Last week Valve announced that modders will be able to start selling their mods on Steam and price it any way they see fit. It seemed like a good idea as it helps to consolidate the mods into a single location and help make developers some money for their efforts as well. However there was a copyright issue that was raised that resulted in one mod being voluntarily removed, which led to the question of how will Valve deal with such instances in the future.In fact some gamers weren’t too happy with the idea of such mods in the first place and believed that gamers who are appreciative should just donate money instead of being forced to pay for it. So as it stands, the community does seem a bit divided on the whole issue. That being said Valve’s Gabe Newell recently took to Reddit where he addressed some of the concerns gamers had about the idea of paid-for mods.
Newell for the most part defended the idea of paid-for mods, but also stated that if in the long-run it proves to be detrimental to the community, they will do away with the feature. “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.”
We suppose it does seem a bit early to be calling Valve’s efforts doomed, but what do you guys think? Is this the future of mod development where developers can sell their mods like how developers sell plug-ins for Photoshop? Or do you think the current method of donations is still the best way to go about it?
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