Bethesda Blog

So this [0] article is where I got the numbers that have caused a fair amount of the outrage that led to this announcement from Valve.

The modders were getting 25% of the mod sales, Valve was getting 30% (a standard for digital distribution channels), and 45% going to Bethesda. The outrage being how much Bethesda got. Bethesda responded to this in the linked article [0]:

> Many have questioned the split of the revenue, and we agree this is where it gets debatable. We’re not suggesting it’s perfect, but we can tell you how it was arrived at.

> First Valve gets 30%. This is standard across all digital distributions services and we think Valve deserves this. No debate for us there.

> The remaining is split 25% to the modder and 45% to us. We ultimately decide this percentage, not Valve.

> Is this the right split? There are valid arguments for it being more, less, or the same. It is the current industry standard, having been successful in both paid and free games. After much consultation and research with Valve, we decided it’s the best place to start.

> This is not some money grabbing scheme by us. Even this weekend, when Skyrim was free for all, mod sales represented less than 1% of our Steam revenue.

> The percentage conversation is about assigning value in a business relationship. How do we value an open IP license? The active player base and built in audience? The extra years making the game open and developing tools? The original game that gets modded? Even now, at…

I gathered my thoughts in a comment on the Bethesda blog post:

http://www.bethblog.com/2015/04/27/why-were-trying-paid-skyrim-mods-on-steam/comment-page-2/#comment-418942

TL,DR:
Bethesda doesn't deserve the 45% of the sale, specially when they are charging 60$ for the game. IMO, they deserve 0%, for they have created nothing (and were already paid for the game/tools). And mods had value to the game, and increase it's lifetime.

Two problems with paid mods:

1 - most modders are heavy modders (about a hundred mods at a time). Knowing that, I can see some players realizing they will spend more than 100$ in a game.

2 - This can becomes Bethesda's business model. It can lead to a Elder Scrolls 6 with lackluster content, waiting to be filled with (paid) mods.

I don't have a problem with paid mods. I just think Bethesda is getting greedy. Does adobe get a cut from Photoshop plugin sales? Does Unity get a cut from Unity developed games?

How to implement paid mods:

- Help modders choose a copyright license

- Help track/prevent copyright infrigement. Many mods use other mods or are "mod compilations". And track unauthorized mod uploads to the market.

When I read articles like this I think of a quote from Carmack.

"The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion." (http://www.bethblog.com/index.php/2010/10/29/john-carmack-discusses-rage-on-iphoneipadipod-touch/)

The rage in the game dev community these days is all about highly cache aware Data Oriented Design (DOD) over OOP. Curiously there aren't a lot of DOD discussions or articles on HN.

It doesn't mater if it has over 4GB of physical memory. What matters is that it has 64bit address space. Memory is abstracted away from the app by the OS and for many applications 32bits is too small. Example of such apps include A) Games that use a lot of textures (compressed textures) B) Image editing C) Video editing D) other more demanding applications.

Even back in 2009 the guys at ID software were running into this due to the low limits how much you could memory map. There's a short blurb about it here: http://www.bethblog.com/2010/10/29/john-carmack-discusses-rage-on-iphoneipadipod-touch/

Between already mapped in shared libraries, files, VMA fragmentation 32bit address space is crowded.

"the possibility of the user encountering page faults" is absolutely hilarious. Clearly trying to take a stab at Apple because the author thinks that there should be more RAM in the boxes, and trying to come up with some justification without understanding that page faults are a basic and normal thing that happen all the time on any sort of modern device.

Also, regarding the "never existed", check out this post from 2010 from John Carmack, discussing the challenges of dealing with iOS's mmap limitations at the time:

http://www.bethblog.com/2010/10/29/john-carmack-discusses-rage-on-iphoneipadipod-touch/

There is some decent code in Doom Classic, but it is all C, and I would prefer to do new game development in (restrained) C++

…

I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.

http://bethblog.com/index.php/2010/10/29/john-carmack-discusses-rage-on-iphoneipadipod-touch/