After a whirlwind of customer fury, Bethesda and Valve have changed their minds about paid for Skyrim mods in the Steam Workshop. Details about the decision were posted today to the Steam Community forum.
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.
~Steam Community user Alden
Background
Last week, the option to charge a download fee for Skyrim Mods was added to the Steam Workshop with goal of rewarding eager armchair developers for their hard work and dedication to Skyrim as a platform. The populous, however, was massively displeased among fears of uninformed consumers being duped by false promises. Users complained that the modding community has been successfully donation based for many years, and accused Valve of wanting a larger slice of pie.
In reality, Valve was only entitled to its usual 30% distribution fee, not the 75% claimed by some confused users on Reddit.
First Valve gets 30%. This is standard across all digital distributions services and we think Valve deserves this. No debate for us there.
The remaining is split 25% to the modder and 45% to us. We ultimately decide this percentage, not Valve.
~Bethesda Blog
In protest, the Skyrim Steam page was hit with a torrent of negative reviews, taking its user rating from 98% to 91% nearly overnight. As of this writing, hundreds of negative reviews populate the “Recent” category, universally referring to paid mods.
What do you think readers? Should game mods be monetized with developers and distributors getting a piece of the action? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter @COGconnected.
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