Valve's New Paid-for Mods

[General Naga]

What already? I thought it was just a few individuals which pulled their mods?!

Edit:

Yep it's official

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.

 

[calgoblin]

Yeah I read Bethesda's statement last night. I don't think this is the last we'll see of it though, Valve will bring it back once they've implemented changes from some of the feedback. Whether the 25% thing from the statement will still stand when it returns I don't know, but good on Valve and Bethesda for respecting their modding communities and removing this early broken system. I guess now we wait.

"This is not some money grabbing scheme by us. Even this weekend, when Skyrim was free for all, mod sales represented less than one per cent of our Steam revenue," Bethesda added. "More games are coming to Paid Mods on Steam soon, and many will be at 25 per cent, and many won't. We'll figure out over time what feels right for us and our community. If it needs to change, we'll change it."

From the Bethesda steatement, taken from Eurogamer.

 

[General Naga]

I wouldn't mind a pay-what-you want approach provided there was an option to pay nothing. In that sort of arrangement I wouldn't mind it coming back - provided it didn't force players to pay for mods.

 

[Simon]

Paid mods are removed from steam.

Just checked and it seems they are removed. Our Lord listens to us

I think many developers should listen to community more often like Valve

 

[volcol]

By all means, a donation could be an option (capped at a certain amount) but I've been modding for a loooong time and I'd never dream of making money from it.

 

[Simon]

By all means, a donation could be an option (capped at a certain amount) but I've been modding for a loooong time and I'd never dream of making money from it.

Mods should be made for fun not for money, but donation button wouldnt hurt anyone

 

[Aniallator]

but donation button wouldnt hurt anyone

Only the TW devs

 

[Pjosip]

Don't feed the bloody rascals fish and chips! They would never get off their asses and actually work on the mods if you do!