Valve may be working on reintroducing paid mods on Steam

Valve may be re-introducing paid mods on Steam in the near future. That would be apparent from minor adjustments to texts on Workshop pages of mods and in the Steam Translation Server.

The minor tweaks here and there caught the eye of members of the Facepunch forum and were collected in a topic on Neogaf. Now when the creator of a mod subscribes to his or her own creation, he or she will get the message ‘You can subscribe to this item for free because you are listed as its creator’. This implies that Steam users who are not so cannot subscribe to a mod for free. At the moment, however, users are not required to pay for mods on Steam. The change in the text is most likely done recently.

In addition, a Facepunch forum member reported about a month ago that new texts related to paid mods had been added to the Steam Translation Server. That’s where volunteers pick up English texts to translate for Valve. “Valve just added a load of strings to the server related to paid mods, creator-controlled monetization, profit sharing and more,” he says. It is not clear what those strings are exactly.

Valve introduced the option for paid mods in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim in April of last year. However, after a storm of criticism, the company reversed this decision. The system was hampered by plagiarism among mod makers and users complained about the questionable aspect of paid mods containing copyrighted material from another party. Valve itself has not made any statements about the reintroduction of paid mods, but already said when they were abolished in April of 2015 that it was a provisional abolition.