Mods have often been considered to be an amazing feature for PC gaming and Steam has made adding mods to games much easier with it’s Steam Workshop. In the past mods have always been free for download, now however Steam is allowing community made content to be sold directly for certain Steam Workshop titles that have enabled this feature.
The Steam Workshop allows users to download user made content such as items, maps and mods. Creators who add their content to the Steam Workshop will now be able list their creation for sale at a price of their choosing or make their work available for free; the content that is bought by users will be immediately available for play.
This new feature debuts today with The Elder Scrolls V:Skyrim which currently has over 25,000 items for download in the Steam Workshop; over 170 million downloads for the game have taken place since it’s release in 2011 and all of the free mods, quests, weapons, items and other creations will still be available for users if the creators wish them to be.
With the announcement of the new feature Valve revealed that over $57 million has been paid to community content creators since the Steam Workshop emerged in 2011.
There’s no comments yet on how this system will be monitored especially as some mods are not compatible and others can be highly unstable and cause games to crash.
Recently Valve has been making changes to Steam mostly to increase security and combat phishing and scams. Level 0 users will no longer be able to add friends and will need to add a minimum of $5 to their ingame wallet or spend that much at least in the store before they can add other users; higher level users will still be able to find and add new users however.
For more information see the announcement for the feature on Steam
What do you think about this new feature? Is it a good idea to allow community content creators to set prices for their mods?