Paid mods pulled from Steam Workshop, purchases to be refunded

Paid mods are no more.

"We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free and paid. But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim’s workshop."

Steam Workshop's controversial new paid mods feature has been axed in response to community feedback, Valve has announced.

"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," Valve wrote in a Steam Community post.

"We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.

"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."

Valve said its main goal with the feature was to allow mod makers to work on their creations full time if that was their wish, and to encourage better support for mod users.

"We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free and 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," Valve said.

"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."

Valve said it missed the mark "pretty badly", but that there's a "useful feature" in there somewhere. It'll be looking at further feedback if you want to keep talking about it.

Bethesda also issued a short statement on the matter.

"After discussion with Valve, and listening to our community, paid mods are being removed from Steam Workshop. Even though we had the best intentions, the feedback has been clear – this is not a feature you want," the developer said.

"Your support means everything to us, and we hear you."

This is probably pretty disappointing to the mdoders involved; Bethesda said some Skyrim modders were earning more than its own staff.