Here is my email to Christen Coomer, who markets new Steam features.

"Dear Ms. Christen Coomer,

I've journeyed with your company and your games since Half-Life 1, I've been using Steam for 7 years now and I can't say how grateful I am for your tremendous contribution to PC gaming. I know how devoted you are to improve it and raise higher still its standards : it is because of this very dedication that I write to you about the new policy introduced today on Steam regarding modded content.

I'm not a market analyst, and I don't claim to know much about the underlying economic motivations that led Valve to allow mods to be sold on the workshop. Let me just state my perspective as a long-time gamer, avid user of mods, and consumer on the Steam platform : I think this is sending a wrong message.

We PC gamers stand apart from the rest of the gaming world thanks to our ability to tailor our experience to our needs and desires. This exists thanks to the dedication of hundreds of people who took upon themselves to develop new content for the games we love. Most modders did this as an act of goodwill as well as a way for them to improve their abilities, some pursuing their dreams of eventually making a fully-fledged game : donation has always been the counterpart of this goodwill.

Yet your company has decided to introduce a dangerous precedent in the world of modding, and I sincerely fear and think this is a Pandora's box for PC gaming. Among the many reasons, the most obvious that comes to mind is that mods differ from official content in that a mod does not always work properly. This means that your company intends to make profit over software that is not guaranteed to work. For a majority of people, paid content is associated with official content and implies reliability. Blurring this boundary will result in a confusion between official DLC and modded content.

You are also single-handedly trying to change the goodwill atmosphere that has always defined the modding community. In these conditions, who would want to continue developping free content when paid content is encouraged by such a major platform as Steam ? Quality will be harder to assess (as a matter of fact Steam already disabled comments on these mods), there will be scams, incomplete and barebones mods, and your decision will be changing the face of modding as a whole. Your policy is doing a major disservice to honest modders, since they will be lost in the sea of cash-grabbers and scammers : not to mention that taking a 75% cut on software you do not make can hardly be referred to as "helping the creators of content".

For all these reasons, I cannot continue to be a customer on Steam. This new policy hurts your company in my eyes, and I do not wish to fund it. I will not buy any game, DLC, mod on Steam as long as that policy is active. I thank you for the 7 years, but if this is where you want to take Steam and PC gaming, we must part ways now."

EDIT : thanks a lot for the gold anonymous brother. I hope this visibility will inspire many emails to the people in charge at Valve so we can change their stance for the better.