Steam users speak out against paid mods

It has recently become possible for Steam users to offer mods for games for a fee. However, not everyone is happy with that: a petition against allowing paid mods has already been signed by 70,000 people within two days.

The petition was started by Cyand Wondel on Change.org. At the time of writing, it has been signed by about 70,000 people, while the petition has been running for less than two days. Within 24 hours of the start, there were already 50,000 signatories. With the petition, Steam users want to ensure that Valve rolls back the possibility of paid mods on the gaming platform. This concerns content that is created by users and that is sold without the intervention of Valve or the developer of the game. The company has not yet responded to the action.

According to the petition’s signatories, content provided by fellow users in the Steam Workshop, the marketplace for mods, should remain available for free. The ability to sell mods for a fee was recently introduced by Valve. The company does require that new content is made visible for some time without the option to purchase. That is to prevent copying of content: the community would first have the time to unmask copycats, or so the idea.

Incidentally, publishers or developers of the game a mod is made for can control how much of the revenue the mod maker is allowed to keep. Currently, the concept of paid mods is only applied to Skyrim: it turns out that makers are only allowed to keep 25 percent of the income themselves. As a result of the transfer of income to the publisher, the donate button has also disappeared: therefore users can no longer voluntarily transfer an amount of money as a thank you for a mod.