We've recently added some features to the Workshop that should be pretty useful for both new and power users alike.

The new Steam Client beta has various improvements around Workshop, including displaying which item is being downloaded in the Downloads page, and an improved interface for dealing with your Workshop item subscriptions (accessible from your game's Properties dialog). The subscription list now contains additional information, such as when the item was last updated, when you subscribed to it, and any item dependencies. You can also filter your list by name or by tag.

For more advanced use cases, you can disable items from being loaded by your game. And you can now change the local load order for your items. Also, if Workshop creators have set their items as depending on other items, you can automatically set the load order based on these dependencies. Missing dependencies will also be displayed, to make it easier to see why some mods are not working. You can opt into the Steam Client beta to try out these changes.

On the web side of things, we've added Saved Search Queries. Basically, if you often find yourself searching/sorting/filtering to find the same kind of items in a game's Workshop, you can now save those search query parameters. Then you can re-run your search at any time by selecting that saved search query from your game's Workshop home page.

We've also added some more browsing options to the main Workshop Home page. You can now filter to games that have Workshops based on whether you recently visited them, and we've brought back the ability to view Workshops for games you own or have recent playtime in.

Plus a few other web changes:

• Added the ability to subscribe to an item and all the items it depends on
  
• Added previous and next buttons to the image viewer
  
• Adding an item to a collection no longer reloads the web page
  
• Allow unlisted and friends-only items to be added to a collection

Let us know your thoughts in the Steam Client Beta discussions.

Today we've released a couple of improvements to the way that search works in the Steam Workshop.

With this update, when you search within a game's Workshop, the results will now handle partial string matches and will organize the results to prioritize the most relevant results, taking into account popularity and user ratings.

You can check out the improvements to search by exploring your favorite game's Steam Workshop.

When preparing the Workshop page for your mod or item, you now have the option to include a 3D Sketchfab preview of your item along with your videos and screenshots.

Here’s an example from johnskyrim’s Doomhammer, a Skyrim weapon mod:
https://sketchfab.com/models/7b08add6fb40478a9bc465a8ef0d8ffb
This can be used to provide an interactive 3D presentation of your model, scene, or item that users can zoom, pan, or rotate around to get a better view of your submission.

To include a Sketchfab preview, you’ll need to create a free account on Sketchfab’s website (http://sketchfab.com/) and upload your model there similar to how you go about posting a video to YouTube. Once your item has been posted to Sketchfab and you have a page on their site, you may enter that URL in the new field provided in the Steam Workshop when editing the screenshots and videos for your item.

The Sketchfab preview can also be inserted into Steam Community Discussions, Announcements, and Greenlight submissions.

Here are a few more examples:
City Skylines:
https://sketchfab.com/models/5948e8c389284f10993f882ca329223b
https://sketchfab.com/models/fa7d5fb3b9b14278be24afadf9d806bd

XCOM 2
https://sketchfab.com/models/184115675e484032944ec31d9dbcadd2

We're going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we'll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.

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.

To help you understand why we thought this was a good idea, our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid. We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it.

But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim's workshop. We understand our own game's communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here.

Now that you've backed a dump truck of feedback onto our inboxes, we'll be chewing through that, but if you have any further thoughts let us know.

The Steam Workshop has always been a great place for discovering community-made mods, maps, and items for a variety of games. Starting now with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the Workshop is also a great place for community content creators to earn money by selling their greatest works.

We think this is a great opportunity to help support the incredible creative work being done by mod makers in the Steam Workshop and to encourage more top-quality work. This new feature allows mod authors to choose whether to list their items for a fixed price, for pay-what-you-want, or to make their item available for free. As a customer and fan of Skyrim, you're able to explore both paid and free mods, quests, and items.

The whole feature is best explained in the full press announcement and on the detailed announcement page and FAQ here: http://www.steamoss.com/workshop/aboutpaidcontent

Along with these new options available to mod-creators, we've added a few features to support the experience and make everything as easy as possible:

With over 24,000 free mods available for Skyrim in the Steam Workshop, there will always be lots to do and explore for free. Now you can also find mods with a specified price, or mods where you can choose how much you wish to support the creators. The price is up to the mod creators.

When shopping for anything, it's still important to spend a little time learning about any product you are about to purchase. But, if after purchase you find that a mod is broken or doesn’t work as promised, you can easily get a refund of that mod within 24 hours of your purchase. View the full refund policy here.

If you're new to Skyrim and haven't yet tried it out, now is your chance. Available now through April 26th, Skyrim is free to play. Just visit the Skyrim store page and click the 'play' button to download and start playing. If you decide you want to keep the game, it's also on sale for 75% off regular price!

To prepare for this announcement, we've asked a few community mod makers to prepare some content for release. Browse Paid Skyrim Mods

Whether you're just getting started or are already a professional artist or developer, now you can make money from your creations in the Steam Workshop.

Starting with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, you can make new cosmetic items, custom skins, fancy houses, epic quests, entire new cities, or just a new hat for Lydia. Once you've made your creation, you can easily set a price and earn a portion of each sale made through the Steam Workshop.

