Valve caves, drops paid mods from Steam

The last few days have seen a lot of gamers up in arms over the paid-mods scandal from last week, when it was announced that Valve had introduced a system whereby mod makers could charge for content they created through Steam’s Workshop. The first game to support the new system was Skyrim, one of the world’s most popular modding scenes and the fans were not happy.

After thousands and thousands of complaints, Valve has now gone back on its initial plan and has removed the paid for mods feature, stating that it may return in the future after more consideration, but that clearly its current implementation wasn’t wanted.

“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,” Valve’s spokesperson said.

It later went on to explain that the reason it wanted to add a payment system to the Workshop was to allow mod makers to work on their creations full time and therefore, give them the chance to create exciting new games like ones today that are based on mods, like Counter Strike, DotA, DayZ and Killing Floor.

“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,” Valve said.

The thoughts from gamers appear to be: make it voluntary. Would you guys be happy if Valve just put a simple donation button on the modder’s pages?