Valve has made the rather eyebrow-raising decision to allow for mods to be sold on the Steam Workshop, and as can be expected when one introduces money into something that was entirely free, it’s gotten off to a slightly rough start.
With the amount of modders dedicating their time and craft to creating mods for games like The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Arma III, Valve figured it would be a good idea to allow for modders, if they choose to do so, to sell their mods on the Steam Workshop, rather than offering them up for free. Mods
More surprising was that Valve wouldn’t be curating this unregulated paid mod market. Instead, they would leave it to the community and the free market, as it were, to do the policing itself, with fans having to keep one another informed of any potentially fraudulent mods or mods with stolen content.
Within a day of this new feature’s introduction, the first paid mod to be removed from the workshop has been revealed to be Chesko’s Fishing Mod for Skyrim. The mod, which does exactly what its title implies, uses assets from a different mod to work: Fore’s New Idles in Skyrim.
This wouldn’t be a problem in the realm of free mods, but with people paying money for the Fishing Mod and the creator of Fore’s New Idles getting none of the profits…well, you can imagine.
The below screenshots, courtesy of PC Gamer, show replies from the creators of Chesko’s Fishing Mod and Fore’s New Idles in the Steam Forums:
This is likely not going to be the first mod to be removed from the Steam Workshop for breaking the rules, so it remains to be seen how the brand new world of paid modding will fare in the coming days.