Valve is removing the feature that allowed Steam users to pay for game mods. The move comes in the wake of angry criticism from many users who were against the feature. The announcement was made by Valve’s Alden Kroll through a post on the Steam Workshop. Kroll writes,
“We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we'll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.”
In the post, Kroll also clarifies that users who had purchased the paid mods for their games will be refunded the full amount of their purchases. He also wrote that Valve still believes that there is a future in this area, but for the time being, the company is removing it.
The first paid mods that Valve made available were for Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. According to Valve, it intended to support the community through the paid mods for games. Kroll though wrote, “But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop. We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here.”
You can read Valve's entire blog post here.