PC Gamer og andre har for nylig haft chancen for at tale lidt med Valve-chefen Gabe Newell, og her faldt snakken blandt andet på mod-udvikling, og her talte Newell ikke bare om Valves tidligere planer om at tillade mod-udviklere at blive betalt, men også om deres nuværende rettigheder.
For dem af jer der ikke er sat ind i Valves tidligere planer, så afslørede de tilbage i 2015 at de ville starte et program der skulle hjælpe mod-udviklere med at blive kompenseret for deres arbejde. De brugte The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim som testspil til dette program, men der var så megen overvældende feedback, at de trak programmet tilbage hurtigt efter.
"The Skyrim situation was a mess. It was not the right place to launch that specific thing and we did some sort of ham-handed, stupid things in terms of how we rolled it out. EJ [Erik Johnson] basically said we just need to back off of this for now, but the fundamental concept of 'the gaming community needs to reward the people who are creating value' is pretty important, right? ... the degree to which Valve helps contribute to efficiency in the system is one of the ways in which we're adding value to the system as a whole. So, you know, we have to just figure out how to do it in a way that makes customers happy and that they buy into it, it makes creators happy because they feel like the system is rational and is rewarding the right people for the work that they do. Does that make sense?"
"The situation gave us a ton of information. But there was also a little bit of 'That burner is hot. Maybe we wait awhile before we put our fingers on that burner again.'" sagde Newell om hele sagen.
Så skal mod-udviklere kompenseres? Det mener Newell stadig:
"They create a lot of value, and we think that... absolutely they need to be compensated, they're creating value and the degree to which they're not being accurately compensated is a bug in the system, right? It's just inserting noise into it. You want to have efficient ways so that the people who are actually creating value are the people that money is flowing to."
Synes du at der skal falde betaling for veludviklede mods?