Valheim devs urge fans not to charge for mods
Against the "open spirit" of modding.
The developer of viking survival game Valheim has urged fans not to charge for mods they create.
In a new blog post on Steam, the Iron Gate team noted it's been receiving "a lot of questions regarding mods" and addressed some issues around the modding scene.
The game doesn't have any official mod support, but the team is flattered and "definitely happy to see that people are engaging with our game".
However, Iron Gate is against charging money for mods.
"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," reads the blog post.
"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."
It continues by stating that the entire mod should be free, not having part behind a paywall, and that tipping a mod author is of course welcome voluntarily.
Further, mods should be labelled as unofficial both in-game and on mod websites. The team is seeking to avoid confusion on when the game has been modded or not - indeed, there is a feature in-game to have a mod trigger a popup.
Valheim was released back in 2021 and sold 2m copies in under two weeks after launch.
More recently, the game was released on Xbox consoles via Game Pass.
New customisable difficulty settings and creating mode options are also on the way.