Except that anyone can steal your free mod, sell it for profit, and then sue your free version away, in which you will be stuck in a protracted legal battle via civil court to prove that you were the one who created the mod. God forbid if you have to do this internationally where copyright laws differ.
Except everyone else doesn't have a 75% tariff on it. As an example: If taxation on businesses was that extreme,
no business would survive. There is no way to breed fair competition when the people with the smallest possible level of power in the market are being punished the hardest.
It's not entitlement to desire that the game be cheaper than the PC I'm playing it on. Plus, I can object to something's price
as the reason why I won't purchase it. If someone puts up a mod adding a new continent, or a companion with several lines of professional voice acting? Yeah, fuck, I'll pay a few bucks for that. No, I'm not going to pay 8 dollars for spell reskins, or texture mods. Especially when I know that 75% of that isn't even going to the creator of the mod, and is instead going to corporations who had
no hand in that labour whatsoever. That's about as anti-capitalist as it gets, considering this "free market" isn't free.
It's not entitlement to declare that you won't buy a thing because the price it is set at (whatever that price) is too damn high. That's simply the consumer voicing why they
won't acquire that product. Pretty simple shit, really.
No, but nobody implied forcing them into slave labour camps to produce mods 24/7. Jesus Christ, they do this of their own free will, and they're free to put their content up for sale of their own free will. Just like how Left4Dead was originally a modification of Counter Strike, got developed into a full product, and went up for sale--
they're free to put it at whatever price they fuckin' feel like, and they've always been able to do this. Steam's system, however, is fucking atrocious. There is absolutely no quality control on steam, you can see it for yourself in the Greenlight section. If they can't even prune out the sea of garbage flooding their service in the form of games, explain how they'll do that for the
tens of thousands of modifications on Skyrim alone. Cuz' you can bet this shitty system will spread from Skyrim to other games.
The primary reason people don't put mods up on the Workshop is because it's god forsaken bug ridden mess. I play Europa Universalis IV, every time there is an update, it breaks every single mod in the game because of the Workshop. There's nothing the developers can do to fix it either, Valve just doesn't give a fuck.
So Valve's solution to be competitive is to
piss off its consumer base with a system that
punishes content creators with a 75% tariff and no copyright protection whatsoever? If anything, this system is going to punish people who make fan mods for stuff like Dark Souls, since that IP is copyrighted, punting it on the workshop will probably get you sued now.
You do not increase the variety in a service by
raping your content creators for cash and
punishing the consumer when there are free alternatives available. This is why piracy is a thing: When it's more convenient to get it free,
people will get it free. It's why Netflix is actually managing to combat piracy better than any DRM ever has:
Because it's fucking convenient.
Now, donation links still aren't allowed, and your only choice is a 75% tariff on your products, or to put them up free. Oh, and they can be copyright flagged now too.
Awesome.
Great fucking system.
Greenlight has proven that Valve is totally incapable of quality control in the realm of hundreds of new products backed by visible corporations, how the hell is it gonna do it for thousands by anonymous individuals? This is like policing 4Chan: Good luck.
Yes, free. Even though you need to buy Skyrim from their service in the first place to even use these mods. "Free." Oh, and the DLC packs.
"Free." When places like Nexus can manage to do it free, for hundreds of games, it's a shameful display when a corporation that rakes in tons of money from hats on TF2 can't manage it. If they have to, just throw ads on the download page like everyone else does, rather than punishing
literally everyone to farm in free money. Bandwidth really doesn't cost that much for simple data file downloads. If it did, a service like Steam would not make nearly as much money as it does already, with millions of people downloading games all the time.
Don't snap at people for saying that this is bullshit. It is bullshit. It's a terrible, nonsensical system that shouldn't have been imposed in the first place. Valve should have just allowed content creators to link to donation pages if they really cared. Fact of the matter is: Valve doesn't. They just see an easy way to get money, damn the consequences, damn the content creators, damn the consumers. Is it evil? Fuck no. It's not evil for a corporation to do what it's designed to do: Make money. It is, however, shitty business practice that shouldn't be endorsed.
A taxi cab driver doesn't pay a 75% tariff to drive his taxi every time he picks up customers to the company that made his taxi. If any company in real life tried that, they would be sued into oblivion. So the fact that this is even remotely
legal for software is already disgusting... Oh, and no, it doesn't make me entitled to point out bullshit and spit in the face of a company that only gives a shit about my money. I'm not
demanding that modders be enslaved to create content for me, I'm demanding that
the system which is currently in place for modders be gutted because it is absolute garbage in its current state.
EDIT
Oh look, someone tried to take down their paid for mods and Valve
refused after Valve recommended them to just steal from someone else's shit to finish their own mod. See? Bullshit. Total fucking bullshit.