Jac and I were just discussing the fact that we
would pay for user-made content if we considered it worth the price, the mod author would be around to support it, and it was actually out of beta testing. We've bought add-on packs for Borderlands games for less than $5, so it isn't the money.
What we would never do is give 75% of what we think a mod is worth back to Valve and Bethesda. I would even be a little perturbed if I discovered the mod author wanted to send a percentage of what I paid to some third-party service provider. If I want to support Nexus or Blender or MCM, I'll do it directly, thankyouverymuch. We've already paid Bethesda and Valve everything we agreed to pay to play their games.
Though many people are dead-set against buying user-made content as opposed to DLCs, Jac and I aren't. Valve and Bethesda destroyed a reasonable idea with catastrophically poor implementation. While modders like Chesko realized they backed the wrong horse almost immediately, I have lost respect for those "Service Providers" who continued the propaganda even after the many faults were made painfully obvious. While Robin Scott came out publicly saying he didn't approve of the implementation, he sure as heck didn't remove Nexus from the list of Service Providers and in the case of Polygon, the ass-kissing had not even been remotely veiled.
Steam allowing paid mods is awesome. Here's why Valve kills paid mods on Steam, will refund Skyrim mod buyers while the latter article is purely factual, the comments are not:
Kirielson Kirielson
MODERATOR, POLYGON
I’ll say it:
Weak move Valve. We know you’re going to put it up, and you really should have ridden the rough seas out of it.
In my opinion, the Service Providers pretty much threw the modders under the bus for a measly 1-5% of Valve's cut. Valve certainly bought their support cheap. It's ironic to me that Dark0ne accused Chesko of taking "a pop at the Nexus"; what I saw was someone trying to recover his principles. Chesko made a rookie mistake. Robin Scott, in his own words has "been doing this for 14 years" and has a business that costs $500,000 a year to run. He's a businessman and he should have realized the modders weren't and they were going to get screwed by the terms offered. Maybe he didn't know beforehand, but he found out at the same time everyone else did and kept his hand out.
In the end, I hope everyone will get over the death threats. I know they are hurtful because Jac and I got them at the time we decided we couldn't support Lover's Lab because it supported rape. We were also misquoted and our intentions misrepresented. But we didn't let them drive us out of the community and I really hope those modders who have left come back. I also hope that even if the horrible, mob-induced venom spat in every direction can't be forgotten, it can at least be forgiven enough to allow everyone to learn from this debacle and return to gaming, modding, and sharing our love for both.
EDIT: This post contains factual errors. Please see my next post for the corrections.