Valve Stops Paid Mods, Internet Rejoices

So! Unless you’ve been living under a rock (which is to say, you’ve spent time outdoors like a healthy human being), you’ve probably heard about the whole debacle with Valve and Bethesda debuting the Mod Store for Steam, a marketplace of Mods where developers could post their modded creations to be purchased with cash—like the workshop, but with money. Good in theory, but in practice it was proving to be a giant bucket of poop and shame, with Valve getting the most negative feedback it’s pretty much ever gotten following the move. And despite some PR and Gabe Newell’s attempts to appease audiences over Reddit, things weren’t getting any better for Valve.

So, in a surprise move, Valve announced later this evening that the experiment was over. The people had won. The paid mod marketplace was being removed, and people who had purchased mods would be getting a full refund.

Yeah. That was fast. Uncharacteristic of Valve, I know.

Here’s the statement in full, penned by Valve employee Aldon Kroll on the Steam Community portal:

“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.”

Bethesda, the developer of Skyrim (the only game to have gotten the marketplace, as a beta test) also had something to say:

“After discussion with Valve, and listening to our community, paid mods are being removed from Steam Workshop. Even though we had the best intentions, the feedback has been clear – this is not a feature you want. Your support means everything to us, and we hear you.”

So, the battle’s over, at least for now. While I can agree that this workshop was a terrible idea (it could have very easily become what Greenlight and Early Access are now: good ideas exploited ruthlessly until they become bad ideas) I think the principle of giving creators a source of income was at least admirable, even if it wasn’t perfect. But for now, at least, bask in your victory, gamers of the world—you’ve won a battle. And isn’t that what life is all about?