The modding community surrounding Skyrim has been in an uproar for the last week since Steam implemented the ability to charge for game mods. With all kinds of things being thrown around on the internet about the whole situation from prominent modders quitting the mod community to disputes about what is fair to sell, things have been all up-in-the-air regarding the whole situation.

As of yesterday, the majority of the mess should now be heading towards cooling off. Valve has made an official statement saying that they will be removing the paid option from the Skyrim Workshop, followed by something of an apology – it’s quoted right below.

We’re going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we’ll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.

We’ve done this because it’s clear we didn’t understand exactly what we were doing. We’ve been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they’ve been received well. It’s obvious now that this case is different.

To help you understand why we thought this was a good idea, our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid. We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it.

But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim’s workshop. We understand our own game’s communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there’s a useful feature somewhere here.

Now that you’ve backed a dump truck of feedback onto our inboxes, we’ll be chewing through that, but if you have any further thoughts let us know.

This comes straight from this page here, an announcement on the Skyrim Workshop’s page. It seems like the everything in the modders’ community will return to normal soon.

We’ll keep you posted on any more updates regarding this whole situation.