Some mods have created entire new games out of current ones (I'm looking at stuff like Mount and Blade or back in the day Warcraft III custom games) and these people did it out of love, so getting some financial gain is great.

While true, there is a key difference with Skyrim: Mod dependencies. What happens when a freely released mod is developed that requires a paid mod to function?

For example, SkyUI is now a paid mod. There's still the free version on the Nexus and the dev has said that any "core" changes will roll into the free version. That doesn't get rid of the fact the paid version has features the free one does not. There are tons of mods that require SkyUI to function.

I'm a very casual mod maker. I mod few and far between. While spending time thinking about this situation, this is how I would personally release mods with this new system, should I want to be more dedicated:

-Release free and paid (supporter) version of mod.

-Both versions are identical. The only difference is that the paid version is as a testing ground. Basically, if you become a supporter, you double as a beta tester for balancing/testing/etc. It helps get the bugs ironed out much quicker when you have lots of people testing instead of just one.

-Testing is more manageable due to the smaller group of people testing. If there's a major issue, you don't have thousands of people messaging you garbage like "why doesn't your shit work!?" Since folks will be paying with explicit knowledge they're also testers, I would expect the reporting to be better than the public at large.

-When bugs are fixed and the mod is balanced, both free and paid get the identical release. Since Steam says it can't be the same version in both changes, the paid version will have the next testing feature ready and pushed in the update.

At the end of the day, nobody gets a gimped version of the mod, nobody gets pestered to give me money, and those who choose to get the privilege to test new features for bugs and balance problems before pushing to the free version. If you want to pay, fine. If not, I don't care either way. Both sides get the same experience, the free version gets updates that should be mostly bug free.