Overview
The Steam Workshop Paid Modding is an event announced by Steam which suggests to implement a way to support the people who mods games by paying a price for it’s use.[1]
Background
On April 23, 2015, Steam announced[2] that their Steam Workshop modding service will allow modders to put a price (either a fixed price or a “pay-what-you-want”) on the mods that they have made, with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim being the first game to feature paid mods in the Steam Workshop. The initial reaction of this announcement was negative due to the fact that many PC gamers do not want to pay for something that is usually for free, and that has been a staple of PC gaming since the 90s (as well as a part of Valve and Bethesda’s history). Due to the negative reaction of this, anti-paid mods steam groups such as MODGATE2015[3], Say NO! to paid mods[4], and Boycott Buying Workshop Mods[5] were formed in protest of this.
Spread
A wide portion of the Steam userbase has reacted already to the recent announcement in which it started to lead on creating groups against the idea, making petitions to remove the paid content option and spamming on the Announcement’s comments, and profiles of modders that already have entries for the game Skyrim. (Similar to the Diretide Incident in 2013)
Aside of the whole idea, many are upset aswell from the fact that Valve is gonna take 75% of the profit the mods will make from users, leaving the users with only a 25%, knowing how they did all the job on coding the stuff they create while Steam gains more for simply hosting them.
On the same day, TotalBiscuit uploaded a video about his thoughts on the new idea.
Gopher’s video concerning paid mods:
External References
[1]Steam – Introducing New Ways to Support Workshop Creators
[2]Steam – Official Announcement
[3]Steam – MODGATE2015 steam group