Gabe Newell the Valve CEO has responded to the extremely negative response that followed the addition of paid mods on steam last week. The addition allows mod makers to sell their creations for any price of their choosing and will only take a portion of the profit; the developer will take 40% of the profit, Valve will take 35% and the modder takes the smallest cut at 25%.
Shortly after the addition of this feature a mod was removed as it included parts of a free mod without the original modders permission. The community has also responded with a petition against the addition of paid mods to the steam workshop, currently there are over 80,000 signatures which is a huge leap from the 40,000 signatures which was reached on the 24th April this week.
Gabe Newell has responded to the backlash by hoping to explain more about the change, what it means and why it’s a good thing via a Ask Me Anything post on reddit.
During the Q&A session the questions focused on the main concerns of the community however that didn’t stop Gabe Newell’s responses from being downvoted heavily.
Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers. If something doesn’t help with that, it will get dumped.
The goal is to increase the total investment the community makes in extending its games.
About half of Valve came straight out of the MOD world….. All of them were liberated to just do game development once they started getting paid.
It would seem that Valve will be sticking to the new feature for now and will try to wait for the community to become more positive to the feature. As a response to the concerns regarding developers stopping free mods for their games Gabe Newell informed readers that they would tell developers “they were being dumb” but dislike telling developers what they can and cannot do.
You can find the full Ask Me Anything post if you’re interested in reading deeper into the concerns and responses.
Did the post do anything to remove any of your concerns or do you feel that there was lots of issues not brought up or mentioned? Let us know in the comments!