It's not over. The community is at stake. I am very worried that tribal knowledge and our community's generosity will evaporate now it has been comodified.

I don't want to let this go, because I've spent 1300 hours living Skyrim, taking care of it like a steward. It's a second home.

I'm a small-time modder, but I had a neat idea and some guy came out of nowhere and wrote custom shader code to make it a really awesome thing, improving on the original idea and bringing my Skyrim that much more to life. And we shared it freely to others. I wanted to contribute to participate and to thank all the other modders for their brilliance and dedication.

This is in jeopardy now. We might end up with 20-100 nifty AAA mods that don't cost too much at all... but we'll lose our intermediate and beginning modders.

I have around 300 mods. Most of those are from small-time modders like myself. There is so much choice right now to build Skyrim into a beautiful, unique world. These small-time mods will vanish.

If they try to sell them in the workshop, they'll never make enough money to even receive a payment. Valve will keep all those funds. Do you realize how much that would add up to? That's nefarious. They'll sap the little guys, and you'll be left with a few DLC-type mods, some scams, some clones...

Skyrim is our house now. It's not going to be easy to let this go.

I didn't think this was even possible, so I made my all my licenses free as in freedom, free as in beer, and free as in roadkill. I didn't even care if someone made money with my modder's resouces--but I never imagined Steam and Bethesda would do something like this. It's heartbreaking.

(Slightly buzzed, I know I'm raving. Seriously, though. This is bad news for a cohesive scene.)