When Valve Corp. announced that it would be allowing content creators to sell mods for games like Skyrim through Steam Workshop, it probably did not expect the extremely negative response it got from its users. Fearing that monetization could ruin the open and collaborative nature of the mod community, thousands of gamers have been criticizing the move all over the Internet.

Disgruntled Steam users downgrade ratings

There were even enough disgruntled Steam users to downgrade Skyrim’s “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating to “Very Positive,” as players with hundreds of hours invested in the game have been changing their reviews to protest the new paid mods.

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell took to Reddit on Saturday to answer gamers’ concerns with the new system. Most of the discussion was surprisingly civil, but even the cult of personality surrounding “our lord Gaben” was not enough to stem the tide of criticisms. So far the thread has reached nearly 19,000 comments, which range from short gripes to 1,000-word treatises on why the paid mod system does not work.

“Our view of Steam is that it’s a collection of useful tools for customers and content developers,” Newell explained in a comment. “With the Steam workshop, we’ve already reached the point where the community is paying their favorite contributors more than they would make if they worked at a traditional game developer. We see this as a really good step. The option of MOD developers getting paid seemed like a good extension of that.”

Is Valve being greedy?

One user said the paid mod system is “another IV drip of money hooked up to Valve, and we’re all supposed to smile about it.”

“Let’s assume for a second that we are stupidly greedy,” Newell responded. “So far the paid mods have generated $10K total. That’s like 1% of the cost of the incremental email the program has generated for Valve employees (yes, I mean pissing off the Internet costs you a million bucks in just a couple of days). That’s not stupidly greedy, that’s stupidly stupid. You need a more robust Valve-is-evil hypothesis.”

Newell said that he is optimistic about the future of paid mods, but Valve will continue to monitor the situation.

“Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers,” Newell said. “If something doesn’t help with that, it will get dumped. Right now I’m more optimistic that this will be a win for authors and gamers, but we are always going to be data driven.”

You can read Newell’s entire AMA on Reddit.

Image credit: “Gabe Newell GDC 2010” by Official GDC – http://www.flickr.com/photos/officialgdc/4427575126/. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.