Plus, many more of your favorite Workshop games will support paid content in the coming weeks. Check out the full announcement and FAQ for more details.

When we launched the Workshop late in 2011, we expected that it would grow, but not that it would grow this much, this quickly. So far, the total payments made to individuals for the creation of in-game items sold in Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive have passed $57 million. This money was earned by over 1,500 contributors spread out across 75 countries.

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. Today we're happy to announce that after a ton of work, the first curated Workshops for non-Valve games have opened: Dungeon Defenders: Eternity and Chivalry: Medieval Warfare.

This is really exciting news and means that more high quality content will be available for the game you love playing. Plus, purchases of this great new content directly enables those community members to continue practicing their craft and making more awesome content.

We expect more curated Workshops to become available for creators and players in various games over the coming weeks and months.

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. 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.

Once you have content accepted into a paid, curated Workshop, you'll see a link to "View Your Revenue" from your "My Workshop Files" page. If you don't have any content accepted yet, now's a great time to get involved!

We just released an update for the Steam Workshop that adds a voting queue for item selection and a new home page for each Workshop to highlight cool content.

Workshops for games such as Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive include a type of items that players vote on to help determine which items can get accepted and made available for use in the game.

Workshops with these types of items now have a voting queue, similar to the queue in Greenlight or on the Steam home page. This queue will make it easy to discover new and interesting items to vote on, and will help the game teams get a better measure of community interest on the variety of items being considered for use in the game.

Each product Workshop now has a new home page design, helping to highlight the most interesting content in the Workshop, and to also better expose a variety of ways to browse the Workshop. With this new home page, customers can now more easily see mods, maps, or items created by authors they follow, see what their friends are marking as favorites, and read about recent Workshop news from the game teams.

This new home page also provides space for games to run special events such as themed contests, or to highlight new types of content supported by their Workshop.

This update has automatically applied to all games and software with a Steam Workshop, so just check out your favorite Workshop to see these new features.

• Added views for most popular items over trailing three-months, six-months, and year. This only applies to ready-to-use content such as mods and maps.
  
• Adding tabs lists to the home page for ready-to-use items. These lists include a new 'Most Subscribed' list as well as 'Most Popular' and 'Most Recent'.
  
• Adding larger voting controls to item voting to support the voting queue.
  
• Removing comment threads from the main page for items to be voted on. Giant ASCII art is now relegated to the 'comment' tab on each Workshop item.
  
• Hiding star ratings on items to be voted on to help avoid biased voting.

Today we celebrate the milestone of having 100 games utilizing the Steam Workshop for sharing user generated content in the Steam Community. That is, 100 plus the nine more titles that added support for Steam Workshop while we were busy writing this announcement. So, here you are with 109 opportunities to share your creative energy with the community by creating custom mods or items, or to share in the excitement of others and customize your games.

Each of the 109 titles use the Steam Workshop in different ways, such as for sharing maps, in-game items, custom scenarios, full game conversions, character skins, new game modes, spells, puzzles, quests, characters, language packs, and much, much more. This is all player-driven, where you can create custom game modifications or content for your favorite game and share it with the community.

You can see the full list of products on the Steam Workshop home page: http://steamoss.com/workshop/

Some Numbers
Over 1,100,000 maps, items, and mods have been posted to the Steam Workshop. This includes everything from custom maps in Civilization V and Monaco to custom in-game items for titles such as Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2.

Over 12 Million gamers have played a modded game or played on custom maps found through the Steam Workshop.

Each of those 12 Million gamers have downloaded an average of 57 items from the Workshop, such as custom maps, weapons, game rules, full conversions, or other modifications.

The Steam Workshop has served nearly 700 Million downloads to date.

Gamers have voted over 32 Million times on items in the Workshop, with 90% of those being up-votes.

Within the past two weeks, another six products have added integration with the Steam Workshop, bringing us to a total of 99 Workshops in Steam! Below are the most recent additions to the Steam Workshop with a bit of information on how each one is utilizing the Workshop for sharing user generated content.


Beat Hazard is already a pretty customized game, letting you fly a spaceship through your own library of music. But now you can build and share your own custom spaceships in the Steam Workshop. Or pick from one of the over 700 custom ships already shared by the community.


The Door Kickers Workshop hosts custom maps, equipment, weapons, and other mods made by the community. Players were clearly interested in seeing more variety of weapons in the game, and Workshop contributors have delivered, providing a couple dozen new options to pick from.


Clickteam Fusion is using the Steam Workshop to share tutorials and bits of source code to help game creators learn and build their own experiences.


The Starpoint Gemini 2 Workshop includes various mods, ranging from a simple text change to complete game world conversions.


The Insurgency workshop, currently in beta, allows you to download custom maps that you can play in your own private games or on game servers running these maps.


Secrets of Rætikon Workshop supports custom levels, mods, total conversions, and even your own games with the powerful editor of Secrets of Raetikon. Share your creations with other players and enjoy what others have built.