14 DAY TRIAL // There's a pretty big comment storm right now on the Internet regarding the newly released feature of paid mods on Steam, and Valve boss Gabe Newell decided to address the issue in person.
Valve's worldwide digital video game distribution service, Steam, has had its share of praise and criticism, but now things are apparently out of control, thanks to the volatile nature of Internet discussions.
The founder of Valve shared some of its thoughts and intentions regarding the newly implemented modding policy in a Reddit AMA, answering a bunch of questions from members of the gaming community.
If you would like to see more of the man and less of the sometimes irrelevant comments, here's a link to the thread sorted by Q&A.
In a nutshell, Newell claimed that Valve wasn't doing this out of greed or with an evil purpose in mind, but that instead, the whole point was to make modding better for both mod creators and gamers, in the long run.
Skyrim was a great platform to experiment on
He said that Skyrim was the first game elected to pilot the new paid mod policy due to the fact that it has an extensive modding scene and that there already are numerous high-quality mods for it. It's a game that has benefited a lot from modding, and it would be one of the prime examples of modding done right.
The company's goal and the whole reason for introducing the option of paid mods was to increase the quality of existing and future mods, by enabling the people working on them to get the necessary financial support in order to be motivated to invest in increasing their quality.
Newell also pointed out that Valve itself is a company founded on mods nowadays, with a ton of employees hailing from the modding scene. The company's biggest games, Counter-Strike, Dota 2, Team Fortress, all started out as free community mods before Valve stepped in and purchased them.
He also emphasized that he viewed paid mods as an extension to the Steam Workshop, where the most popular content creators were already earning more than at a traditional game developer job, and the option to also pay mod developers seemed like a natural extension of that.
The goal is to make things better for users and creators
In the long run, the goal is to improve the quality of content creation, but if the changes are found not to serve that purpose, they will be dropped.
"Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers. If something doesn't help with that, it will get dumped. Right now I’m more optimistic that this will be a win for authors and gamers, but we are always going to be data driven," Newell stated.
Valve's boss also pointed out that the 75 percent cut that his company and the game's developer get was not set by Valve, and that it would be different for each title, and that several alternative solutions are being considered, including a donation button where users would be able to pay what they want for a certain mod.
He also pledged to look into addressing some of the other problems identified by the community, namely the way that Steam Greenlight works, and the lackluster customer support provided by Steam representatives.