Gabe Newell to Speak His Opinion on Paid Mods

There finally seems to be word from Valve's Gabe Newell on the Paid Mod controversy. Since the release of the Paid Mods feature plastered on Steam's Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Workshop Page, the gaming community hasn't taken particularly kind to the idea. Many gamers and modders have been protesting via "protest mods," petitions, or by flipping ASCII birds on the forums to back the fact that Valve is being greedy. The backlash from the community has finally caused Newell to set up a Q & A session on Reddit to try and ease the tension. Here are some of the most interesting responses from Newell that indeed shed a little light on the situation:

"Let's assume for a second that we are stupidly greedy. So far the paid mods have generated $10K total. That's like 1% of the cost of the incremental email the program has generated for Valve employees (yes, I mean pissing off the Internet costs you a million bucks in just a couple of days). That's not stupidly greedy, that's stupidly stupid.
You need a more robust Valve-is-evil hypothesis."

"We are adding a button that modders can use that allows them to set a minimum pay what you want option."

Here is probably the most important statement, however:

"Our goal is to make modding better for the authors and gamers. If something doesn't help with that, it will get dumped. Right now I'm more optimistic that this will be a win for authors and gamers, but we are always going to be data driven."

So he believes that, despite the backlash received beginning Thursday, that people will understand and start supporting the feature altogether, but if Paid Mods do not help gamers in the end, he will drop the project altogether. Do you believe that his words will change the tide of the controversy?