It already exists for two games (not their own). Chivalry and Dungeon Defenders. Guess what, nobody cares.

I see the DD Eternity one.
Then again, that's a game that has been received pretty damn poorly, already, for shady tactics. This is just icing on the cake for that, isn't it?

I checked and checked. But I did not see paid mods for chivalry anywhere.

Well glad to see it gone like that but will we see something else crop up in its place we shall see. Donations 100% or a close amount should have been the way to do this not a 25% take and forcing people to buy the mods not a good idea especially mods that have been free for years.

For me though this is the last straw with Valve they seem to be making one stupid decision after another but at least they stopped the pay mod scheme but took a lot of customers to change their minds and dare i saw they lost a lot of customers the last few days.

Bethesda as well a company i used to keep buying their games the fact they took the biggest split for doing nothing but create the game is very insulting i mean it was the mod community that fixed a lot of their bugs they could not be bothered to fix. I feel now that Fallout 4 and the next TES will be shallow games with little content and a pay scheme to add mods to them.

I wonder if they plan on offering the editors for their future games, or more if the modding community will refuse to make mods to show for a full game how much it won't survive without it's community...

I'm still hoping they will go back to Morrowind and fix a bunch of bugs as well as update it for newer hardware... But that is futile as they've dropped support for the game (but still enjoy raking in money). A bit of a surprise they didn't release it for free now...

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/04/27/valve-yanks-new-mod-sales-feature-from-steam-after-only-four-days/

Looks like they'll do it again with the biggest next AAA release but from the start to not disturb an already active mod community...
They know exactly how to regulate shitstorms and push the boundaries to change the world how they like it.

The big problem with full blown capitalists is, that they truly think everyone is playing their asocial little game and can't imagine a world outside of it.

One thing I do not like very much about this whole thing is tying mods to plattforms like Steam exclusive mods. This is against even level competition playing field.

So I wonder about the legal situation: Could a publisher legally dictate that all mods of its software must use for example Steam, even if technically this is not necessary (for example because the mods only adjusts options)?

I'm pretty sure the legal problems with all this were the main reason for rowing back, there are a lot of copyright violations in this system and ironically coming from the main source of DRM....

Another thing I do not understand is the approach of Valve to not curate the market place they have created. I understand that this is a lot of the work but on the other hand don't they want to earn their 30% cut?

I think for legal reason they should be obliged to curate every third party, semi-professional, market place. Copyright infringements are pretty common in the modding scene and as soon as commercial interests come up it should not be the sole responsibility of the copyright holder to find and persecute potential thefts which would be a herculian task. As the creator and operator of the market place I would say one can demand more carefulness while checking for potential copyright infringements - in the interest of the whole community.

If they would actually do this I would have much more understanding for the height of their cut.

The sales are in game

http://steamcommunity.com/games/219640/announcements/detail/217635038925827056

Well that was a mess. It is not over though, I am sure that Valve will introduce paid mods in the future, just not with a game that already had pre-existing mods that were free (as per their statement).

Yep, they already said so.

I think now that actually the biggest hurdle for paid mods (apart from customer acceptance and measly cuts for the modders) are the legal problems.

Making sure that each contributor to a mod (copyright holder) agrees to the planned selling will probably be quite hard. Some mods live there for years and take contributions from many sides to make them great. Finding a consensus on any share of the revenues will be incredibly hard, because in principle each time someone contributes something new all the previous contributions have to be reweighted.

It basically only makes sense for a small company which in turns pays their modders as kind of employees or for really small teams - but can they deliver the big mods that are so popular.

The other thing is making sure that there is no IP fraud during the process, i.e. making sure really all contributors agreed. This can be extremely tedious and the risk of a mod being sued (after all this is about money) are high, but also the potential bad climate of people just stealing your work and selling it somewhere is even worse.

So, what would you have to do in order to keep all this under control:

1. Curate your mod market place. No way around it.
2. Require full credits and authorship information for each release.
3. Require consent to selling from each author for each version.
4. Take mods down when in dispute immediately.
5. Offer a mediation place for dispute.
6. Maybe delay payment to after a 24 hour trial period where everyone for free can test every mod and can check whether the mod contains unlicensed material.

And in the light of these actions, I doubt that the commercial success of paid mods would be still so big for the middle men. But I doubt anyway Valve would go to such high standards. As their Workshop is currently they pass all the responsibility on to the modders while taking 30% of the income. Also they do nothing to protect legal right holders, kind of assisting in potential stealing. This should not be supported.

All in all: selling mods is not easy and legally quite some challenge. Luckily for them Steam pulled out before the real difficulties would have begun.

Interesting recap article on gamasutra.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/242106/Where_is_your_mod_now_How_Valves_paid_mod_program_imploded_in_four_days.php