PC Gamer and other publications recently spoke with Valve's Gabe Newell in a roundtable about modding, and Newell talked not only about Valve's previous plans to allow modders to be paid, but also his thoughts about modders right now.
For those of you unaware about Valve's previous foray into the issue, they had announced back in 2015 that they would launch a program to help modders get paid, with Skyrim as a test title, however, there was so much response both good and bad that they retracted it soon after.
"The Skyrim situation was a mess," Newell explained. "It was not the right place to launch that specific thing and we did some sort of ham-handed, stupid things in terms of how we rolled it out. EJ [Erik Johnson] basically said we just need to back off of this for now, but the fundamental concept of 'the gaming community needs to reward the people who are creating value' is pretty important, right? ... the degree to which Valve helps contribute to efficiency in the system is one of the ways in which we're adding value to the system as a whole. So, you know, we have to just figure out how to do it in a way that makes customers happy and that they buy into it, it makes creators happy because they feel like the system is rational and is rewarding the right people for the work that they do. Does that make sense?"
The situation, he continued, "gave us a ton of information. But there was also a little bit of 'That burner is hot. Maybe we wait awhile before we put our fingers on that burner again.'"
Expressing his thoughts on modders in general, he explained that they "create a lot of value, and we think that... absolutely they need to be compensated, they're creating value and the degree to which they're not being accurately compensated is a bug in the system, right? It's just inserting noise into it. You want to have efficient ways so that the people who are actually creating value are the people that money is flowing to."
Do you think modders should be paid, or is the system that operates now a better one?