Not true at all. They created an attractive gaming environment and a mechanism for modding. They should get some percentage, like a royalty, but taking twice as much as the people who write the mods is patently ridiculous.
75% is not to the mod developer, 75% was to Bethesda, and 25% to the mod developer.
This is what pissed people off. (Also, the developer would only get paid if he got 100 USD to receive, meaning that he needed 400 USD in sales, meaning that probably most developers would never get any money).
Not really. The publisher and/or the developer is not diverting revenue from the mod creators to themselves. They created a platform that someone decided to extend...they are a passive beneficiary of someone else's elective work, but they aren't actively rent seeking.
No, silly, they want all of the content and functionality that they developers worked so hard for, they just don't want the developers to be compensated for it.
The core of the issue came down to the effects on the modder community.
1. Modders are hobbyists, not professionals. Many modders came right out and said they would no longer make mods under this system, because the pressure to charge means it becomes a job. They no longer would have the option to just walk away from the mod.
2. Piracy. Modders have explicitly made their mods available for free. Once you have a system where they can be charged for, you have freeloaders putting someone elses mods on steam to make money. Steam provided no protection against this, the only resolution would be filing an individual complaint or invoking DMCA, and Steam was leaving that entirely up to the mod owners to figure out.
3. This was seen as a hostile move towards Nexus, the biggest provider of mods for the games in question. As soon as this was announced, mod makers began removing their products from Nexus out of concern that they would be dishonestly put on the Steam store. As Nexus is an ad-supported service, fewer mods means less income, and it would not be due to a capitalistic business reason.
In the end, most modders don't WANT to be paid for their mods, because it's not a profession. I saw plenty of support for a donation system, however.
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