If you've read my previous post on paid mods for Skyrim on the Steam Workshop then you know that Valve was met with resistance from the gaming community. Amazingly enough just 4 days after the announcement Valve decided to go back upon their decision of enabling modders to sell mods on the Steam Workshop. I think this was a hasty decision which will have a negative impact on the future of modding, as well as Valve as a company.
Allowing for paid mods on the Steam Workshop was a bold move, one that could have ushered in a new era of mod making. Change is scary though, and whenever you try to change something people are going to get a bit upset. That's normal though and as time passes and people start seeing what those changes actually mean and they suddenly seem less scary. People were afraid about what they thought paid mods meant however they might have not understood all of the benefits that they may have meant.
There are things that Valve did wrong however which could have
Allowing for paid mods on the Steam Workshop was a bold move, one that could have ushered in a new era of mod making. Change is scary though, and whenever you try to change something people are going to get a bit upset. That's normal though and as time passes and people start seeing what those changes actually mean and they suddenly seem less scary. People were afraid about what they thought paid mods meant however they might have not understood all of the benefits that they may have meant.
There are things that Valve did wrong however which could have
Research
Something that I found astonishing was that the owner and founder of NexusMods which is probably the largest Skyrim modding community had no idea that Valve was unveiling something like this. Valve should have done their research and found this guy and brought him in to get his opinion on what they were trying to do. If anybody understands the modding community, or knows people who do understand it, then it would be that guy. He would have been able to give Valve some insight on what they were stepping into and what sort of assurances Valve and Bethesda would have to make to keep people happy.
Quality matters
A common complaint from gamers when it came to Skyrim paid mods was that the Workshop would become filled with cheap, poor-quality mods since there was no official curating of the Workshop. It's great that Valve is providing a marketplace for paid mods but this is actually a valid complaint that Valve should have predicted.
Valve needs to police the paid mods section of the Steam Workshop and keep sub standard mods out of it. Yes this means that Valve has to spend money to curate it however if paid mods do well (like Valve should want them to) then it should pay for itself. At the very worse Valve can appoint community members as mod curators which will weed out mods of poor quality which nobody would buy.
This could even be expanded upon by having certain requirements that paid mods must meet to be sold on the workshop however I'm not going to get into that.
Valve needs to police the paid mods section of the Steam Workshop and keep sub standard mods out of it. Yes this means that Valve has to spend money to curate it however if paid mods do well (like Valve should want them to) then it should pay for itself. At the very worse Valve can appoint community members as mod curators which will weed out mods of poor quality which nobody would buy.
This could even be expanded upon by having certain requirements that paid mods must meet to be sold on the workshop however I'm not going to get into that.
The cut modders get
From what I've seen, there were quite a few people who were only against paid mods because of the cut that mod makers were making compared to Valve and Bethesda. I mentioned this in my previous post and I still stand by it, I firmly believe that the content creators should be the ones coming out with at least 50%. If you want to understand my reasoning behind this then I'll direct you back to my previous post. I will however say that I believe that by increasing the cut that mod makers make, it will also lower the average price of mods.
Core mods going paid
I don't actually know what you'd call a mod that many other mods depend on, so i'll just call it a "Core Mod" since it's required for many other mods. A very popular core mod called SkyUI was going to become a paid mod following the announcement of paid mods on the Steam Workshop. This caused a lot of people to become very angry since it meant that it would become required to pay for SkyUI if you wanted to use other mods, furthermore many free mods would rely upon SkyUI causing you to indirectly be forced to pay for free mods.
This is a very grey area. I believe that the author of SkyUI should receive monetary compensation if they wish, however since many mods already rely upon SkyUI it would be unfair to force all the players who wish to use those mods to suddenly have to pay for SkyUI. I believe a solution to this would be to make SkyUI free and instead a small percentage of the profits from all the paid mods that rely upon SkyUI will go to SkyUI's creator. This will solve the problem of the creator wanting compensation from their work as well as keeping free mods which rely upon SkyUI free.
Another solution would be to enable developers to release two version of their mods, a free version and a paid version. In this instance SkyUI could have a free version which free mods can depend on, and a paid version that offers more features that other mods can take advantage of if their users have the paid version of SkyUI. This would be a somewhat tricky solution to implement since it would mean that mod makers who depend on SkyUI would have to write code to support whether the player has either the free version or the paid version.
This sort of situation however really only happens when a core mod suddenly goes from free to paid probably wouldn't happen if the ability to sell mods was present at the time the Steam Workshop opened for Skyrim.
This is a very grey area. I believe that the author of SkyUI should receive monetary compensation if they wish, however since many mods already rely upon SkyUI it would be unfair to force all the players who wish to use those mods to suddenly have to pay for SkyUI. I believe a solution to this would be to make SkyUI free and instead a small percentage of the profits from all the paid mods that rely upon SkyUI will go to SkyUI's creator. This will solve the problem of the creator wanting compensation from their work as well as keeping free mods which rely upon SkyUI free.
Another solution would be to enable developers to release two version of their mods, a free version and a paid version. In this instance SkyUI could have a free version which free mods can depend on, and a paid version that offers more features that other mods can take advantage of if their users have the paid version of SkyUI. This would be a somewhat tricky solution to implement since it would mean that mod makers who depend on SkyUI would have to write code to support whether the player has either the free version or the paid version.
This sort of situation however really only happens when a core mod suddenly goes from free to paid probably wouldn't happen if the ability to sell mods was present at the time the Steam Workshop opened for Skyrim.
There is still potential
This isn't the end, at least I hope it isn't. Paid mods have worked for other game(s) and I strongly believe it can be done in the Steam Workshop. Valve had good intentions they just made some critical mistakes, and speaking of those good intentions I want to quote them here.
Allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to
Excellent, I can get behind this 100%
Encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities
Extra "encouragement" (money) is great for developers, but this shouldn't be a significant source of income to the developer. At the very least the developer should be making enough to pay for people to update modding tools, fix bugs, release new modding features, ect. Furthermore as the paid mods market grows so does the developers income so they should be placing their bets on the market growing.
More great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it.
This is very noble of Valve and I also support it and I feel like this is the best way to bring this about. This is the kind of future I want to see modding and the game industry to have, where games can be grown from mods seamlessly and organically.