Gabe Newell On Paid Mods

If paid mods are bad for gamers Valve will trash the idea.

Valve CEO Gabe Newell says that if Steam's new program that allows users to sell mods instead of just giving them away for free turns out to be bad for gamers, the company will ditch the idea.

"Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers," Newell said in a Reddit Ask Me Anything thread. "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."

A free modding community Nexus showed its concern about Steam's Paid mods feature. Newell guaranteed that Valve won't make developers protect paid mods and make them available only through Steam.He added that Valve would also be happy to work with Nexus to better support the community.

"The goal [of paid mods] is to increase the total investment the community makes in extending its games," he said. "We thought we were missing some plumbing that was hampering that."

The paid modding program was launched on Thursday only with Skyrim, it caused a great deal of controversy after one mod was removed.

Newell didn't seem concerned about cases like that becoming too common. "This is a straight-forward problem," he said. "Between ours and the community's policing, I'm confident that the authors will have control over their creations, not someone trying to rip them off."

As for the current revenue split on paid Skyrim mods, which gives the creator of the mod only a 25 percent share of sales, Newell said: "The pay-outs are set by the owner of the game that is being modded. As I said elsewhere, if we are censoring, it's dumb, ineffective, and will stop."