Amateur developers are no longer allowed to sell their custom game add-ons — "mods," as they are commonly known — via PC gaming platform Steam, just four days after Valve launched a program aimed at monetizing user-created content.

It became clear to Steam gatekeeper Valve Software after less than a week that giving fan-creators the option to sell their mods was a mistake. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim was the first and only game to be included in the program, but the torrent of negative feedback directed at both Valve and the modding community prompted an abrupt about-face.

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"We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing," Valve's Alden Kroll writes in a blog post on Steam. "We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different."

Part of the problem, as Kroll puts it, is the game that was chosen to spearhead the initiative. Skyrim launched in November, 2011, and publisher Bethesda Softworks, long an active supporter of modding communities, rolled out free development tools in the months after the game's release.

For more than three years, fans have been building freely distributed add-ons for the game, inserting anything from new guilds and locations to dragons with the head and voice of "Macho Man" Randy Savage. The sudden monetization of previously free features took modders and players both by surprise, as the backlash that followed the launch of the initiative illustrated.

"Why would someone pay for a mod? Why is this even a thing?" Steam user GhostyGump was the first to comment in the Steam Community "megathread" discussing the new paid mods on April 23.

Subsequent comments raise concerns over what putting a price on unofficial add-ons might do to the community. Mod creation is typically a collaborative process, and it's difficult to suss out fault when accusations of idea theft or improper credit-sharing arise. Prior to Steam Workshop, where users can download mods for supported games in their Steam library, the mod community primarily existed using personal websites and communities like Nexus Mods, which offers user-created add-ons as free downloads.

Browsing through all the feedback, you can see a few common themes surfacing. Many express worry over the potential for thievery, especially when a resource like Nexus opens the door for a mod to be passed off as someone else's creation when ported into Steam Workshop. There are also concerns over spending money on unofficial mods, since they're often released in an incomplete state with no assurances regarding their stability. A mod that works just fine today might break down completely with the game's next official update.

How much should modders be paid?

Users and creators both took aim at Valve's 25-75 revenue split (as detailed by Bethesda) on paid mod income, with the smaller amount going to the fan-creators. Those that come out against the uneven split feel that the modders ought to get more money for their efforts. Not everyone shares that view, however.

Speaking in an interview with Forbes, DayZ creator Dean "Rocket" Hall explains that a mod is best viewed as "a derivative work of a licensed product." Hall's popular zombie apocalypse simulation set in a persistent, online world started life as mod for the game Arma 2. His work on the mod earned him a job with Arma dev Bohemian Interactive and a green light to develop DayZ as a standalone game, which even in pre-release "Early Access" has sold more than 2 million copies to date.

Hall defends the 25-75 split. "If I approached Bethesda to make a derivative game, using their tools, assets, IP, distribution – I would not get a 25% revenue split (I would get less). If we want professional modding, which is what this is, then people cannot apply emotional arguments – they need to apply business arguments. Therefore the split needs to be considered based on value."

He later took to Twitter with a more concise explanation, applying it to his own experiences with DayZ.

RE: Paid modding. Any double digit percentage on REVENUE for a derivative work with supplied tools is an excellent deal commercially (cont) — Dean Hall (@rocket2guns) April 24, 2015

(cont) and far more than I expected/received for DayZ. People need to think about VALUE and not EMOTION when thinking of business — Dean Hall (@rocket2guns) April 24, 2015

Hall sees modding as one possible route for games-loving fans to follow when they want to transition into the world of professional game development. "I see mods as really a broad group of projects spread all the way from little hobby activities through to something indistinguishable from a regular development team," he writes in a post on the DayZ subreddit.

"There is a step missing in becoming a developer, making it very hard to move from amateur modder through professional development team. I think the paid modding seen here is an excellent intermediary step for teams to get through that doesn't rely on luck, money, and connections."

He continues: "I am not here saying all mods should be done a certain way, I am arguing against those who are demanding that mods should all be free. I believe the mod team should have the choice."

Clearly, this is a complicated issue with a vast division of opinion. For every Steam user and industry observer that applauds Valve's commitment to rewarding the efforts of amateur developers, there's another that believes to their core that mods should be free, forever and always.

The only point that all sides seem to agree on is that modders should have the ability to accept donations from their fans. Mods have always been a free proposition due to copyright issues surrounding user-created content (among other factors), but donations have similarly always been fair game. Many mod developers maintain websites with their own donation options, but some Steam users see an opportunity here to bring a feature like that into Valve's service.

"While I am against mods having a pay wall and a set price, I do agree that modders should have the opportunity to benefit monetarily from their work," Steam user Delicious Pie writes. "I think a donate or pay what you want button would still work well."

"Having the system on steam, where your information is already saved and the button is right in front of you, would make donating easier and more prevalent. Would I donate to a really good modder if I had a few bucks/cents in my steam wallet and an easy button in front of me that would let me give it to them? Most likely yes."

Before the idea was canned, Steam Workshop sales did offer fan-creators the option of "selling" mods with a pay-what-you-want price attached to it. That was scrapped along with the rest of the initiative, but Delicious Pie (and plenty of other Steam users) argue that allowing donations to be paid out via a user's Steam Wallet is a good compromise.

Valve, for its part, seems to understand that there's an opportunity to reward fan-creators and it was simply mishandled here. "Our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid," Kroll writes.

"But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop," he continues. "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."