Steam still considering implementing paid mods in the future

Back in April, Valve decided to test the waters with paid mods by allowing mod makers to sell their mods at their own price – starting with Skyrim. It was not a move that was appreciated by the community (even if the mod makers thought it was an OK idea). Valve decided to nix the idea for the time being and set everything back to normal.

Looking back, Valve agrees that they went about paid mods the wrong way. There was a huge lack of communication on the concept and they simply should not have started out with Skyrim. Speaking with Kotaku, Valve's Erik Johnson and Robin Walker looked back at the fiasco.

“I think the magnitude of the reaction was also like, ‘Did Valve just turn evil on us?’” said Johnson. “We don’t think we did, but we can see how it got miscommunicated that way. I know Robin will say this too, but it was one of the most awful weekends I’ve had working at Valve. It felt really, really terrible reading through all of that.”

The internet is known to breed some comments that don't particularly give you the 'warm and fuzzies,' but the community showed Valve that they hadn't made the right decision.

“We’re willing to take risks,” said Johnson, “but sometimes we’re just wrong. We definitely screwed up things in the details."

"If you look back specifically at the Skyrim situation,” continued Johnson, “while it wasn’t our intent, it was really easy to read that as, ‘Remember that thing you love? You pay money for that now.’ That’s an awful plan. That’s a terrible plan.”

According to Johnson, "people [modders] should be compensated" for all the work they put into their mods. As for the future of paid mods, Johnson and Walker both agreed that if Valve pursues the concept in the future, it would be done with better planning. “You need something that’s like, ‘Here’s the new thing. Somebody spent a couple years on it, and it’s amazing. It’s for sale,’” Johnson explained. “We didn’t really have anything like that [last time], so it came across poorly.”

Next time, Valve won't be "walking into a pre-existing, very mature community."

In my opinion, if Valve looks to implement it again they should focus on standalone mods. There are plenty of mods out there that depend on other mods – those mods shouldn't be priced – but the mods that depend on nothing could definitely be. A lot of hard work goes into the making of mods and if quality mod makers can make money off of their mods, they will probably produce more mods.

Then again, that's probably an unpopular opinion.