Shortly after The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim publisher Bethesda issued a blog update explaining why it was supporting paid mods for the game on Steam, Valve has announced that it is dropping support for the feature – with Bethesda's approval.
In confrimation of the news on the Steam forums, Valve announced that those who have purchased mods already will receive a refund.
"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."
The company admitted that it did not fully consider how paid mods for the game might be viewed by the community, or how they might work.
"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.
"To help you understand why we thought this was a good idea, our 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. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid."
Valve added that it hoped to create modding communities like those for Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, "But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop. We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating.
"We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here."
The company says it will continue to consider feedback it receives from the community. While paid mods may be gone from Skyrim, Valve's statement does not preclude the possibility of the feature being in place for other games.
Bethesda says 8% of Skyrim players have used mods. It's unclear whether this is specifically referring to the game's PC market or 8% of all players. If the latter, the number of mod users over the life of the game would be around 1.6 million given the game's 20 million install base as of January 2014. It's likely the market for mods would be significantly smaller if paid mods were the norm though free mods would likely have continued to be abundant given the mod markets in other games with paid options.
