I find the lack of concern people have for what's undeniably happening to Skyrim's (indeed, TES and Bethesda's as a whole) established mod scene at this very moment disheartening. No matter how anyone tries to rationalize Valve's attempt at paid mods, this is ravaging Skyrim's modding community. The Elder Scrolls modding has been going on for 19 years counting the first notable attempts with Daggerfall, and for 13 years with official development kit tools since Morrowind. There are many, many thousands of mods for the series spanning all those years (many of which are nothing short of amazing) and NOT ONE SINGLE ONE WAS FOR MONEY.
Bethesda's games (especially on PC) are largely only popular because of that free mod scene, they've already benefited greatly from growing word of mouth, goodwill, and ultimately sales from all the community effort with the intention of improving or expanding upon the game for the sake of it or at best, indirect efforts to make a name for oneself. Similarly, Valve also benefit from those sales (Workshop's mere existence undoubtedly helps).
That both companies, especially Bethesda, have the gall to try and suck more from it is disgusting, imho. They're illustrating absolutely no respect for the modders or modding community who, if anything, they ought to be paying for cleaning up their garbage and polishing their reputation and games' worth immeasurably. Skyrim was a massive success and to this day remains at the top of Steam's charts because of this. People will bring up modders getting paid, but it's never been about that with TES modding and no one in the right mind would go into the hobby considering it. It never turned any monetary profits directly.
Instead of any such gratitude or contentment in allowing this to continue unfettered to their own benefit, the response from these companies is to monetize what became popular because it was free (facilitating easy use and disuse of a plethora of mods by pretty much every PC version owner, greatly contributing to the games' lasting and growing popularity) and then take inordinate cuts of it, seemingly forgetting the free part is what made it so enticing and positive to consumers, unrestrained (by legality conflicts) in terms of content creation, and productive in terms of modder collaboration. They did it with an existing and established game/community too, tearing it asunder in the most reckless manner possible with strife and opening up mods to a complicated mess of legal, ethical (mod theft and fear of such rightfully necessitating the removal of mods from Nexus by their creators), and retroactive (free mods become paid) issues.
Valve and Bethesda have lost all respect from this long-time Elder Scrolls fan and I've already committed myself to avoiding the former whenever I can (got TW3 from GOG instead) and as for the latter, I've already been growing discontent with their base games but at least they had such a proactive stance on mods which could fix a lot of their issues. But now they've placed themselves in a position where they would benefit from the mod revenue to have their UI and bugs fixed even? Unacceptable.
As for the premise of getting paid for making mods, ignoring the appalling cuts taken by the companies overseeing it, you were always doing things wrong if you went into TES modding for money as it's literally never been a factor in nearly two decades. It was never an incentive before and the community thrived for it (unified, too). It was a thing of beauty, but introducing money into any system always has ramifications and impact on motivation. It's basic human psychology. Some people will insist work demands payment, but it is a fact that TES modding has always been a hobbyist thing and it has thrived for it as have many modding communities.
Plenty of things individuals benefit from all day for free are made in such a way. Are we to pay to watch Youtube videos as well? What about viewing fan art? Reading fan fiction? Using all and any open source software? Reading a thought-out forum post? Do we apply this paid mod system retroactively to all games of the past as well? No, not all people will make mods for money, but it will always play a role in community division, motivational factors, cross-"licensing" of underlying mods, difficulty in quality regulation, IP-infringement, and disgusting behaviors such as ripping off other people's work and trying to sell it (that fear alone is negatively impacting Nexus as of now).
Paid mods simply cannot be properly and fully regulated, not while remaining community mods rather than outsourced DLC and they just drive a giant nail through the modding community as a whole.
