Let's bring in
@Cratylus for this. He would be a good person to ask. Valve was looking at sharing profits with modders. I heard that may come back.
Would be nice if they and other companies did. I would likely get into developing mods (both small and large-scale) if there was a shared profit structure for developers. I'd love to finance and oversee the development of say, a cheap/smallish DLC-like expansion mod for Fallout 4 (as others have done for New Vegas); but there's no way in hell I would do that just to make Bethesda some more money.
I'm on the fence with this.
On the one hand, as a small scale modder myself, yeah it would be cool to get paid to release some of my work for others to use and enjoy. But that's not really why I mod. I do it to add what I consider improvements to the game (my game of choice is Skyrim) that are missing from the original vanilla "out of the box" version. I don't mod for the purposes of making a buck, but yeah it might be a nice incentive for me to make public the stuff I do create. I know that the Bethesda modding community is quite robust with numerous sites dedicated to nothing but modding Skyrim, FO4, etc. But for the most part, the sites I use to augment my game are free and so are all of the mods available there. I remember the fiasco that happened with Steam allowing modders to profit from their work. That lasted all of what, a few weeks?
On the other hand, I do think that if Valve or Bethesda or whoever shared some of their profits with modders, I believe it would improve both the quality and the number of mods available. Hardcore gamers like the three of us tend to see the shortcomings and flaws better than developers do for whatever reason. And there are some really, really amazing mods out there done by the modding community that add to the enjoyment of the original versions of these games. I know, for me anyway, there is no way I could go back to playing vanilla Skyrim.
I'm not sure how they would go about calculating their payouts... number of downloads?... number of "likes"?... average rating?... size of the mod? Certainly
@gourimoko isn't going to spend a lot of time and resources developing a cool DLC-like mod for FO4 is the payout is peanuts.
Another concern I would have is the potential for a lot of this modding content to be controlled by Valve, Bethesda, etc. which brings in a whole host of problems.
- Are users going to have to buy these mods that otherwise would have been free?
- Who controls the copyright on the content? Will it be a case where modders have to sign away their rights to Valve in order to share in the Valve profits?
- Will the companies limit the types of content that they will reimburse (i.e. only PG-13 content, only "expansion pack" type content, minor game tweaking type content won't be eligible, etc.)?
- Will the developers and publishers use this as an excuse to shut down all free modding not under their umbrella?
I could quite easily see things like these happening, especially if Bethesda's or Valve's legal teams have anything to say about it (which they will).