Steam Workshop now Selling Game Mods *UPDATE*, Paid Mods Gone
User migles gave me a tip about an interesting development on Steam. Valve was always relatively open-minded in terms of game mods - in fact, some of their biggest franchises like Counter Strike and Team Fortress started off as user-created mods. The Steam Workshop was Valve's way of distributing such game mods via their Steam platform and now it also allows mod creators to sell their creations online.
Revenue from selling these modifications is split between Valve, the developers of the original games and the mod developers, the latter getting 25% of the proceeds.
As of right now you can only sell mods for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but the new distribution platform shows promise to aspiring mod developers and puts the limelight on an activity that used to be relegated to the fringe of the gamingverse.
Update: Valve removed paid mods from the Workshop. Here's a statement from an employee:"We underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop. We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here.
"Now that you've backed a dump truck of feedback onto our inboxes, we'll be chewing through that, but if you have any further thoughts let us know."