Steam Could Bring Back Paid Mods

After all the vitriol and flames and hate and internet outrage that came about the last time Valve tried to implement paid mods, they decided that maybe they went about it the wrong way. Valve is still intent on bringing back paid mods but they want to do things very differently.

Kotaku managed to get in word with Valve's Erik Johnson and Robin Walker, where they explained how things went a bit sour with the paid mods they tried introducing into Skyrim. Johnson explained how they went wrong and that they would still like to find ways to compensate modders, but certainly not in the way that they originally tried doing it...

If you look back specifically at the Skyrim situation, [...] 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.

Originally, Valve and Bethesda worked together to implement paid mods into the Steam community, allowing mod creators to put fees on their works and charge for it. Some modders thought this was a great idea, while others though it was a terrible idea. Gamers were all mostly against it and Valve eventually killed paid mods.

Some developers were backing the idea of allowing modders to earn money from their projects while some also sided with the modders and gamers who felt as if it would do nothing more than fracture than the modding community.

One of the big problems was that a lot of the popular mods out there for Skyrim are collaborative works between multiple people and teams. What happens when X modder decides to charge money for a mod where he had help from Y and Z modders? Do Y and Z also get a share of X's profits? Also, what if Y doesn't want their mod paid for... what if they want it to stay free?

In addition to collaborative works between modders entering some very gray territory, there was also an issue with copyrighted works. What about those lightsabers in Skyrim? Or how about those Dr. Who mods? What about that jacket from Shenmue? How about Goku from Dragon Ball Z? There's a string of complications that come into play when talking about charging for mods, and many gamers saw it as nothing more than a minefield for greed.

In the end, many gamers felt as if one of the best parts about the modding community is that it's done with the intent of the creator wanting to use their time to create something cool because they love it and not necessarily to make a quick buck. And yes, there were a few modders during the test run of paid mods who were putting up things to sell just to make an easy dollar.

There was an argument to be made that charging for mods would devalue a lot of work and cause a lot of people to pump out low-quality content to make as much money as possible, as quickly as possible.

Johnson nor Walker really addressed the finer points of contention against paid mods in the Kotaku piece, but Johnson did make an argument for Valve sticking to their guns about believing that people need some way to be compensated for their work, saying...

People who make stickers in Counter-Strike, or item sets in DOTA, or who play professional Counter-Strike or DOTA, or who make mods—we think of all those as part of the same group of people, who are creating value for our online communities,It’s all user-generated stuff. Even people just playing games are adding value. And we feel like people should be compensated for that value, whether it’s through dollars or item drops. We need to be the people who are making sure that value is being compensated for appropriately. We think people getting paid is really important.

Whether or not the community will be on board the next time they decide to implement paid mods is completely up in the air. But they really need to put communication first, they need to discuss this as openly as possible, they need to do a test run on a game that doesn't have a built-in and established modding community and they need to make sure they deal with all of the legal red-tape before setting the feature loose into a pen of wolves.