Well, they really backed away hard on that one. We'll see if the idea comes back eventually in another form in a few years, but for now things will stay as they are... which is a good thing IMO.
I was thinking about it some more in the last days, and utimately I decided that it was a bad thing, not necessarily for the modding scene as such, but for independant game development. As a few people already said, at 25% (or even a bit more, as they said that the modders' part would be up to game publishers), you're probably better off developing your own game. Learning to mod a game properly, the editor, the scripting API, the particularities, etc. takes a lot of time, about the same time you could invest learning Unity for example. But if paid mods had become a thing, this would essentially drawn in talents as indirect "workers" for the majors, and all that talent and time would be lost for the indie scene. Because, if you're developping a mod for skyrim, essentially you help Bethesda and their distributor (steam) make money and you get a cut in return. It's not very different from being hired by them to develop a DLC for example, essentially a work relationship, albeit an "open" one.
So for the big publishers, it was a good strategic move, because they were consolidating their presence and user-base, and they were undercutting future competition by drawing starting devs under their hood. It wasn't such good news for the rest of the smaller players, and that's why I'm rather happy it didn't happen finally.
I've been invited today to discuss the matter at local radio station, in Montreal here changes to the video game industry are watched closely...
