Valve boss Gabe Newell still thinks you should pay for game mods

The people who create mods for video games should make money from their work. At least, that is still the position of Valve boss Gabe Newell.

Steam does not offer a way for mod developers to directly sell their creations to that PC gaming platform’s millions of users anymore, but it did for a brief time in April 2015. After years on the market, Valve and publisher Bethesda worked together to introduce paid mods for open-world role-playing game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. In response to that new feature, a number of gamers freaked out. They made it clear that they didn’t want to pay for mods. Because the PC platform is so open, gamers had grown accustomed to the idea that they could download a mod from anywhere and install it themselves without having to pay, and the idea that Steam would create a marketplace where people could sell those same mods was too big of a change. And that led to Valve and Bethesda pulling the plug on the idea.