The developers of Valheim, Iron Gate Studio, recently made a post taking a stance against paid mods for their popular Viking survival game.
Iron Gate Studio, the creators of Valheim, the popular survival game where players must venture into different biomes to discover new resources, enemies, and tameable creatures, recently released a statement on Steam regarding mods for the game. According to the statement:
We definitely understand that you spend a lot of your time on creating a mod, and that you might want financial compensation for that, but Iron Gate does not condone locking modded content behind a paywall.
The developers go on to state:
We feel that charging money for a mod is against the creative and open spirit of modding itself, and therefore we urge all mod authors to make their mods freely available to all who want to play them. This should include the whole mod, and not just have part of the mod available for free while another part of it costs money. If you want to show your appreciation for a mod author you can of course still support them with a voluntary donation, but we do not want payment to be a requirement to access a mod.
While most mods are freely available to players to download on sites like NexusMods, other highly popular mods lock premium content behind a paywall.
One of the most notable and popular is the Warfare mod. This addition adds a vast plethora of different items, weapons, and animations — for free but also offers a premium paid version that includes a list of new world bosses in different biomes, additional content, and even more (shinier) weapons. According to the store page for the mod:
You can unlock the premium content by donating to my PayPal for local access or donating to my Patreon for server access, check the following links for more info and join my discord server.
Important to note, as of today, there is no official mod support for Valheim via Steam. In order to mod the game, players will need to download them from third-party websites not affiliated with Iron Gate Studios.
Whether this warning from the developers changes the monetization practices for the mods that charge a fee for access is yet to be seen. But what we can say is that we’ll be following this story closely in our news section.
