Video Game News: Steam Sells Skyrim Mods.

And it's a pretty awful thing.

http://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements/detail/208632365237576574

Why?
Mods are traditionally free from Skyrim Nexus or hundred of modding sites where they are made and downloaded without cost.
But now they're being monetised, it is widely assumed that many of the most popular game models will abandon the free sites in order to make a profit on Steam Workshop.

That isn't a problem.
What is the problem is that the person who made the content doesn't necessarily have to do that.

There is absolutely nothing to stop me from downloading a bunch of game mods and reselling them on Steam Workshop. I could easily make quite a fair amount of money from literally stealing content from hobbyists and enthusiasts.

There is no site moderations, no support, absolutely nothing to stop me from downloading a bunch of content, not even repurposing it, and then resell it to lots of less-than-intelligent consumers who don't quite understand that mods are free and always have been (Essentially, children with their parents wallets.)

I could get banned from Steam, but the content creator has no proof I stole their content they spent weekends of downtime from work painstakingly building. And anyone can snatch it up and make a quick buck.
And Steam are not going to check the Nexus to see if the mod is officially yours. The site contains great mods made by veteran developers, weird/cheap/broken mods made by teenagers and people who just enjoy Skyrim and... adult ones made by people with too much time on their hands.

The author makes a 25% cut from the mod, 75% goes to Bethesda who then take a 5% morsel and throw it at Valve. 5% may not seem like much, but if you don't think they'll make money, you're underestimating just how many people are still playing Skyrim.

Which is sort of weird. It's a game from 2011, four years ago, that people are still making lots of money off today despite the fact they were just enjoying the game and creating new parts of it yesterday without making a red cent.

It is, as PCGamer summed up thusly:  Bethesda and Valve are inviting the rebels into the boardroom—come in here, dear boy, have a cigar—and a lot of PC gamers are looking on in disgust.


I'm just a bit blown away by the oversight here. No curation? Half the mods barely work with each other and what if it crashes your game or corrupts it? You'll have to pay for the game and mods all over again!

Jeez.

Video Game Discussion: The Most Successful Games With Microtransactions.

One blog post a month. That's how it's worked, right? I never could really do bi-weekly. Sorry, I suppose.
If I were being paid, I'm sure I'd care. But YOU tell ME if you see any adverts on here.

I mean sure, I would have twenty-thousand pop ups and three adorable dinosaurs holding min-billboards about car insurance and pills to expand your johnson if I could but I have no way to enable them currently. On the subject of monetisation, the topic today is microtransactions in video games.

Here's the definition of microtransactions stolen straight from Wikipedia.

Microtransaction (also referred to as in-app billing or in-app purchasing) is a business model where users can purchase virtual goods via micropayments. Microtransactions are often used in free-to-play games to provide a revenue source for the developers.

Essentially, there are many games that are free-to-play or "freemium" games which have no entry cost at all, but enable the player to purchase bonuses within the game using actual money.

The most successful games, such as mobile game Clash of Clans, can easily generate close to a billion dollars in financial revenue from such transactions.
Funnily enough, it's more than enough to bankroll an entire game.
The people who pay in a freemium game amount to about 0.5% to 6% of the players dependent on the games quality and popularity.
Those players essentially fund the free ride that everyone else is getting.

So which console games make the most money from microtransactions? The ones where you have to pay for the main character to wear a yellow suit instead of a blue suit? The ones like Call of Duty where you pay for weapon packs and certain player emblems?

Trick questions, actually.

Mobile games and handheld games make the most from micro transactions.

And here's how you go about making the most successful game.

1.) Make sure your game relies entirely on luck

Notable examples.) Crossy Road and Pokemon Shuffle.

Pokemon Shuffle is, in essence, Candy Crush with Pokemon. You can have five goes then another one every thirty minutes or buy more. You can also buy coins to buy upgrades or jewels which allow you to take extra turns if you're stuck on a level. Using money to buy money to buy money.  

Also, Candy Crush takes no skill and entirely hinges on luck.

As does Crossy Road, where you make an animal cross a road whilst cars go backwards and forwards.

If your game relies on luck the player will play it indefinitely. They'll get frustrated, but never frustrated enough to stop.

                         2.) Make sure your player can't stop. (Even if the game is turned off.)

                     Notable examples.) Crossy Road, Pokemon Shuffle and AdVenture Capitalist.

What do all the games above have in common? You can turn them off and they will continue to function when offline. Pokemon Shuffle will, after thirty minutes, renew your number of goes and add one. Crossy Road gives you a gift every six hours that is almost always coins that unlock you new characters for the game and idle game AdVenture Capitalist continues to generate in-game money even when the game is off using general calculations of how much you were earning per-second when you clicked off it.

                                         3.) Make sure that the non-payer players pay too.

                                                      Notable examples.) Crossy Road.

In Crossy Road, you unlock new characters through a coin system. You can buy coins, collect coins in the actual game or..... watch adverts.
For each advert watched, you get 20 coins. Watch five and that's a free character.
They're all adverts for other mobile games, usually. Know your audience and all that.

Crossy Road made $7 million from players who bought more coins using in-game currency.
$3 million came from other players who were content to watch 14 seconds of something they didn't want or need. Turns out those 14 seconds added up.

The mother of all mobile games is still Candy Crush Saga, which raked in $3.6 million a day to the tune of a cool $1.33 billion dollars. (That's billion with a "b')

Still, it just goes to show.

What does it show?

I don't know.

Make a game on Facebook and put a button involving paying on there and you're rich, I guess.

Bye.