April 24, 2015 11:23 AM EDT
You can't compare the two payment systems, they are totally separate. Youtube =/= micro-transaction money. Valve are pulling 75% off of a price tag that won't peak over 5$, and for the biggest mods won't peak over 15$. They keep the first 400$ the mod makes as well. You're left with minimal returns on anything that you put out. Put more effort in, you don't get that time's worth back, and at that point you might as well be doing it for free. If you want to make anything real out of it, you split it into DLCs and ship them. Now I'm not saying the modders that already make some of the best mods out there are going to up and change, but they will be inclined to change the way they handle their mods. Others, in fact the vast majority of new comers, will pounce on the opportunity to flood the shop with mods full of 'potential' that will never see it realised. Don't compare this shop to something as different as Youtube. Compare it instead to the next closest thing, the Steam Greenlight. Has it given as some good indie games? Sure. Is the vast majority useless crap that the devs will lure you into buying and drag out development until everyone's forgotten about it? Yes. And that's exactly what's going to happen.
If this was anything other than a money grab, I'd probably support it, because modders get to decide to charge for their work if they deem it worthy, and that's their choice. But this is nothing but exploitation. What's more, it's going to interfere with the fundamentals of what made the modding community so great. That ability to share and build off of each other in the sole interest of helping the community made for a unique occurence, now that's going to go out the window. Chesko's fishing mod has already been pulled out of the shop, because Fore (author of FNIS, a mod tool from which basically every skeleton/animation/pose mod is made) called him out for using his work. Back when everyone worked with the understanding that modders modded for the community, that would have never been an issue.
Fudgemuppet provides an entertainment service, and if their quality drops their money drops. A mod isn't the same thing, there's no obligation to keep the quality up, their money doesn't stop if the mod doesn't meet expectations. Who's there to act as quality control? Who's going to test the mods and ensure compatibility? What if I download a mod and it breaks my game relative to my mod order, and I had no way of knowing? I had to pay for this beforehand... By contrast I don't have to pay Fudgemuppet anything. I don't have anything to lose if they start releasing crap, they do. I can, with no detriment to me, stop viewing their product. Am I going to get guaranteed refunds on mods that don't meet my expectations? No, of course not. You see where I'm going with this? That's just a very bad comparison.
This whole thing is all bad. If you weren't on console and ran 200 mods that consistently had to be tweaked and/or kept up with the broader modding community, you'd feel the same way too. Assuming you don't use Steam, I'll just tell you that this is only part of a general trend of monetisation with the guise of helping the community. Once Valve used to be the last hope for PC Gamers, proving that you could release great F2P games and make money without it being P2W (DotA 2, TF2) now they're jumping on trends in order to make a quick buck. EA 2 incoming.
(It's not likely big modders are going to tank quality, but if they actually have an interest in making money, because of how exploitative Valve is being, they're going to need to split their work and make us buy every expansion. If they don't, then they might as well be releasing it for free because they're going to be making chump change. Imagine if tomorrow youtube took another 50% of Fudgemuppet's ad money, would those ads be doing anything? They'd be working off of donations and sponsorships. If ads were the only source of money, they'd be forced to split every build into 2/3 parts just to keep up.)