There's some amazing news setting on the horizon for modders out there, as we speak, that will allow them to finally receive compensation for their hard work.

Steam has launched a new feature within its platform -- called Item Stores -- that will allow developers to curate a market for specific games.

Astonishingly, developers will be able to work with modders to sell user-created items on a game's official store on Steam, allowing both the original game developer and modder to split the proceeds.

Valve offers an explanation to the Steam Development Community Group stating the following:

This new Item Store is designed to make it easy for developers to establish an in-game economy or to just sell individual cosmetic items, keys, or consumables. And, it's designed to easily integrate with a curated Workshop (similar to Team Fortress 2) so you can accept user-made items, use that data to create item definitions and prices in the Steam Inventory Service, and set those items for sale via the Item Store. Steam takes care of the checkout process, splitting payments to Workshop authors as appropriate, and adding the items to users' inventories. Your game then just needs to be able to call the Workshop to download item content in the right circumstances for your game.

However, what isn't transparent is the proceed split between both modders and developers. Although a potentially good thing about this is that it will allow for developers to set price caps on items, depreciating the sometimes over-expensive rare items sold by the community.

Currently, the only game using this feature on Steam is Rust, with others, undeniably, well under way.