It's fair to say that not everyone is happy with yesterday's launch of paid mods on Steam. And so, as is the way of things, there's now a petition demanding that Valve "remove the paid content of the Steam Workshop" on Change.org—and it's attracted more than 34,000 signatures in less than 24 hours.
"The workshop is a place for people to share content with each other they made so all can enjoy it for free," the petition states. "Mods should be a free creation. Creations made by people who wish to add to the game so others can also enjoy said creation with the game. We need to unite and reject this act by Valve. Unite have Valve remove the paid content of the Workshop."
Internet petitions follow internet anger like night follows day, but as Tyler talked about yesterday, some of the concerns about paid mods are perfectly legitimate and understandable. Even so, I'm a little surprised by the intensity of the backlash. The Steam forums are alight with conversation, and of course the news that one paid mod has already been removed because it contained content from another, free mod has only added fuel to the fire.
Of course, Valve is under no obligation to respond to this petition, and so far today there are far more people actually playing Skyrim—48,000—than have called on Valve to end paid Skyrim mods. But the number of signatories is climbing, and eventually, if the growth continues, it's going to get awfully hard to ignore.

In all reality, some schmuck got into Gabe's ear and got him to agree that a piece of the price charged for the Mod was worth shitting on your consumer base.

One of the worst decisions Gabe has put in place.

Update: After discussion with Valve, and listening to our community, paid mods are being removed from Steam Workshop. Even though we had the best intentions, the feedback has been clear – this is not a feature you want. Your support means everything to us, and we hear you.

We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing. We've been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they've been received well. It's obvious now that this case is different.