By now most if not all of us have heard about the Steam Workshop’s new initiative to let modders charge for their mods. Like a lot of things, it has both good sides and some not so good sides but the Internet has largely reacted negatively. Yesterday Gabe Newell himself, head of Valve, took to Reddit to answer questions that users might have about the paid mods.

What we can gather from the AMA is that Newell believes in the modding community of Steam and wants to see them get paid fairly for work that in some cases is extremely well-made and might as well be called game development in its own right. And I’m pretty sure that this is a sentiment that we can agree is a good one. He said that “With the Steam workshop, we’ve already reached the point where the community is paying their favorite contributors more than they would make if they worked at a traditional game developer. We see this as a really good step… The option of MOD developers getting paid seemed like a good extension of that.”

Tackling some issues people could see arising Newell stated that Steam will not demand exclusivity of mods calling such practices “basically a financial leveraging strategy that creates short term market distortion and long term crying.” He also said that he was confident that the community’s policing along with Valve’s own would crack down on people trying to make money off mods that they had stolen off another modder.

Some people also noticed that people speaking about the paid mods on Steam were getting banned or having discussions removed. When presented with this information Newell said that if Valve was doing that it was “stupid” and he would get it to stop, noting that such tactics don’t really work anyway in getting people to stop talking about topics.

I personally can see what Valve is going for, I really can. This has the potential to be a great thing, but knowing that Valve is not going to be too hands-on (no matter what was said about policing for stolen mods) still gives me a little cause for concern.

I, like everyone else, can only wait and see what will result.