Valve's goal is "making modding better" with new marketplace

Late last week Valve introduced a market place for paid-for mods on Steam, and the decision has proved controversial. While some will no doubt be more than happy to pay for content that enhances their gaming experience with a particular title, others are less happy about mods being monetised in an unregulated marketplace (most notably there's thousands that have signed a petition telling Valve just that).

Since the rather public reaction to Valve's decision to create an open and unregulated marketplace has drawn such severe criticism, company CEO Gabe Newell has taken part in an Ask Me Anything discussion over on Reddit, responding to questions from disgruntled customers.

"Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers," Newell said in response to one question. "If something doesn't help with that, it will get dumped. Right now I'm more optimistic that this will be a win for authors and gamers, but we are always going to be data driven."

Newell also shed some light on the reason behind the decision: "The goal [of paid mods] is to increase the total investment the community makes in extending its games. We thought we were missing some plumbing that was hampering that."

Nexus, a free modding community, had plenty of questions for Valve and Newell, and the company boss tried to reassure them, saying "we'd be happy to work with you to figure out how we can do a better job of supporting you. Clearly you are providing a valuable service to the community."

He also assured the community that this wasn't a step towards making modded content exclusive to Steam: "Exclusivity is a bad idea for everyone. It's basically a financial leveraging strategy that creates short term market distortion and long term crying."

There were plenty of questions regarding the financial side of the deal. Many people were calling for Valve to introduce an option to donate rather than pay a fixed sum. "We are adding a pay what you want button where the mod author can set the starting amount wherever they want," said Newell, no doubt placating many people in the process.

As for the split profits (for example, a mod creator might take 25% of the money made from a sale, while the rest went to Valve and the game's creators), Newell confirmed that "the pay-outs are set by the owner of the game that is being modded" and not Valve or the modder.

Finally, in response to the case whereby one mod has already been removed from sale after it was claimed that it contained the work of another, uncredited author, the Valve chief said: "This is a straight-forward problem. Between ours and the community's policing, I'm confident that the authors will have control over their creations, not someone trying to rip them off."