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Valve boss Gabe Newell has responded to criticism following Steam’s introduction of paid for user created mods.
In a Reddit AMA, Newell stated that if the changes resulted in a negative result, they will get “dumped”, but was optimistic about the results.
“Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers. 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,” Newell posted.
Newell also explained in the thread why the company decided to make the change now.
“Our view of Steam is that it’s a collection of useful tools for customers and content developers,” he wrote. “With the Steam workshop, we’ve already reached the point where the community is paying their favourite 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.”
He also snapped back at suggestions that there were underhanded reasons for these changes: “Let’s assume for a second that we are stupidly greedy. 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.”
Source: Reddit
