Amazing news! Although, I'm slightly concerned about the wording. He says, that adding paid mods to an established modding community wasn't a good idea to start off. Reading between the lines I'm hearing 'we need to be more intelligent on how we implement paid mods in the future'.

Please explain exactly what about paid mods is intrinsically bad.

I honestly don't know.

If you really want modders to make a living add a donate button that gives majority if not 100% to the creator.

I'm not sure I totally agree with this statement. %100 to the creator? But who, exactly is the creator? When a video game ships, do the programmers who make the tools not get paid? Do the publishers not get paid? Does the marketing team not get paid?

Mod creation isn't done in a vacuum. If we consider a mod to be a product, wouldn't it be fair to consider, as part of that product, all parts of that product? The tools used to make the mod, the publisher of the mod, the assets the mod works with, etc?

I feel like people who insist on 100% to the creator, and they mean only the mod creater, are treating the issue as if the mod is a full fledged game, not a modification of a pre-existing game. But I think it's disingenuous to treat a mod like a full-fledged game, as if all the work done to ship the initial product is void simply because we paid for the initial product.

Since the mod simply can't exist without the pre-existing game, I feel like there is a non-zero owing to the creators of the pre-existing game. Whether that owing be 1% or 90%, I'm not close enough to the issue to decide. But I don't think 0% is reasonable. (To be clear, I don't think the modification-creators owe 0% to the teams that built the base game to begin with.)

To put it simply, a mod is not a game, and I don't think it should be treated like a game.