Valve has recently gone through a major PR debacle after the company announced that it's implementing paid mods for games and Skyrim in particular. Their decision was short-lived, and it was retracted, but they have managed to incur the rage of the community. Independent developers are now working on a new game launcher that will make Steam obsolete.

Valve probably figured that there will be some resistance from the community when they announced paid mods, but they couldn't have anticipated the force of the response. The company pulled the paid mods for Skyrim just a few days after the announcement and things seemed to have settled down, but the online community didn't stop.

In fact, developers from around the world are gathering around a new initiative called "Project Ascension," which will be a game launcher capable or replacing Steam, Origin, and uPlay. Gamers are tired of having games available on multiple platforms and they don't want to give Valve the opportunity of making money with Steam. The same can be said with the other two clients.

Project Ascension is a serious endeavor

The new game launcher became an idea on Reddit and developers, designers, and enthusiasts from all over all over the world are now working together to make this a reality. They already have dozens of design ideas sent by the community, and also a Github repository in place. The game launcher will be open source, it will provide users with the best offer for a game from selected services, and it will completely circumvent all the official game clients.

To no one's surprise, the project now has more developers than it would actually need, and Project Ascension will soon become a reality. What seemed like a simple new feature from Valve to help modders gets paid for their work is now coming back with a vengeance.

Update: We were contacted by Matt, a member from the team and here is what he has to say about Project Ascension:

"I am one of the Core Team members of this project, and we would like to clarify that we are not exactly replacing it, but providing a healthy way for competition. We believe that by consolidating many different stores for comparison in one place, we can get the best gaming community possible."