Valve Does A 180, Removes Paid Option For Mods

Last week Valve launched a new feature on Steam that allowed modders to sell their creations. This led to some controversy as some believed that mods should remain as it is which is largely donation-based. Valve’s Gabe Newell then took to Reddit to state that the company would pull the feature if they deemed it was bad for the community.

We assumed this meant that maybe they would let it run for a couple of weeks or months to see how things would pan out. but that did not happen as Valve has officially pulled the plug on the payments feature for its mods. It seems the issue here has to do with Valve underestimating the differences between the communities based around their own games, like Half-Life, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, and etc., versus that of communities built around other developers’ games, like Skyrim which has it own dedicated modding community.

According to a statement released by Valve, “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.”

Is this disappointing? Slightly, as we would have loved to see how it panned out in the future once things stabilized, but with copyright issues such as other modders using assets from other mods without permission, it could have ended up pretty messy.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gaming
Tags: Steam (Valve), Valve