You might have heard that Valve swiftly pulled paid mods for Skyrim on its Steam Workshop. While the public at large are happy, some mod authors are less pleased.
The Steam Community is currently littered with posts from angry developers who saw promise in the system, if not its exact implementation. A few claimed they would quit modding altogether as a result.
Other took to Reddit and other forums to ruminate on the whole sorry saga. Many were quick to note that while donations seem like an ideal future compromise, they have been tried and failed before. The creators of one of Skyrim's most widely used mods, SkyUI, pointed out that in four years they've only received $500 in donations. Artist Edhelsereg counts over 200,000 downloads of his work, and has been rewarded with only two donations.
Not all modders agreed with the system, however. Some have apparently gone as far as to suggest 'exiling' the modders who took part in the scheme, leaving SkyUI team member Mardoxx to claim that:
“There is no ‘community.’ The past 48h have shown this. There never was.”
It's clear that there's a mutual desire for modders to be rewarded for their efforts, but as Valve have amply demonstrated, no consensus on how. Hopefully something emerges from this whole debacle to solve that problem and leave the age-old PC modding scene richer for it.