Valve taking a cut I understand as they handle the sales and distribution platform. I'm not sure I think 30% is fair, but that's a different issue.
As a revenue split I'd be much more on board with the modder getting 75% and the rest being to everyone else.
Of course, then you need to consider how mod dependency is handled. And you have to look at how long term mod support is handled. What happens when the modder goes away or Bethesda releases an update that breaks existing mods.
The whole thing is a big nasty ball of problems.
So, you agree that Valve should get some part of the sales, because they are the ones (Steam) actually taking the payment and assuming some of the upfront risks of processing payments (fraud) and, because of the network effect and the customers they bring (read ... marketing)
But Bethesda who developed the actual game that brought the modders and gave them a platform to derive their work on, not to mention creating the actual game and game engine and putting it in the hands of the actual customers; they should just get nothing out of this whole deal?
I agree that the whole thing is a big hairy mess, and as a developer and an underdog myself I agree that the split should be approximately reversed, but I'm not sure there's much else we agree on.
They produced the game engine, and are letting people develop on it for free. And them getting a cut from people piggybacking on their work and making money from it was distasteful to you?
It's due to perceived "fairness"
This 75/25 split by Valve reminds me of the psychology experiment the Ultimatum Game: "'Inequity aversion' is so strong that people are willing to sacrifice personal gain in order to prevent another person from receiving an inequitably better outcome." https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-brain-work/200911/...
Different cultures respond differently to the Ultimatum Game. Be wary of those studies that only use "Anglo-Saxon American College Kids" as test subjects, which is a group of people that isn't even representative of America in general.
http://bigthink.com/praxis/are-americans-the-weirdest-people...
>>> The revelation that rural Peruvians handle the ultimatum game so differently from American respondents led Henrich on a MacArthur Foundation-funded research trip to more than a dozen more locales around the world, where he found wide variation in the average offers of player #1 and this curious result: “in some societies — ones where gift-giving is heavily used to curry favor or gain allegiance — the first player would often make overly generous offers in excess of 60 percent, and the second player would often reject them, behaviors almost never observed among Americans.”
As with the Store or Greenlight before outsourcing tasks to the community (reviews/greenlight votes) doesn't mean Valve isn't responsible for the stuff they offer in their store. A 24h hour refund policy is simply laughable when non-waiveable EU consumer rights regulations require 14 days.
The other thing is the quite astronomic payout cap at $100 which means any hobbyist has to sell $400 ore more, depending on taxes before he see any of his efforts compensated. This further shows that Valve was not interested in amateurs but this was all about professionalizing the modding scene to a few contributors.
Valve was charging 30% for operating the storefront, handling payment, the value of having spent years building a site where people are willing to come and pay for things, the value of having built a service that would allow modders to make money building off of another company's work, and so on. Valve's 30% was well deserved.
I don't think this is true in the case of purely digital products. As far as I am aware of the german implementation of this regulation it explicitly allows to waive the rights before the first download. Like many companies steam does this during checkout ("I agree..").
http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/consumer_affairs/consum...
«In the case of digital content, the cooling-off period expires when the downloading or streaming starts.»
Says you can't waive it; for digital downloads the 14 day period get's annulled once you start downloading/streaming, not at checkout. Since many more things can go wrong with software(games) then compared to linear media (books/music/video) that implementation is still questionable.
Untouched by this, at least in Germany every product sold (including Software) comes with two years of warranty ("Gewährleistung") which is established between the consumer an the reseller (at point of final sale, in this case Valve SARL) which first requires the reseller to provide a working product ("Nacherfüllung") if that's not possible the customer is entitled to a refund. Not that that this is found in many online shops in Germany, but those are the regulations that Valve has to follow by when selling software (games) to German customers.
