Valve Listens to Users and is Removing Payment Feature From Workshop

133,013 signees to the petition over at Change.org, one AMA by Gabe Newell and an absolute ton of comments across reddit, Steam Community, Bethesda forums and other sources, Valve have announced that the paid mods are no more.

Valve have nerfed all community posts into one big post - you can find the post we linked to last week here, incase you wanted to read it in its entirety - and posted up to explain what's going on.

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.

Alden then goes on to explain the thinking behind the paid mods in the first place:

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.

Hopefully this means that next time they will consult the community before leaping into something similar.