Valve Corporation has continued to provide Steam Workshop content creators with new avenues of making money, such as when it announced inventory support for games in February. By the end of last year, content creators had earned over $57 million from transactions on Steam Workshop since the platform was launched in 2011, and now Valve will be giving even more people the chance to earn money through Steam by allowing them to sell mods for existing games.

“The Steam Workshop has always been a great place for sharing mods, maps, and all kinds of items that you’ve created,” Valve wrote in an announcement. “Now it’s also a great place for selling those creations. With a new, streamlined process for listing and selling your creations, the Steam Workshop now supports buying mods directly from the Workshop, to be immediately usable in game.”

Valve is kicking off its new paid mod marketplace with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, which currently has over 25,000 mods available through Steam Workshop. Skyrim developer Bethesda Game Studios has been a longtime supporter of fan-made mods.

“It was essential to us that our fans decide what they want to create, what they want to download, and what they want to charge,” Bethesda wrote in an update on Skyrim’s Steam page. “Many of our fans have been modding our games since Morrowind, for over 10 years. They now have the opportunity to earn money doing what they love – and all fans have a new way to support their favorite mod authors. ”

The new features allow content creators to choose whether they want their mod to be free or paid, and they can choose what price they want to set for their mod. Mod creators can also choose a “pay what you want” option, which allows players to pay as little or as much as they want for the mod.

One concern for many players is the tendency for some mods to not function properly, or worse, cause the game to crash. Because of this, Valve gives users a 24-hour trial period to test out a mod to see if it works. If it doesn’t, you can uninstall the mod and get a full refund.

It is unclear what sort of protections Valve will have in place to prevent people from abusing this system. Once a mod has been downloaded, knowledgeable users would currently have little difficulty copying the data and reinstalling the mod themselves after they have gotten their refund.

There are also numerous third-party sites that host mods, and it would be easy for paid mods to be rehosted for free on those platforms without going through Steam.

Fan backlash

While the new paid model is great for modders, many Steam users who are used to free content are not so happy, and some are already calling for petitions to get rid of paid mods.

“I’m outright appalled by this,” one Reddit user wrote. “Take one of the unique things that the PC community has enjoyed for years, and make profit from it.”

There have already been several mods that were previously free but have now been converted to paid, including “Wet and Cold,” a popular mod that dresses NPCs in more realistic clothing for the game’s cold environment.

Several users have taken to the mod’s comment page to call the change “immoral” and accuse the creators of being greedy. Many are also rating paid mods poorly not because they are bad quality, but because they charge money.

Many users have said they they prefer to use Nexus Mods, a third-party site that hosts nearly double the amount of Skyrim files than Steam Workshop does. Unlike Steam, Nexus Mods allows mods with mature content as well as those that require other files to function, such as the popular Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE), which unlocks more complicated features.

Nexus Mods admin Dark0ne predicted the monetization of mods on Steam in a post last month, where he was skeptical of the direction it would take the community.

“We get lots of drama now, without any money changing hands, over permissions and credits, I don’t even want to think how horrible it would be to try and sort out such issues when money is involved,” he wrote. “That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

While many mod creators are excited about the new Steam Workshop mod marketplace, they will already be fighting an uphill battle against player sentiment, and it may take a few months before the dust settles and we find out if enough people will actually be willing to spend money on mods.

Image credit: Valve Corp / Steam