| poeTV | Submit | Login   |

Reddit Digg Stumble Facebook

Help keep poeTV running


And please consider not blocking ads here. They help pay for the server. Pennies at a time. Literally.

Comment count is 25
Void 71 - 2015-04-27

The boys at Valve are the most ruthless capitalists in the industry, but they maintain their street cred by supporting the shit out of their games. I guess that's why people haven't noticed that they've been poaching mod developers for the last 10 years.


Binro the Heretic - 2015-04-27

Based on my experience with TF2, I'd say they OVER-support their games, sometimes.

Also, please tell me this video will be the new "The Fall".


blue vein steel - 2015-04-27

i'd rather get the weekly updates that TF2 had at one point, even if it's 90% hats, than the months between patches of games like BF4


yogarfield - 2015-04-27

Binro: it already is. STEP UP YOUR MEME GAME.


Binro the Heretic - 2015-04-27

Can you point me to some good ones.

Also, give me a break, I'm a broken-down 45-year-old fart with grownup responsibilities & shit. I can't spend all my time keeping up with the interweb.


yogarfield - 2015-04-27

They're called the "El risitas" parodies.


yogarfield - 2015-04-27

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDiB4rtp1qw

the OG version


Harveyjames - 2015-04-27

I think it's a good thing that mod makers can get now paid for their work!

I don't think 75% sounds like a fair cut and there clearly needs to be a better quality control system, but you expect these kinds of teething problems when you're doing something that hasn't been tried before. I'm sure they're listening to the community and working hard to fix what's broken.


baleen - 2015-04-27

HI CHET


baleen - 2015-04-27

just kidding I know who you are.


Harveyjames - 2015-04-27

You mean you decoded my clever nickname?!


Harveyjames - 2015-04-27

Yeah, anyway. What's the problem here? This is what happens when to all companies that get too successful- every mistake they make is proof of their EVIL. Steam is pretty great! It was the iTunes for videogames before iTunes was the iTunes for music. And ever since then it's been massively successful, and the games on there are cheap as fuck. I think it's super impressive!

I'm not mad at them for creating a marketplace where the fans can actually make money for mods they make. I played the shit out of a whole bunch of mods back in the Quake days (QRALLY springs to mind) and I bet the people who made those games didn't make a fucking penny off them. That's got to be frustrating, especially when you're the creator of a mod like Team Fortress that got downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Sure, the TF boys were eventually hired by Valve, but that was a rare exception.

That mod makers can finally get renumerated for their stuff and not have to rely on paypal DONATE buttons is fantastic.

That mod makers are "stabbing each other in the back": not Valve's fault! But apparently they're working on that!

That fans are butthurt that a thing that used to be free now costs money: suck it up, you dorks aren't entitled to free entertainment! The people who make these things for you gotta eat!

Boy oh boy, this video is a jack-off. It's almost like the one thing Valve did wrong is underestimate how entitled, pissy and amoral their community is. This is what happens when you lift up a rock- all the bugs come crawling out. I think the mod thing, once they get the kinks out of the system, is going to prove itself to be a brilliant and useful service. It's also going to allow some people to make mod making their ACTUAL JOB, which will doubtlessly result in a thriving culture of amazing, weird, experimental and brilliant videogames.


Hooker - 2015-04-27

Wow, that is a major reframing of the mod community of the 90s and late 2000s. People make mods / maps / etc. because they're passionate about it and enjoy making them. The go in with the explicit understanding that they will never, in any monetary way, be compensated for their work. Disappointment and frustration came from nobody using or liking your mods. Making something like Aliens TC for Doom or Counter-Strike meant you were a king. I doubt anyone that made a successful mod ever felt frustrated by the fact that they weren't rich as a result - that was never part of the deal for anybody.

Now here's Valve, who is selling things that people made for free and taking 75% of the revenue because they own the distribution system? For something that has distributed itself for two decades? FUCK that.


Hooker - 2015-04-27

I can't even fathom a scenario where someone makes a mod when all fan-made content is always free, distributes it for free, and then gets upset when they aren't paid for it.


Monkey Napoleon - 2015-04-28

Just because Valve is formalizing the system now, doesn't mean it hasn't been going on forever. Counter-Strike was a free mod until Valve scooped up the dev team.

From a technical standpoint, Source engine games blur the line between "a game that uses a licensed engine" and "a mod for half-life 2".

Anyway, if you're passionate about game your game mods, you don't get them through steam because the updating is shit and the compatibility is shit. You install them manually or use third party managers. Nothing about that changes except for maybe getting future mods through a torrent tracker (if they're even bothering to remove them from free sites).


