Valheim developer slams paid mods

Valheim developer Iron Gate has slammed paid mods for its popular multiplayer survival game.

Ever since Valheim was released for PC in 2021, it soon became one of the most popular games in its genre, before making its way to Xbox in March this year. At least on PC, according to SteamDB, Valheim hit an all-time concurrent player peak of 502,387.

Sure, those numbers have naturally dwindled over the last two years, but Valheim still maintains a healthy player base and no doubt those numbers are a little more impressive when you consider the Xbox platform, too.

However, one of the best ways to keep players engaged is the fantastic modding community. Whether it's a new skin, maps, modes or even DLC, the PC modding community can be a weird and wonderful place. Best of all, for the most part, mods are free.

That being said, there is a fine line between what should be free and what should be paid for. Modders invest countless hours bringing the best mods to life. On the flip side, while it is understandable that some modders will want to charge a fee, some publishers and developers don’t always look upon them so fondly by profiting on their property.

One such developer is the aforementioned Iron Gate. As reported by DSOGaming, the studio has released a statement slamming paid mods for Valheim and has called for the community-made content to be free.

The studio will not block any of the paid-for mods, and to be fair, Iron Gate has openly suggested supporting modders with a donation in support - it just prefers not to see money exchanged for mods.

“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,” Iron Gate said in a statement. “This should include the whole mod, and not just have part of the mod available for free while another part of it costs money. If you want to show your appreciation for a mod author you can of course still support them with a voluntary donation, but we do not want payment to be a requirement to access a mod.

“Additionally, we would also greatly appreciate it if mods made it clear that they are unofficial mods, both in-game and on any website where the mod is available,” it continued. “Sometimes joining a modded dedicated server will automatically trigger a download of a mod, and we simply want to avoid confusion for players so that they can know whether or not they are playing a modded game.

“Valheim already has a feature for this, where you can simply have your mod trigger a popup in game, which will inform the player that their game is running with a mod.”

Valheim is available now for PC, Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One. Furthermore, plans may be in the works to bring the survival game to PlayStation in the near future.