Do you still have mixed feelings about Valve’s aborted launch for paid mods on Steam? One developer chimes in late, but we think his opinion is worth reading.
Paul Boyer, lead designer of Galactic Civilizations 3, actually started out making mods himself. He talked about getting shouted at for starting to sell icon packs, but the community managed to work something out. Some mods made money off their content, but players still got a lot of free packs.
Boyer says that Valve chose the wrong game in The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. This was a game where fans were making free mods for years, and were obviously already used to this arrangement. Boyer argues that no matter what rationale Bethesda, Valve, and other stakeholders made, fans simply would not accept the change.
Instead, Boyer says that Valve should have launched this with a newer game, which could grow its community with a paid mods model.
Ultimately, Boyer has this to say about paid mods, and why the industry and fans need to embrace it:
Eventually I think some kind of payment model would work for modders and actually would be great for them, great for the game industry. You could get these people like Derek Paxton, who did the Fall From Heaven mod (for Civilization), he did that for free, but he became a really great designer and eventually got a job.
If you can make money from modding, you can spend more time doing it, and then eventually you can start making your own games. I think there’s some strength to it, but I don’t blame people for getting mad about it, especially when it was floated with a game like Skyrim that has such a vibrant community around it already.
