Gabe Newell From Valve Talks About Paid Mods Policy

The Founder and CEO of Valve is sharing his ideas and thoughts on his company's new modding policy. In a Reddit AMA, Gabe Newell answered a number of questions about paid mods. It really is about Steam's new paid mods initiative, and how it could destroy modding as we know it. Read more below the fold (updated).

Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers stated Gabe. About half of Valve came straight out of the MOD world. John Cook and Robin Walker made Team Fortress as a Quake mod. Ice frog made DOTA as a Warcraft 3 mod. Dave Riller and Dario Casali we Doom and Quake mappers. John Guthrie and Steve Bond came to Valve because John Carmack thought they were doing the best Quake C development. All of them were liberated to just do game development once they started getting paid. Working at Waffle House does not help you make a better game.

In response to a question about Steam banning/censoring discussion about paid mods:

"Well, if we are censoring people, that's stupid. I'll get that to stop. On top of it being stupid, it doesn't work (see Top Gear forums on Jeremy Clarkson)."

Replying to Robin, the owner of Nexus Mods, who wants Valve to prevent the "DRMification" of mods:

"In general we are pretty reluctant to tell any developer that they have to do something or they can't do something. It just goes against our philosophy to be dictatorial. With that caveat, we'd be happy to tell developers that we think they are being dumb, and that will sometimes help them reflect on it a bit."

In response to a request to add a donation button to paid mod pages on Steam:

"We are adding a pay what you want button where the mod author can set the starting amount wherever they want."

In reply to concerns that Valve might require exclusivity for mods:

"Exclusivity is a bad idea for everyone. It's basically a financial leveraging strategy that creates short term market distortion and long term crying."

Newell explaining the reasoning behind the initiative:

"Our view of Steam is that it's a collection of useful tools for customers and content developers. With the Steam workshop, we've already reached the point where the community is paying their favorite contributors more than they would make if they worked at a traditional game developer. We see this as a really good step. The option of MOD developers getting paid seemed like a good extension of that."

On stolen/plagiarised content appearing in the Workshop:

"This is a straight-forward problem. Between ours and the community's policing, I'm confident that the authors will have control over their creations, not someone trying to rip them off."

Read it all here at reddit.

Update April 28th 8:32 AM

Just moments  after launching paid mods on Steam through the Skyrim Workshop, Valve is now removing the payment option based on the backlash and feedback from end-users. Valve says it will refund Steam users who purchased a Skyrim mod on Steam.

"We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing," Valve said in a post on Steam. "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."

"We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZand Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it," Valve said.

Valve added the payment option to Skyrim's Steam Workshop days ago allowing mod makers charge for their creations and set their own prices. The overall response was very negative, with Steam users submitting negative reviews of Skyrim and the initial batch of paid mods. After "pissing off the Internet," Valve co-founder Gabe Newell attempted to address customer concerns over paid mods on Reddit this weekend (see above).

"Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers," Newell said in reply to one Redditor. "If something doesn't help with that, it will get dumped. Right now I'm more optimistic that this will be a win for authors and gamers, but we are always going to be data driven."