For a TL;DR go straight to the second post.
If you have installed one of
certain 17 mods previously, you might have noticed that your game will no longer launch. Steam will not let you play Skyrim until you either uninstall these mods or purchase them, even if you had them installed way before this paid mod business.
This means that Valve is effectively holding your save games hostage until you pay up. If you are a frequent modder, you are very familiar with the kind of damage suddenly uninstalled mods can cause to your saves. Even those mods that provide uninstall procedures require you to do it before removing the mod from Skyrim.
I have enough faith in Valve and Gaben to think that they would not intentionally bank on this kind of thing, but it bears keeping in mind that Valve gets 75 per cent from each mod purchase.
This in turn means that Valve has an absolutely massive incentive to push this to more and more mods.
You might be thinking something like "so what? 75% out of 2 bucks/euros isn't that much, don't they deserve a cut?"
They probably do, but not 75%. Not when they didn't do any of the work in making the mod, or making the host game. And it's not looking like it'll be just 2 bucks, but who knows how much for the entirety of your current mod collection? Read on.
Let's say you were a great guy and yesterday bought these mods that you already had, and in so doing supported their good work (with 25% of the amount going towards the actual work).
Today, you go to Steam and click to continue on your epic journey across the lands of the Nords, killing Giants and Dragons as you go. But as you attempt to go there, Steam again announces that more money is required to access this save game.
Another mod that you had installed previously has joined the paid mods program. What a joyous day.
But is paying for a couple of more mods that bad? The real kicker about this is that Valve might do this again and again for every single mod that your save relies upon. Or that you might install in the future.
The size of the of shadow that this casts over all of the current Workshop mods is hard to overstate. Do you dare to install this cool mod that just arrived for free on the Workshop? At any time it and Valve might lock you out of your saved data if you do.
This is the same business model as
cryptolocker viruses use.
If you decide that this is unacceptable, and very unfortunately so far Valve has chosen not to rescind this policy, but instead have
chosen to censor the negative feedback they have received about it, you should make the jump to outside of the Workshop mods.
For your convenience, here's a couple mod managers that are free now and are in no apparent danger of ever demanding more and more money from you.
Nexus has made a public statement that they have no plans to go into paid modding, despite having received many offers.
Mod OrganizerNexus Mod ManagerAs a bonus, here's a couple of Youtube videos about this if you are not familiar with the whole ordeal yet, or would like another perspective about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt2wSvb6rhw by Gopher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGKOiQGeO-k by Totalbiscuit
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