Paid mods on Steam
Given the Battlefront 2 topic at hand, the brief history of Valve's paid mod workshop feels like a cautionary tale that EA and DICE might have benefited from learning about a while ago. Essentially, back in 2015 Valve announced that it was adding a payment feature to the Skyrim section of Steam Workshop, allowing mod creators to monetize their content.
On the surface of it, that sounds reasonable enough, but on closer scrutiny there were a litany of problems. The first was revenue split, which would see modders receive 25% of the money their mods made, while the original game's publisher and Valve would split the other 75%. Even in the world of digital downloads, where the host platform often takes a sizable cut, that felt like a pretty aggressive split.
There were other issues that were just as significant. Mods had always been on a spectrum from scrappy, half-working stuff to more polished efforts, and Skyrim - a game with literally thousands of mods available, many of which could be applied simultaneously to transform the game in entertaining ways - had a lot of everything.
Unfortunately, this meant that there were lots of problematic edge cases. Some mods used copyrighted material - easy to turn a blind eye to when it's free and buried in a mountain of add-ons, but more exciting for IP lawyers when it's got a price tag attached to it. Other mods would break when patches were released, meaning you could be left with something you bought that no longer worked. And with the addition of a payment system, unscrupulous sorts could rip off other mod creators, passing their lesser-known work off as their own to make a quick buck. Valve famously doesn't employ legions of staff to monitor stuff, preferring to build systems where the community self-polices nefarious activity, which made this situation even worse.
Valve tried to figure out a way forward with the feature, and Gabe Newell even did an AMA on Reddit about the whole issue, but in the end Valve removed the feature. Its statement included a sensible conclusion that will probably feel sobering to EA and DICE this morning:
"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."
In other words, you can't always take something from one context and expect it to work well in another.
