Valve Closes Door on Steam Workshop's Paid Mod Program

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Easy come, easy go

Mere days after opening up the Steam Workshop to paid mods, Valve has decided to reverse course and go back to the way things were. In other words, modders can no longer sell their Skyrim mods, which was the first (and only) game to kick off the short-lived initiative. In a statement explaining the reversal, Valve said that jumping into a years old modding community was a pretty poor decision.
Valve went into this newest venture with good intentions, and of course to make money -- modders would only receive 25 percent of the revenue they generated, which was one of the knocks against the program. Nevertheless, Valve says that in the past, allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards has been received well, but it's now obvious that this is a different animal.
"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," Valve said. "We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here."
The hotly debated program received criticism from a number of different angles. In addition to taking issues with royalties, gamers feared that paid mods would divide the community, many of which want to keep these things free. There was also concern over policing the mods for stolen content, along with crappy mods being put out by people looking to make a quick buck.
All these concerns led to a petition on Change.org that received over 133,000 signatures. This no doubt played a role in Valve's decision to end the program, along with the "dump truck of feedback" that flooded its inboxes.
On the flip side, some big names supported the program, including Garry Newman (Garry's Mod) and FMPONE (Counter Strike modder). You can throw Gabe Newell into the mix as well, who recently took to Reddit to answer questions about the now defunct program.
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