Bethesda is going for round 2. Be prepared!

Read the news here.[www.idigitaltimes.com]
I think that some day we'll have to let it happen in some form. My idea is optional Workshop integrated donations where the modder gets at least a 50% cut.

Join the new group so we can keep protesting!

Valve has announced from the Steam Workshop group that paid mods will be removed for good! Thank you for supporting the fight, everyone!

Originally posted by Valve:

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.

There are many reasons why we are leaving the FMA (Free Mod Alliance). The main reason is that none of the FMA members actually seem to care about the protest and it makes no difference at all if we are members of the alliance or not.

Originally posted by tornado711:

The Free Mod Alliance (the FMA) is a pact formed Tornado711 and mood which unites the groups that are currently boycotting the pay to use concept of steam modding! We have united the current boycott groups under one organization! Note: This is not a separate steam group! This is a pact formed among boycotting groups to help collaborate on protest efforts and make things more organized! We encourage any other boycott groups who are not involved in the FMA to get in contact with tornado711 so we may add you to the pact!! Together we can push for change people!!! Join these other groups as well to support the cause! #FREETHEWORKSHOP #FMA


Current members of the FMA:
http://steamproxy.net/groups/antipaymodding
http://steamproxy.net/groups/BoycottSteamWorkshop
http://steamproxy.net/groups/hashtagsavethemoddingcommunity
http://steamproxy.net/groups/FreeTheWorkshop
http://steamproxy.net/groups/bringdownthepaywall
http://steamproxy.net/groups/ignishope
http://steamproxy.net/groups/pootisislovepootisislife
http://steamproxy.net/groups/FreeTheWorkshopForTheWin
http://steamproxy.net/groups/removepaidmods/

That is the description for the FMA written by the founder of it. The whole text is kind of unclear and doesn't really tell much about the FMA. He still made sure to put his Steam name there two times. That just shows us he is only seeking for attention. We cannot base everything on one text written by him, though. We have to have more reasons. And we have plenty of them.

The reasons:

• Like it says in the start of this post the FMA members just don't seem to care. The FMA private group has only one announcement and one discussion. The announcement was made by tornado711 after we tried to get him to send it for about a day. It was an "updated" FMA member list that every FMA group would put on their page. It looked ugly and was propably made in one minute. And it was not actually updated. There was just a few groups listed and one of them (called "Pootis Fan Club") was supposed to be removed from the FMA. tornado711 promised me to remove it from the list but he didn't. As you can see the group cannot be joined as it is private and the group states itself that it is not a part of the FMA. The only discussion was made by me. It was a fixed version of the member list that I used about 15 minutes to make but tornado711 was too lazy to even take a look at it. Point of this bullet being: the FMA is not organized at all, they don't even have a list of their members.
  
• I asked tornado711 many times to have a group meeting where we could set our shared goals and update the list of members and get a place to share the FMA resources. Some times he ignored me completely and when he answered he kept saying the same things over and over again. "We don't have time for that." "You are not the leader of the FMA." "We've got this under control." "Calm down." "We want this to stay as a peaceful protest." "You're taking this too seriously." There was also some other phrases like that but my point is he never had anything to say as a response to my messages because he just didn't care so he decided to ignore me instead. And about the "peaceful protest thing" would it be somehow radical if our alliance would organize a bit? I don't think so.
  
• tornado711 also said that the FMA is not supposed to be "completely organized" and it exists "just to show unity". What if I told you that the FMA is not organized at all and that the members of the FMA are not united. There can't be even a tiny bit of organization or unity if we don't even know the amount of us and the names of each other.
  
• The overall image we got from the FMA. The only person that could be reached in the FMA was tornado711. He was plain ignorant. He didn't even bother to read what we wrote to him. He also promoted the fact that he is the leader and he has everything under control. He was trying to be hard to reach and he acted like he had no seconds to waste. The ironic thing is that he spent hours to send me messages like "I don't have time for that" instead of checking out a simple post somewhere, making a tiny announcement or holding a short meeting. He wasn't always even sure about the organization name so sometimes he called it the MFA (Mod Free Alliance?).

He (tornado711) is still writing only positive stuff about the "great alliance" of the FMA groups. That's what we call Free Mod Alliance propaganda. They claim to have an alliance but actually there has never been one. The FMA is completely bullshit.

I was trying to be as clear as possible to explain why we decided to leave the FMA. The text may still be hard to understand and contain a lot of typos because I wrote it in a hurry and english is not my primary language. If you have any questions feel free to ask, we will answer them as soon as we can!

Thank you for reading, I hope you have a better understanding of the truth behind the FMA now.

Gabe Newell did an AMA on r/gaming. He has commented the situation and answered some questions.

You can easily find his comments via this link

Something he commented about banning people below:

Originally posted by Gabe Newell:

Well, if we are censoring people, that's stupid. I'll get that to stop. On top of it being stupid, it doesn't work (see Top Gear forums on Jeremy Clarkson).

That explains why I along with others got banned from the Steam community because of protesting their change. They still haven't restored any removed threads, comments, screenshots, discussions, announcements et cetera, though.

I know this information is a bit outdated, it has been first announced two days ago. We'll have to catch up anyways and someone may have missed this announcement by Garry Newman so here it is: http://garry.tv/2015/04/24/paying-for-mods/