Last week, the game-hosting platform Steam added the ability to sell game mods for a set amount in the game. Historically, mods were free and allowed players to customize their games in a way that made them stand out. However, Steam wanted to provide the designers, who put hours of coding into their creations, with some form of compensation. While this might sound honorable, not everyone supported the change, according to Forbes.
After only a few days of sales, Steam's creator Valve has decided to pull the paid-mods feature from the Skyrim workshop (which was the first test case to see if the service was actually viable and helpful). Steam published a blog post on Tuesday announcing the change: "We've (cancelled the paid-mods feature) 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."
But what was Steam's true intentions?
"[O]ur 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," the blog post continued. "We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid. We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it."
However, Valve didn't anticipate how people would actually use the service to make a profit. "We underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop," Steam added in the post.
As of Tuesday, Valve has pulled the paid service and refunded all mod purchases.
