14 DAY TRIAL // Valve has announced that it will be removing the payment feature from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Steam Workshop, no longer allowing mods to be sold for real-world currency.
Last week, Valve and Bethesda decided to pilot an initiative meant to offer mod-makers a source of income in order to be able to support their efforts, but it was met with an extensive backlash by the gaming community as a whole.
As a consequence of that, the two companies have decided to shutter the program, stating that everyone who spent money on a mod during the brief period in which the initiative was active would be getting a full refund.
"We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing. We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different," the official announcement on the Steam Community boards states.
Valve boss Gabe Newell has personally revealed that the whole goal of paid mods was to provide a better experience for everyone involved in the process.
Valve itself owes a lot to mods
As Valve now owns several extremely popular video games that started life as a mod, including Dota, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress, and there are several other high-profile titles on Steam that began life as a mod, such as DayZ and Killing Floor, the goal was to enable mod makers to transition into this more organically, and to provide them with a funding option.
The company already uses a revenue sharing model that allows users who create content for various video games to monetize their work, which is sought to expand, but now admits that stepping into an years-old modding community and changing the rules might have been a faux-pas.
Valve has pledged to take all the constructive feedback it received into account for the future, as it still has maintained that paid mods would be a useful feature, but that they would require a more thoughtful implementation.
While the feedback from the community was largely negative, numerous voices spoke out in favor of making paid mods a thing, including people who actually made a living out of doing precisely that, the most notable of which is the creator of Garry's Mod, Garry Newman, who posted his views on the matter on his blog.
Bethesda explains its good intentions
Bethesda, the other company involved in the scandal, has posted a new blog entry trying to explain the reasoning behind the initiative, assuring everyone that it had the best intentions at heart, and that it was not looking to nickel-and-dime anyone, or take unfair advantage of other people's work, but instead empower content creators using a model that already exists in the industry.
Many people are of the opinion that Bethesda, Valve, and other companies should hire talented modders or support them in some way with their own resources, instead of just taking their money, which is how the prototype model for paid mods was largely seen.
In addition to this, many voices opined that adding a donation button to the already free mods would be a much better way to reward people for their hard work, instead of simply applying a flat fee for their products.
If you're interested to find out more or see the gaming community's opinions on the matter, you can join the discussion on Reddit.