Valve Removes Payment Feature From Skyrim Workshop Again

Well, that didn’t last long. Just a couple of days after Valve introduced a new feature that allowed modders to sell their work on Steam, the feature has been pulled again. The feature had nothing but the best intentions but it was a swing and miss at the same time. It didn’t take long before the first online petitions ran with the aim to get the feature removed. It even cost Steam $1 million extra in staff costs just to reply to all the users contacting them with their concerns and complaints about the new feature.

“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. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.”

In a blog post, Valve-employee Alden explained the reasons. The main goal behind the entire idea was to make the modding community even better, allow the exceptional people to earn a buck for the work and the hope for mods to turn into future full games like Dota, Counter-Strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor have done already. But it probably wasn’t the best idea to start with a game that has as dedicated and big a modding community as Skyrim does.

“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,” said the blog post. “We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there’s a useful feature somewhere here.”

Any user who spent money on a mod during the few days that the system was running will get a full refund of their money. Most users appreciate this news when looking at the feedback, but at the same time they urge Steam to add a donation button instead. Make it voluntary instead, so people who want to pay for what the think is good work can do so and skip the bad ones.