The president of Valve, Gabe Newell, understands that the modders should be paid for their hard work. Often, making new modifications for video games id time taking and, sometimes it gets quite tough. Some people make themselves to realize a vision and then make a decision to share it with other consecutive players. There are modders available that must cease this hobby, as the time is money. As much fun it takes to create mode, if there is no money to pay the bills, it gets difficult to justify it and continue.
Valve decided to give modders a way to get paid for their efforts by giving them the ability to set a price, in April 2015. Of course, many of them did not take the idea very kindly. From personal experience, there were specific modders that believed that donations were considered, but payment wasn’t required. After all, most of them have a Nexus Mod page, there was a donate button available.
“The Skyrim situation- well, it was a mess,” Newell stated this week. “It was not the right place to launch that, and we did some ham-fisted things in the way we rolled it out. But the fundamental concept that the gaming community needs to reward the people who are creating value is pretty important.”
During a press meeting with several other valve staff members, venture beat reported that Newbell believes the community of modding that “creates a lot of value” for the game and their creators. However, the way the business works, modders are not getting paid.
“They were creating value, and the degree to which they are not being accurately compensated is a bug in the system, it was awful to go through, but it gave us a ton of useful information,” Newell stated.
The Valve president is aware of criticism towards his point of pay-to-mod. Modding has been free since the beginning, so why change? Newell explains that this will be contributing to buildup games and mods – it necessarily doesn’t set up a competitive world between any of them.
“It’s information flow. In a sense, you want to have really good signal-to-noise ratios in how the gaming community signals to developers: yes, do more of that. Or no, please, don’t release any more of those ever. ”
“To help you understand why we thought this was a good idea, our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full-time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities,” he continued.
Valve is trying his best to bring back some version of compensation to the modders in the future, but not anytime soon. Valve hasn’t shared any detail about reintroducing paid mods. Based on what it said, it only looks as a matter of time before it tries again. Newell admitted that he believe their process of approaching the introduction was rough around the edges. But through the process, they managed to gather useful information.
