Bethesda don't understand the modding community and didn't bother to do research on it before implementing this system, which as a developer is baffling to me how this could have made it's way from concept to creation without one person taking into perspective the actual people who use mods and what it's like to mod Skyrim. I think this should have been started with a new game that has no existing mod community (Elder Scrolls 6? Fallout 4? Other?) and the modding tools should be created with functionality in mind. Mods aren't stable to begin with, modding tools that don't create dependencies are the better way to go. Being able to create self-sustaining content that even in the future with future game updates wouldn't break is the best way to go about this. Right now there's no guarantee that mods you purchase will still work or work at all when you buy them.
That is a good point, since a lot of mods will clash with each other and whatnot, and I would hope that Bethesda would do a better job to identify which mods would work with your current game and to what extent.
I spelled Bethesda wrong earlier but whatever.
TL;DR
Community Content creators have every right to charge money for something that took time, effort and dedication, and they should be allowed to price it whatever they want. However, Valve also has the right to take a significant cut of the income, since they provided all of the content required for any of those mods to work.
