This was a huge hubbub and the first time Valve acted in a completely anti-consumer greedy manner. It was disheartening, since Valve is more or less a shining beacon of virtue in an industry of abuse and scumbags, so to see them attempt to monetize one of the great things that people do for the benefit of their community was hard to stomach.
It’s not a good idea, for so many reasons. First of all, you clearly don’t actually need financial incentives to get people to create these mods - because they’ve been doing it in astounding numbers for 20 years now, all out of goodwill, the desire to make something they like better, and the desire to make things better for others. There’s been no shortage of people willing to do hard work for their own reasons and not for financial gain at all, although not infrequently a good quality modder will be hired by a game developer.
It screws up the incentives. In the case of Bethesda games, so much of the modding is to fix broken, poorly designed, or otherwise negative issues with their games. There are things like the unofficial skyrim patch which is just a mod that eliminates hundreds of bugs. Imagine if they could charge $5 for that. Now Bethesda, rather than spending money to improve their game, is actually making money by releasing a broken game and having the community fix it? Imagine what poor elements they could put into their games that would necessitate mods to fix, meanwhile they get to monetize the fixing.
Games are already monetized out the ass. Endless DLC. Cash shops in games. Do we need another way that you’ll be paying out microtransactions bit by bit instead of just being able to buy a game like you could 10 years ago?
People will end up paying for things that don’t work. Sometimes a game update will break a mod. Sometimes one mod will interfere with another. When you’re getting amateur work for free, you just have to live with this. But imagine if you paid $5 or $10 for a mod, and then the next patch rendered it unusable. And the creator decided he was done and moving onto new projects. Well, you’re fucked. Something you paid for no longer works.
Valve policed the mod workshop badly, and indicated they would continue to do so. People were taking other people’s work and posting it as their own, and making money from it. Both direct theft (posting someone else’s work under false pretenses) and indirectly by incorporating elements of someone else’s work into your own without permission. Valve’s attitude towards this sort of abuse was indifferent.
Mods are often a collaborative process, with many people working on them, and people using the work of others to expand or enhance their own work. When you’re all doing it for the love of the craft, as a hobby, this is quite natural and easy. When you’re competing to make a buck, that co-operation and permission to share and build on each other’s work evaporates. It becomes complicated to even figure out who to pay, when the work was collaborative and built on previous work. So everyone would be out for themselves, and the work would suffer from it. Lots of people are using software, too, to create these mods which is free to use for non-commercial purposes but requires payment for commercial use. That would create a legal mess as well as a disincentive to use other people’s work, even if given freely, if you can’t verify that none of it came from things that were only licensed for non-commercial use.
It just seems incredibly greedy because game makers already greatly benefit from including mod support in their games. The community makes their game better, for free! They should be thanking them, shearing them. It fixes bugs they put in there, it refines elements that the game did poorly, even creates totally new content. There are games that wouldn’t be worth playing except for the mod community. Game developers/publishers already benefit from modding through increased sales by having a better product. Double-dipping by benefiting from the community making your game better (which you should have done yourself) is treating someone creative and generous that benefits you as a resource to be milked. Making double what they did from the transaction just makes it sickening. It’s actually worse than that - the mod had to sell for $400 total before Valve could be bothered to give the creator a cent. So if you made some niche mod for a dollar that 300 people decided to buy, well, you wouldn’t see a cent from it, but Valve and Bethesda would.
Valve already had non-greedy ways to reward content creators. In CSGO, one of their games, they accepted really good community maps into their official rotation. And if you wanted, for a buck, you could become a supporter of that map. It just meant you’d have a little icon on the scoreboard when you played that map. It was just a way of saying that you appreciated the work and wanted to give back a little bit to the person who made it. Why not have a similar system for mods? Give a streamlined way to give modders a completely optional donation. No one could object to that, and it would do some of the things you claim you wanted to do in terms of creating financial rewards for modders.
I could go on, but that’s enough for now. Valve wanted to risk destroying what was one of the greatest things there is in gaming, all in the name of adding even more ways to monetize our games. It would’ve been toxic to the modding scene, expensive for the end user, and possibly corrupting to both the game designers and the modders.
I’m a huge Valve fan and I’ve basically contended that they are the most benevolent market leader I’ve ever seen - they have the PC gaming industry by the balls and never did anything evil with it, even though they could’ve. They’ve always been extremely consumer friendly. This was the very first time I’ve questioned that. It was extremely discouraging. But on the plus side, they listened to the HUGE negative reaction to this and pulled it very quickly. So good on them.