“The Steam Workshop has always been a great place for sharing mods, maps, and all kinds of items that you’ve created. Now it’s also a great place for selling those creations.”
That quote is taken from the steam workshop announcement page in which Valve seemed to declare war on their free market model surrounding the modding community. If you’re out of the loop previously, Steam Workshop was introduced in October of 2011 and has been enormously successful with the PC gaming community, providing altered game states and custom skins for a variety of titles from Don’t Starve to Skyrim.
Now PC gamers begin to question their dutiful overlord, Valve, in what appears to many as a blatant exploitation of fertile grounds. Could it be, however, that Valve wants to compensate those passionate creators out there, thus creating a demand for more content developers?
Either way, if you want to pick up your mods at no cost, there’s still free mods in the Steam Workshop, Mod DB, and Nexusmods. The only question is, can the competition sustain itself and for how long?
You can be sure we’ll be covering this in months to come both here and on Twitter.