Valve is removing paid mods from Steam and will refund anyone who spent money on them.

The move comes just days after the company launched the paid mods service, beginning with paid mods for Skyrim.

“We've done this because it's clear we didn't understand exactly what we were doing,” said Valve's Alden Kroll.

“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.

“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.”

Valve said it will be looking at all user feedback regarding the feature.

Bethesda also chimed in on the issue.

“After discussion with Valve, and listening to our community, paid mods are being removed from Steam Workshop,” it said.

“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.”

Last week Valve co-founder Gabe Newell took to Reddit to field questions and complaints about the new service.

"You need a more robust Valve-is-evil hypothesis," he wrote.