That certainly didn’t last long. It was only five days ago that Valve and Bethesda implemented an arrangement that would see mod creators publishing their work on Steam Workshop for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim able to charge for their work. The arrangement has now been cancelled after immense community outcry and refunds will be issued to anyone who paid any mods.
The deal itself allowed mod creators to sell their (up until last week) free work on Steam, with Valve and Bethesda taking a meaty 75% cut. The decision led to widespread community condemnation, angry mod creators and even saw Valve’s CEO Gabe Newell, ordinarily held up as a lord and savior by the gaming community – being downvoted straight to hell when he attempted to explain the new system in an AMA on Reddit.
Valve employee Aldon Kroll released a statement on the Steam Community portal about the matter that reads:
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 have 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 have also released an exceedingly long statement that attempts to explain their own reasoning behind the scheme and why they’ve decided to go with Valve on this one and shelve it. As I say, a mighty long read but a really interesting look behind the curtain for anyone seeking a method to the madness.
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.
Valve and Bethesda haven’t completely given up on the idea just yet though. Kroll says that Valve will be looking at other ways to “start iterating” paid mods. Hopefully it works out a bit better for everyone next time.
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