Valve on paid mods: ‘We didn’t understand exactly what we were doing’

Talk about a quick turnaround.

Five days after Valve set up its paid — and to some, controversial — mod system, the company and Bethesda have canceled it. In the past few days, the PC gaming community made it clear that it didn’t like the idea of creators being able to charge for their work on game modifications on the Steam digital store. So Valve has reversed its position as of this afternoon for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim workshop.

While previous features aimed at giving creators a share of the rewards were well received by gamers and developers, Valve says that it’s obvious that this particular change was not. The idea was to support the game modification community — Valve felt that letting creators charge for them would result in better mods for everyone. But it admits that it underestimated the difference between its existing revenue sharing model and the established, older modding community. A statement on the Steam Workshop page admits that the Skyrim community was probably not the right place to start.

“We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there’s a useful feature somewhere here,” said Valve’s Alden Kroll in a statement.

The company says that it will be working through its “dump truck of feedback” going forward.