Creator of pulled premium mod quits Steam for good

Skyrim mod creator Chesko has said he’s done with Steam Workshop mod support after clashing with Valve over his controversial Art of the Catch mod.

It was reported last week that the fishing mod, which was one of the first premium mods to be made available on the service, became the first to be pulled from the service after it was discovered to have used animations from an existing mod.

However, it transpires that Valve has refused to remove the mod completely, despite requests to do so from the creator.

I was just contacted by Valve’s lawyer,” Chesko said on Reddit. He stated that they will not remove the content unless ‘legally compelled to do so’, and that they will make the file visible only to currently paid users.

Valve’s stance is that they ‘cannot’ completely remove an item from the Workshop if it is for sale, only allow it to be marked as unpurchasable. I feel like I have been left to twist in the wind by Valve and Bethesda. I am beside myself with anger right now as they try to tell me what I can do with my own content. Unbelievable.

In light of all of the above, and with the complete lack of moderation control over the hundreds of spam and attack messages I have received on Steam and off, I am making the decision to leave the curated Workshop behind.”

Chesko also detailed the process that went into the launch of Steam Workshop premium mods alst week.

We were given about a month and a half to prepare our content,” he added. Things internally stayed rather positive and exciting until some of us discovered that ‘25 per cent revenue share’ meant 25 per cent to the modder, not to Valve/Bethesda.

This sparked a long internal discussion. My key argument to Bethesda was that this model incentivizes small, cheap to produce items (time-wise) than it does the large, full-scale mods that this system has the opportunity of championing. It does not reward the best and the biggest.

But at the heart of it, the argument came down to this: How much would you pay for front-page Steam coverage? How much would you pay to use someone else’s successful IP (with nearly no restrictions) for a commercial purpose? 25 per cent, when someone else is doing the marketing, PR, brand building, sales, and so on, and all I have to do is ‘make stuff’, is actually pretty attractive. Is it fair? No. But it was an experiment I was willing to at least try.”