"again"? They never stopped thinking about it. Bethesda always said paid mods are going to to stay. This is your god now.

Valve is only doing this to line pockets with more cash.They try and pretend they do it for the modders yet they want to take a cut.This will just lead to more problems than solutions like last time.Stolen work, broken mods, paying for simple line edits.

In the end, I will never buy mods on Steam as long as Gaben has his greedy hands in the cookie jar.It is a nice idea but no easy way to go about it.The average Steam user is not going to be able to afford to pay for every mod so in the end the creators may make some money but only for the few willing to pay for every mod the others will just pick and choose which ones to download or just pirate them.I know some will cry but it cost money to host mods.Well they make a couple billion and no longer really make any games so unless they are spending billions on running Steam i doubt them not taking a cut from mods is going to break them.

"It makes sense to us. Valve continues to pay modders, map makers, and modelers whose work is selected for publication in Team Fortress 2, CS:GO, and Dota 2".

They act like they are doing modders a service when they get the money back they pay those modders with profits from selling items from said games.Who is covering my cost of paying modders?You can not pat yourself on the back as if you're doing them a service when you stand to to lose nothing from it.

Mods are just another EA type deal as they may not be complete and may never get complete, may be buggy and broken or barely work or may work great are you willing to risk t for a mod?

User-generated content (=mods) is already paid for in several games, most notably some of Valve's, like CS:GO and DOTA2.

This is totally a non-news: not only the post is re-using old quotes from when Valve pulled back out of Skyrim paid mods, a sign that there isn't much more to say, but that Valve thinks more games should have payware UGC was already a given.

FWIW I'm fine with people being able to put a price tag on their work, if so they wish. Then, of course, it's up to people to decide whether the mods worth the asking price or not, exactly like for games.

What I think, however, is that there will be a small elite capable of producing content of high enough quality to be actually given the money they're asking for, and everyone else - much like you have a tons of apps for mobile phones, but relatively few, in percentage terms, actually can make a good living out of it.

The other question is what it happens to the modding ecosystem. For instance, if the next TES game introduced paid mods as an integral part of its modding, so that there is no bomb dropped like on a Skyrim, but a level field instead, what happens to the modding ecosystem?

For the most part, it may turn out to be a hollow concern though, indie devs have proven that there can be a pretty open and friendly ecosystem where information is not withheld but voluntarily shared.

so it begins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwhUrk91BrQ

Talking as a creator content myself I can easily say that IMHO paid mods are totally fine, as long as you give choice to the creator to put them for free and you start over on a new game.
Adding paid mods on any well-established game with an already active modding community (like Skyrim) was the worst decision they could ever make.

Of course a donation button on EVERY non-paid mod would be the icing on the cake, coming from the open-source world II can only appreciate that.

Finally paid mods should be thoroughly tested by the parent game developers before being published on the workshop (like DOTA2 skins for example) and should be subject to the same refund policy games have (since it's quite hard to know what to expect).

"Modders need to be paid, this is an outrage. Talented, invested, independent individuals modding games should be incentivised to promote further interactions"

btw we take 75%, just a little something to wet our beak

View attached image.

Not this bullshit again. Like everyone else said they could just add a tip/donate button to the mod page and they will still make money.
The problem with some mods is they require like 4-5 other mods just to work, so now you have to buy all of those and then hope they are all kept updated.

it's ok, they want their 15%.

"Modders need to be paid, (and we want a part of that)." - Valve

Lets leave the decision to the modding community. And if there are going to be paid mods, they should not be locked to steam.

Modders with good quality work should absolutely be compensated, I agree.

However, the fact it's said by company happy to pay item creators in TF2, DotA, and CSGO all of 12.5% of profit their item makes (while pocketing the other 87.5% despite the fact item creator did 95% of the job for them, not to mention creators getting paid only for direct sales, all proceeds from secondary sales and steam market being kept by Valve) kind of makes me think gabe has padding his wallet as his first, second, and really only concern...

I was watching youtube while reading this post and this happened! clickbait sponsored by youtube.

View attached image.

should be a donation button.. rather than having a you must pay to use mods... I think forcing people to pay for mods which may or may not work, and can require 5 or 6 additional mods to work correctly, and that aren't officially supported and can be easily stolen is a slippery slope.. Anyone who can make high quality mods by themselves aren't going to want Valve taking their % off the top, any one who can make mods solo normally does a far better job when they can work with a bunch of other people doing little bits at a time, when you introduce money to the mix, bad things follow..

With that said, some modders can completely alter a game for the better,, on the other hand, you pay for things which are supposed to be supported, unless Valve has some plans in place to ensure those paid mods aren't going to be broken or have some quality control, I just don't think this is going to work..

Furthermore, Valve will do this, easy way to make money, even if they only take 20%, that's 20% they are taking for doing nothing at all.

They never abandoned it. When they took off Skyrim's paid mods, they clearly stated it's only because Skyrim which had strong footing for mod scene wasn't the proper place to start.

So yeah, not surprised at all.

Donation button will not work. They will maybe put it together alongside purchase button, but I'm sure people would just download than donating. Just look at those free software out there.

inb4 Change.org again

View attached image.

I don't agree that a donation button is the only answer.

I think one option would be to leave it up to the mod creator to decide whether the mod is free or not.

If it's up to the content creator and this is implemented on a new game (rather than a 3-year-old game that already has thousands of mods) it should be fine.

I'm curious what would happen if Valve let the modders decide if they'd be paid and how mucn.
I get the feeling Valve would still catch the brunt of this, and there'd still be plenty of complaining from the community.

Really Valve, really?

do we really need the same community meltdown again?

ugh, just..ugh.

Heres the fact: forcing a bloody paywall wont suddenly make people who had zero intention to pay anything to, well, pay up. If they want to drive up mod piracy yet again, they are on a good way to it.

LiEat and Alicemare are free to access on the developer's site, yet they both have more than 1k reviews, likely multiple times of that were purchased. I think it's a good proof that if someone delivers good quality, people will actually "throw money at them". Raising visiblity and ease to donate would be a good way to help the modders.
For example I'm not willing to give a single dollar to the guy who made SkyUI if Bethesda gets a fucking cent out of it - it's a terrible loophole to help developers get money from the work of modders who fix their shit. I'm curious how big of a cut Valve/Bethesda/devs would like to take this time....

No, mod authors absolutely deserve ability to create paid mods. There's nothing wrong with this.

It was bad idea to start with Skyrim, since mod scene was already used to free mods and authors started charging for mods that used to be free, were stolen, etc.

And it was bad idea to be unmoderated, so people starting charging for simple mods. It needs curation so only good quality mods can be paid.

Edit: Game developers cut shouldn't be like 50%, so mod author gets majority of income, Skyrim had most going to Bethesda.

"Valve deserves to be paid for modders work" -t. Gabe the greedy merchant.

View attached image.

Donation. Button.

just another way for scammers and alike to make money off steam if this hits live

First of all there is just too big a scene of modding available in one place, I mean the Nexus of course. It gathers hundreds of games, tens of thousands of modders, has it's own app making installing mods for most popular games out there a matter of two clicks. AND it has the Donate button, allowing mod users show appreciation for the mod. What Valve proposes is "we will let you sell mods on Steam for XX% of the revenues." I would never EVER use any system like that. EVER! This is wrong, having to pay any percent to a third party is outright wrong. I did donate to authors of several mods on Nexus, because I loved their work, and I was able to simply make a donation to their PayPal. I refuse to ever use third party donation/purchase system where any amount of what I am giving the author will go to a parasite.

Just an another attempt of Valve to earn more money without doing anything...