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Those who have created custom content for Valve games have now made more than $57 million via its Steam Workshop, Valve said in a Wednesday blog post. And that’s only from three games: Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
For those unaware, Steam Workshop is the service by which third parties can create add-on content for supported games—like new weapons, or new skins for weapons, or items for a character to wear. In some games, the community votes for what it most likes with their wallets, and developers get a fraction of the item’s cost when it sells.
According to Steam, more than 1,500 people across 75 countries have participated in the Steam Workshop as item sellers since it launched in late 2011.
“The Workshop has continued to grow and a larger number of contributors are now earning revenue from more pieces of content in a wider variety of games,” Valve said. “To help answer questions about where revenue is coming from, we’re also launching a set of new tools that enable contributors to view real-time sales data for their items as well as view detailed per-item revenue breakdowns and historical statements.”
Valve also announced the first two non-Valve games that will support Steam Workshop sales: Dungeon Defenders: Eternity and Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. While the company hopes to have Steam Workshop integrated into other titles over the coming “weeks and months,” the company did note that it took “a ton of work” to get Steam Workshop integrated into these two new titles.
“The limitation of paid, revenue-generating Workshops to Valve content has been an unfortunate consequence of the sheer number of challenges required in order to scale to a global audience of creators and players,” Valve wrote.
In May 2014, Valve noted that more than 1.1 million items had been posted to Steam Workshop—be they items sold for a price or published for free for others to mod into their games. The Steam Workshop, at that time, was up to more than 700 million total downloads. Of the 12 million gamers who have played some kind of modded game, each downloaded an average of 57 items from the Workshop itself.
