Only four days after Valve Software launched a new paid-mods service on digital gaming storefront Steam, the company officially changed course on Monday and removed pricing from its Steam Workshop pages, all while admitting "it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing."

A Monday blog post at the Steam Community site confirmed the rollback and stated that anyone who paid for a mod in the Steam Workshop storefront would receive a full refund for their purchase.

As of press time, all mods listed under the game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim—the only game that had been affected by Valve's change this past Friday—are back to being free. That means add-ons and updates for that game, like new weapons and levels, no longer come with either static prices or pay-what-you-want options, nor can mod creators post new content with pricing attached. (However, the announcement page for paid mods remains online, at least for now.)

"Stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating," the blog post stated. "We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here."

The blog post acknowledged receiving "a dump truck of feedback," but it did not mention users' complaints about some mod content being sold without creators' consent, nor how Skyrim mod creators would only receive 25 percent of Steam Workshop revenue. Those two issues were also not fully addressed by Valve CEO Gabe Newell during a weekend reddit "Ask Me Anything" thread. In a prior announcement, Bethesda had stated that it would receive 45 percent of that revenue, with Valve taking the remaining 30 percent.

Before Friday's update, modders could have their creations, such as items and weapons, included as paid DLC in such games as Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2—and those games' Steam Workshop pages had already acknowledged the same 75/25 split between Steam and mod creators for those item sales.

This post has been updated to clarify revenue splitting between mod makers and other involved parties.