Valve President, Gabe Newell, believes modders should be compensated for their work. Often, creating modifications for video games is time consuming and, at times, tough. Some people make them to realize a vision and decide to share it with other players. There are modders out there who must cease this hobby because, well, time is money. As much fun as it may be to build mods, if there is no compensation to pay the bills, it is difficult to justify it and continue on.

In April of 2015, Valve attempted to give modders a way to receive compensation for their efforts by giving them the ability to set a price. Of course, not many players took kindly to the idea. From personal experience, there were modders that believed donations were appreciated, but payment wasn’t necessary. After all, most have a Nexus Mod page for a reason – there was a donate button.

VentureBeat reported during a press meeting with several Valve staff members that Newell believes the modding community “creates a lot of value” for the game and their developers. However, with the way the business works at this time, modders are not receiving fair compensation.

They’re creating value, and the degree to which they are not being accurately compensated is a bug in the system,” Newell stated.

Of course, the Valve president is aware of some criticism toward his idea of pay-to-mod. Modding has almost always been free, so why should that change? Is it an attempt to corporatize the community? Rather, Newell explains that this will contribute to building up games and mods – it doesn’t necessarily set up a competitive environment between them.

It’s information flow. In a sense, you want to have really good signal-to-noise ratios in how the gaming community signals to developers: ‘Yes, do more of that. Or no, please, don’t release any more of those ever.’

Valve is hoping to bring back some some version of paid mods in the future, but not anytime soon. Admittedly, Newell believe their method of approaching the introduction was rough around the edges. However, through it, they managed to gather useful information.

What do you think of paid mods? Do you agree or disagree with Gabe Newell? Feel free to let us know in the comments section below, we would love to hear from you! Don’t forget to follow Don’t Feed the Gamers on Facebook and Twitter to stay up to date on the latest gaming news!