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Valve Removes Paid Workshop Mods for Skyrim


bp9801

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Last Thursday, Valve introduced paid mods to the Steam Workshop for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. A hobby that had previously been free for every PC gamer suddenly had a price tag attached to some parts, and the Internet voiced its concerns and hatred of the idea. It seems that Valve and Bethesda have heard the cries, and as such paid mods are now gone from Skyrim's Workshop. Anyone who bought a mod (or more) will receive a refund for the full purchase price.

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.

Valve's Alden Kroll said the company didn't seem to understand the community it was stepping in to and more than likely underestimated. There's paid content for Valve's own games, but a community where mods were free for years probably wasn't the best place to start. Kroll did say Valve believes there's still a "useful feature" for it eventually, which doesn't exactly bode well, especially if it returns for something like Fallout 4.

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.

At any rate, paid mods were a short lived experiment for Skyrim, and hopefully one that stays that way for all non-Valve games on Steam.

Source: Steam



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