Harveyjames - 2015-04-28

Actually, the 75% isn't Valve's standard cut. I don't know how much Valve takes but I think it's about 25%. The rest is split between the publisher and the mod maker, and the publisher sets the figure. So that 75% figure is the fault of the publishers of Skyrim, not Valve.

Also! It's ludicrous to assume that mod makers in the 90's were just doing it for 'the glory', or whatever, and wouldn't have appreciated a way of turning their hobby into a revenue stream. I actually worked on a couple of total conversions for Quake (as a sound effects guy!) when I was 14, and there was always talk of licensing the Quake engine and selling the mod for money.

Only thing is, licensing the Quake engine was prohibitively expensive- as I recall, it was about 10 grand. 10k is not a lot of money for a business but it's a fuck of a lot for a couple of college students and their barely-pubescent sound effects dude.

We had a lot of people playing our mod. An active community! If we'd been doing it today, we would have been making actual money and we would have been able to keep doing it. I probably would have seriously considered it as a career, instead of going to college to study whatever I thought a "real job" was.

So yeah, call me overly optimistic but I fail to see how this is a bad thing.


Harveyjames - 2015-04-28

POSTSCRIPT: Here's what happened to that mod I worked on.

The programmer had to focus on 'real job' stuff because he got married. The modeller got lured away by a company called Ion Storm to work on a game called Daikatana. I caved in to pressure from my parents and got a lucrative job polishing the brass fittings, sweeping the car park and cleaning the toilets in a gentleman's club.

Now- there are already people earning more money selling things on the Team Fortress marketplace than they would earn if they were working at a games company in the same position with the same level of experience. If we'd been able to make money from our mod, that band would have stayed together. I'd have been able to buy an electric guitar, or get more sound recording equipment! At the very least, I wouldn't have had to clean toilets, you know?

So: I like this. I hope it turns out well.


Harveyjames - 2015-04-28

(N.B. I mention 'electric guitar' because I really wanted an electric guitar back then, not because it has anything to do with modding).

Thinking about it, my family were very poor. My first computer was a 486 with a load of pirate music software on it that some local heroin addicts sold to us. I could barely run the game I was working on, but I worked hard on it every night.

There's a lot of kids like that right now- talented and hardworking but without the breaks in life to help them out of their circumstances. I'm glad there's now a marketplace to allow people like that to sell their work and let their hard work pay off.

But all gamers seem to see is "this used to be free, and now they're making us pay for it". Shame.


Harveyjames - 2015-04-28

(update!! they already shut it down! Well, I hope they learn a few lessons from this and figure out a better way of implementing it in future)


That guy - 2015-04-28

I can tell you're a moron because you chose the word "butthurt" to describe people being upset over having to pay for something that used to be free. You overreached with that piece of slang because you want so badly for that to count as being "butthurt".

Imbecile.

I hope the whole goddamn industry implodes. The gaming press is wall-to-wall concubines. AAA game companies release unacceptably buggy games and then never really fix them. And the fans lap it up and crawl up the ass of anyone who disagrees.

"As if gamers have any standards"


Hooker - 2015-04-28

Yeah, the open-source nature of mods kinda sucks because people would have to stop working on them due to their financial obligations. I agree with that entirely. But it is a way for individuals to express themselves through games, and it's wonderful in that regard. I barely play games at all any more, but when I do, I always go for the PC version, and the reason I do is because of the mods.

You know what already works like Steam's mod system? iTunes and the Play Store. You know what fucking sucks balls? iTunes and the Play Store. My fear is that by simply introducing the idea that people could be paid for mods, Valve has already irreparably fucked the whole thing up, and I guess in that regard it was a wonderful thing while it lasted.


Harveyjames - 2015-05-08

Wow, you really are "that guy", huh. Sounds a bit like you didn't read or understand anything I said!

Though I'm going to be laughing at "the gaming press is wall-to-wall concubines" for a few months to come, so thanks for that.

Jesus, what the fuck happened to this site


Shoebox Joe - 2015-05-08

@HarveyJames, this site only wishes it wasn't remotely libertarian.


Old_Zircon - 2015-04-27

I was pretty psyched that Skyrim was last weekend, since that's about the most I'd want to pay for it, but it was followed by a mounting sense of shame after finding out that they had done this. I wish there were a way to take back my .

Morrowind is still way better, too.


Hooker - 2015-04-27

I've bought like three games on Steam ever, and I haven't loaded it up in probably 4-5 years now. Five minutes ago, I had no opinion on it whatsoever (aside from hating the fucking arcade-you-have-to-log-into-before-playing-your-game nature of the industry now, which Steam basically started).

This video won me over massively. Fuck Steam and fuck Valve.


Register or login To Post a Comment







Video content copyright the respective clip/station owners please see hosting site for more information.
Privacy Statement