Shams said: 2: Fair re-imbursements: If you ask someone what's fair you'll probably get as many answers as there are people. One thing that surprised me a bit during the Bethesda/Steam debacle was that people were perfectly fine with Steam getting their cut as a platform holder (it cost a lot to build and maintain). But somehow didn't think that the massive risk/investment Bethesda took in building a second platform - Skyrim - was as important - and that they came off as greedy. Or that somehow that a modders/content creators work should valued much higher than Bethesda's effort.



Instead of getting lost in arguments about exactly what IS fair - let's just agree that whatever the system is it should leave most parties happy. Click to expand...

Just wanted to touch a bit on this.Going by what I saw in conversations about that particular mess on sites with various levels of interest in gaming(gaming news website forums and modding forums with dedicated sections to Skyrim) was something along these lines of them being infuriated that all Bethesda and Valve were gonna do was sit back and take a huge chunk of the money while doing absolutely nothing in terms of bug fixing, testing, ensuring compatability and or anything in terms of quality assurance in addition to not doing any legal legwork what so ever. I recall that one of these third party dlc(that is what they were trying to do in essence so thats what I'm calling it) got problems when it turned out he used something he didn't have permission to, but I don't know if that was properly cleared up since the whole thing ended so fast. It certainly didn't do Valve(partly due to their failure with Greenlight and such) and Bethesda any favours thats for certain which just kept giving people reasons to think these modders were going to receive practically no more than beggars coin while being put in the firing lines.That and the moment money got involved in addition to the blatant mislabeling by Valve and Bethesda, things just toppled down on everyone involved since the first things that came to mind aside from the legal problems was all the problems that come with modding being pushed to the front. Mods are known for having a host of issues ranging from mild to extremely severe and for being abandoned at the drop of a hat. All of which people felt were understandable, if a bit disappointing, since people were doing this for free and on their spare time. It did however seem to give many the impression that these people were simply not to be trusted, especially when their output kept being called paid -MODS- which just soured the grounds even further. Though the early access style DLC and overpriced stuff that was starting to show up didn't help.In the end it seemed to not really be just any one thing, but rather a ton of things of varying sizes piling up to cause an avalanche all at once. At least that is the impression I got from all of this by reading the modding community and other gamers statements on this. Other aspects has been covered earlier in this thread from what I could tell so.One other thing I took from the mess is that words have power and that one instance of mislabeling it is more than capable of crashing the entire thing dead in its tracks. Perhaps next time they won't use something with such strong implications and expectations attached to it as the word "mod". We'll see though. I'll stop rambling on like a silly person now and drowning people with badly structured stuff.On a sidenote I gotta admit that the idea of Skyrim as a risky investment is an amusing idea, but that could just be hindsight on my part even though I never doubted that Skyrim would sell fairly well(though didn't think it'd sell as much as it ended up doing if I recall the amount correctly).