The backlash to the
recent
addition of paid modifications to the Steam Workshop has caused Valve to
backtrack from the plan (thanks Mashiki). A
Steam Community Group Announcement from Valve's Alden Kroll states they are
killing the program and offering refunds to those who paid for mods for
The
Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
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've
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.