[jondr]

They do understand. A huge amount of the outrage and criticism on sites like reddit, 4chan and NeoGAF acknowledge that the basic idea of paying for mods has its potential to reward creative modders and result in some increase in quality modding.

But the frustration in this instance is mainly about the specific implementation. Paid modding was being forced onto a game and a mod community never designed to tolerate it. There were simply way too many complications for it be simply a case of: pay money, eventually get better mods. Skyrim modding is too haphazard and a legal and ethical mess. Plus it is a community that had survived for years and produced many quality mods without any formal financial system to aide it at all.

As an avid gamer it is quite frustrating to see people dismiss this outrage as "gamers not knowing what's good for them" or "entitled gamers not wanting to pay for something they expect to be free" when it is a lot more nuanced than that.

[UK-AL]

As far as I know, you could also release free mods. It wasn't a forced thing.

With this system, if a guy wanted to drop his full time job, and do modding full time he could if it was popular enough. Now, that would be more difficult. Resulting in less content.