It’s been a strange couple of days. Despite having God-like status with the majority of the Internet’s vocal gamers, Gabe Newell has received overwhelming criticism these past couple of days for his company’s decision to start implementing a system that would enable modders to charge money for their content on Steam. Universally slammed by gamers and modders alike, Valve has quickly decided to pull the plug on the program and has admitted its mistake.
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.
