Valve backtracks on paid mods initiative

Just days following the launch of paid Workshop content on Steam, Valve has decided to remove the feature.

After strong negative feedback from users, the company announced it is going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. Anyone who spent money on a mod will be refunded.

"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."

Valve says their 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. The plan should have resulted in better mods for everyone, both free & paid.

"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."

In late January, support was added for third party games to sell in game items created by members of the community. Valve also announced over $57 mil has been paid to community content creators since Workshop debuted in October 2011.

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