Steam Brings Paid Content to Workshop - And Not Everyone Likes It

The Steam Workshop has always been a great place for sharing mods, maps, and all kinds of items that you’ve created. Now it's also a great place for selling those creations.

The opening line of the Steam Workshop Paid Content page sums up the new move by Valve quite well - you can now sell your mods through Steam Workshop.

With over 24,000 free mods already available forThe Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Valve decided to use it as the first title which now allows paid content, to support modders. So much so that they have put it as their Free Weekend title this week, allowing you to try it until Monday.

There are still free mods, and pricing is up to creators - though they only keep 25% of it - as well as being fully refundable: so long as you find you don't like it before the 24-hour grace period is up. And you get no help if you buy a mod that later becomes buggy and no longer supported by the creators, just the suggestion you comment on the mod's page.

It's for reasons like these that a Change.org petition has been created, asking Steam to remove paid content. Some mod creators have taken to posting up discussions in the Skyrim section of Steam about how it is a bad idea, such as this posted by modder FilthyCasual:

This situation Valve started is terrible, because it has resulted in, or will result in, the following:

First, Valve, you have now made "modder" a dirty word here on the steam forums almost overnight. Thanks a bunch. You have now divided PC consumers and modders, when we used to be a pretty tight bunch.

Second, I now see mods going up that are little tiny swords and whatnot going up for sale. Bundles already that cost more than the game itself. In other words, I am concerned about a complete influx of mods that are completely useless and tiny and unsupported and updated, just because of money-grabbers who want a piece of the pie.

Third, this leads to microtransaction hell. Hell for consumers, and a deluge of stuff to compete against for us modders. This isn't healthy competition. It is gonna be cutthroat. Thanks again for taking the fun out of it.

Fourth, there will be inevitable stealing of other's people's content and then selling it as their own. Some may claim that because they modified another mod's content, they now have created their own mod and are free to sell. I disagree. They are making money at the expense of others.

Fifth, you have a "return policy," if it is even worth of the name, that is full of holes. First, 24hrs isn't much time to test if a mod will glitch out or not. Ever heard of a standard 14 or 30 day return policy? Let's say a consumer buys a mod, then one week later the modder releases an update. This update has a bug, and the game crashes or glitches out. Then let's say, for whatever reason (even a good one. Like real life got in the way) the modder doesn't release an update to fix the bug. Before today, big deal. You could either uninstall the mod or revert to a previous version. Given it was free, most people wouldn't complain too much. But NOW, a consumer will likely be stuck with a useless piece of software they paid good money for. Software that now is worth zilch. They will be, understandably, really upset, with no way to get their money back.

Lastly, you, Valve, are likely hurting good, legal sites like Nexus Mods as some greedy people take their mods, or the "premium versions" off the site in favor of posting to the Steam Workshop. These sites rely on advertising revenue to run, and you will very likely hurt this revenue. Why do that? You used to have a reputiation of siding with the underdog. It is not like you are in competition with people like Nexus. It is not like they are EA, taking a corner of the market. And it isn't even like you really need the money Valve. This just feels to me like a cash cow. A move EA would be proud of, sadly.

The petition is available to sign here and already has over 18,000 signatures. There is also a Steam Group you can join called Boycott Buying Workshop Mods, which has over 2,000 members.