Valve pulls the plug on paid mods on Steam, purchasers of Skyrim mods to receive refunds

Just as quickly Valve introduced paid mods on Steam it’s pulled the plug on them. In an announcement on Steam today Valve’s Aldon Kroll said that the paid mods scheme would be removed from the Skyrim workshop.

All purchases will be refunded now that the scheme is defunct “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,” Kroll wrote. “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.”

Kroll wrote that Valve’s intention with the paid mods scheme was to reward those members of the community who created mods and to encourage developers to foster the modders of their titles. “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.”

Kroll admits that Valve underestimated the effect paid mods on the long established modding community of Skyrim would be and suggests that it was the wrong place to start. “We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there’s a useful feature somewhere here,” he wrote.

Since Valve initiated the paid mods program, many users have been dissatisfied, with some even creating free protest mods. The featured image of this post is from a mod by amusquiz which gives players a protest placard. Protest sign: No paying for mods is currently one of them most popular mods in Skyrim workshop. Goes to show that sometimes a protest can work wonders.

What’s your take on the paid mods issue?