Posted in: Games, Movies, Video Games | Tagged: entertainment, gabe newell, games, Skyrim, Steam, valve, video games

Gabe Newell Has Talked About Paid For Mods On Steam

There has been a bit of a palaver developing on Steam over the last week. Valve have experimented with allowing paid mods on the service, specifically for Skyrim.

This has annoyed a lot of people who feel that mods "should" be free. While I think the system currently in place genuinely needs a big overhaul to work properly, I can't help but find that specific initial response a little entitled.

Gabe Newell has come out to talk about the service. Interestingly, he seems to have his own reservations about the service. Speaking on Reddit, he answered questions that produced pretty interesting answers.

When explaining how Valve came to the decision be said:

As a baseline, Valve loves MODs (see Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, and DOTA). The open nature of PC gaming is why Valve exists, and is critical to the current and future success of PC gaming.

Our view of Steam is that it's a collection of useful tools for customers and content developers. With the Steam workshop, we've already reached the point where the community is paying their favorite contributors more than they would make if they worked at a traditional game developer. We see this as a really good step. The option of MOD developers getting paid seemed like a good extension of that.

On evidence that several Valve moderators were closing forums complaining about the mod situation, Newell frankly said:

If we are censoring, it's dumb, ineffective, and will stop. If we are censoring people, that's stupid. I'll get that to stop. On top of it being stupid, it doesn't work (see Top Gear forums on Jeremy Clarkson).

If you are one of those people who think this is a terrible idea, the best thing you can do is just not engage. Newell said that the continuation of this feature is got to be down to numbers.

Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers. If something doesn't help with that, it will get dumped. Right now I'm more optimistic that this will be a win for authors and gamers, but we are always going to be data driven.

As I said, I'm totally in support of paid for mods. I like paying creators for content I enjoy. I also think it will eventually lead to better content as creators can dedicate more time to making great mods that they can be reimbursed for. The biggest problem now seems to be quality control and an unfair profit break down for these creators. Hopefully that will be sorted out in time .

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