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

Valve Cancels Paid For Mods Program And Offers Refunds

Well, that was quick. Less than a week after being instated, Valve have pulled their paid for mod system. The company have scrapped the controversial implementation that allowed mod makers to charge for their work. This launched last Thursday for Skyrim Workshop support.

In an extensive letter to the community, Valve said:

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.

As I stated the other day, I was fully supportive of this program even if the system needed much tighter regulation. I don't think the there is anyway you could make a confident first step into this system, but given time, I'm sure it would have levelled out. I'd have liked to see this given time to grow, but alas. Seems we will never see that now.

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!