Steam Workshop makes creators $50 million richer

Valve's Steam Workshop was first launched in 2011 for Team Fortress 2 items and allows players of Valve and Steamworks-enabled games to download user-created content for their games. In Valve's own games you can also pay for some of these items and it seems that this can now be considered a success, with Valve revealing the fact that they have now given out over $57 million to creators of in-game items sold in Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. This was distributed to over 1500 creators in 75 different countries.

Valve have also announced that curated Workshops are opening for two non-Valve games, allowing the purchase of community made items in both Dungeon Defenders: Eternity and Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. These two games will soon feature lots more high quality items available for purchase and importantly these items will be made by the community, for the community, with some of the profits going back to the creators.

Valve also said that, “We expect more curated Workshops to become available for creators and players in various games over the coming weeks and months.”. This will lead to even more curated Workshops opening for other games that support Steamworks, and having lots of user generated content for a game, with rewards for the creators of this content, is great for both the community and the players.

In the same post Valve also announced, that they would be releasing new tools for content creators that will allow them to keep track of their sales, both for individual items and overall in real-time. This will be enhanced with historical data as well so that Workshop creators can easily keep track of where they are making money and plan how to make the most of their time.

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KitGuru Says: While we don't know how much Valve will be making from sales of items in non-Valve games, as long as the content creators are happy with their cut I don't think it really matters. Valve have so far been pretty smart about how they make their money and have not to my knowledge, placed adverts all over Steam and their games, something that I'm sure advertisers are none too happy about with that massive market.

Source: Steam News

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