Valve has controversially reversed it’s recent introduction of paid mods. For those of you who have been following this story over the last week, Valve and Bethesda introduced a system where ‘modders’ could sell their designs on the Steam Workshop. However the moment this was introduced it was met which huge backlash by the modding community.
Skyrim was the first Bethesda game to see paid mods introduced, with many fans stating that it was user made mods that were keeping the game alive after it’s release in 2011. Shortly after they were introduced, reviews of the game were made negative by many in the community desperate to send a message to Valve that paid mods were simply not wanted. Many fans suggested perhaps a donation option where donations could be made volunatarily rather than mods being a compulsory purchase.
PC modding has almost always been free for most games, it’s what makes the PC gaming community so great. Something you don’t get to do in front of a console. Valve have released a statement to the community and had the following to add:
“We’re going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we’ll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.
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.
To help you understand why we thought this was a good idea, our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid. We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it.
But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim’s workshop. We understand our own game’s communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there’s a useful feature somewhere here.
Now that you’ve backed a dump truck of feedback onto our inboxes, we’ll be chewing through that, but if you have any further thoughts let us know. “
What is your opinon on this one? Were Valve and Bethesda right to start charging for mods? Or would this have led to users going elsewhere for their mods? Let us know your comments below or on social media, we’d love to hear them……
