Gabe Newell believes that modders need to be paid

  

    In a sense you want to have really good signal to noise ratios in how the gaming community signals to developers ‘Yeah, do more of that.’ Or, ‘No, please, don’t release any more of those ever.’

And [modders] create a lot of value, and we think that … absolutely they need to be compensated, they’re creating value and the degree to which they’re not being accurately compensated is a bug in the system, right? It’s just inserting noise into it,

You want to have efficient ways so that the people who are actually creating value are the people that money is flowing to.

 

To be clear, while Gabe’s statement does sound like a good thing on paper, his statement is designed for one thing, improve the public’s perception of Steam and to generate additional revenue. Right now Steam is the only PC gaming storefront that supports modding, leaving them in the perfect position to profit from paid modding, just like the company planned to when they launched their “paid modding” services in April 2015. 

While many PC gamers deify Gabe Newell as a “saviour” character for PC gaming, it must be remembered that Gabe is a businessman and Steam’s support of Linux and open standards all stand to earn the company money. Valve’s current support of Linux gaming and their OpenVR standards currently place Steam as the flagship games distribution platform for not only general PC users, but also Linux Gamers and VR users, allowing Steam to generate a substantial amount of revenue. 

Remember Valve’s “Paid Skyrim Mods” fiasco, where the company only paid mod makers 25% off all of the earning made from their paid modding program, with modders requiring hundreds of sales in order to get paid. Also remember that Valve required several court challenges and years of litigation before the company implemented a consumer friendly refund system. So much for “good guy Valve”.  

 

 

While paid modding can be seen as a good thing, it is hard to see it getting implemented in a way that is both fair to modders and PC gamers alike, at least without a middle man that takes a substantial portion of the revenue. 

If you want to support your favourite modders many already have support jars on their Nexus Mods or community webpages, with some having their own dedicated Patreon campaigns or other ways where fans can contribute to their work. 

  

You can join the discussion on Gabe Newell’s belief that modders need to be paid for their work on the OC3D Forums.