The return of paid mods

[Zeta333]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRkrascT_iM

gg bethesda

[Mister Cheese]

I'm not surprised that this is happening again. Considering demand that modders wanted to be paid for their work and it's easy money for Bethesda it was going to happen eventually. While I am hoping that Bethesda monitors the content in this club I have a feeling it will end up like Steam Greenlight.

[Blueobelisk]

Those games are well past their prime so who even cares?

[Zeta333]

Those games are well past their prime so who even cares?

Its a gateway.

[glowpipe]

I was reading somewhere else that it aint paid mods. But more like microtransactions. Like freelance devs creating mini dlc content. All tested and made sure its working with eachother and stuff.

Someone posted this in the E3 thread but this is how the official site describes it

What is the Creation Club?

Creation Club is a collection of all-new content for both Fallout 4 and Skyrim. It features new items, abilities, and gameplay created by Bethesda Games Studios and outside development partners including the best community creators. Creation Club content is fully curated and compatible with the main game and official add-ons.

How do I get Creation Club content?

Creation Club is available via in-game digital marketplaces in both Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition and purchased with Credits. Credits are available for purchase on PSN, Xbox Live, and Steam. Your Credits are transferable and can be used in both games on the same platform.




Can I become a Creator?

Whether you are a professional developer, artist, or modder; you can apply to be a Creator here (broken link). Be ready to share work you’ve already done as part of your application.

Is Creation Club paid mods?

No. Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they’d like. Also, we won’t allow any existing mods to be retrofitted into Creation Club, it must all be original content. Most of the Creation Club content is created internally, some with external partners who have worked on our games, and some by external Creators. All the content is approved, curated, and taken through the full internal dev cycle; including localization, polishing, and testing. This also guarantees that all content works together. We’ve looked at many ways to do “paid mods”, and the problems outweigh the benefits. We’ve encountered many of those issues before. But, there’s a constant demand from our fans to add more official high quality content to our games, and while we are able to create a lot of it, we think many in our community have the talent to work directly with us and create some amazing new things.

If this is the case, then maybe. If we gonna get less and less mods and more and more paid shit, then i hope bethesda goes bankrupt. No one gonna buy their shitty games wich only lives because of mods if you have to pay 49.99 for the game and 3872 dollars to make it playable.

[Mister Cheese]

Those games are well past their prime so who even cares?

It's horseshit is what it is. Elder Scrolls VI or Fallout 5 will launch with these paid mods and you'll have to pay 4.99 for an unofficial patch created by someone that did Bethesda's job for them.

Meanwhile right now the unofficial bug fix patches for all the Fallout and TES games are free right now on the Nexus. This will be a shitshow. When steam introduced paid mods many mods were taken off the Nexus and put on steam. Then people started putting up stolen mods on Steam to try to resell them. Asset flipping essentially. While they may claim to moderate this it doesn't mean this system will be perfect.

5 dollars for extra hair colors! 10 dollars for a ui update! 15 dollars for a weapon skin!

[smackyslap]

Just going to ignore the whole paid mods things for a moment and talk about that bullshit line that these mods will always be compatible with your game and save I've been messing with the gamebryo engine for a long time and can tell you will never be 100% that a mod will play nice with your game. Not to mention the game can't even properly purge data left over from mods you have installed then uninstalled unless it's just a texture mod if it has scripts it's gonna leave some shit behind gotta use a 3rd party save cleaning tool to do that and most of the time that is just asking for more trouble.Not even going to talk about animations and adding new ones in.

I see a whole lot of issues of people paying for mods that just don't function with their save their other mods their hardware their whatever a lot of vectors for shit to go wrong.

At least Bethesda now requires for the mod to be unique and only available to creation club so that hinders the mod stealing for profit on the other hand it just enables the reverse with piracy of paid mods This is just a can of worms that Bethesda did not need to open and it looks like the only option to change their mind is to make creation club to much of a hassle to moderate or just stop buying and playing any of their new games if you feel that strongly against it.

[Nazrark]

Paradox has done this with Cities Skyline. Invited a popular modder to make some paid content for them that they would update and make sure worked for everything in the future.

While this was done to help out a struggling but talented designer.

I am not sure how this will work with Bethesda games. Considering how much they rely on the community to fix problems in their games. I don't see how this could be good.

[Collegeguy]

No. Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they’d like. Also, we won’t allow any existing mods to be retrofitted into Creation Club, it must all be original content. Most of the Creation Club content is created internally, some with external partners who have worked on our games, and some by external Creators. All the content is approved, curated, and taken through the full internal dev cycle; including localization, polishing, and testing. This also guarantees that all content works together. We’ve looked at many ways to do “paid mods”, and the problems outweigh the benefits. We’ve encountered many of those issues before.

I guess I understand the approval part, but good intentions can tear things down. Sounds like a lot of extra work the creators would have to do along with overhead, which inevitably will drive up the price to paying $30-40 for installing a single fishing mod.

I still wish they could somehow make an advertisement monetization model viable instead.

[Vespian]

Just going to ignore the whole paid mods things for a moment and talk about that bullshit line that these mods will always be compatible with your game and save I've been messing with the gamebryo engine for a long time and can tell you will never be 100% that a mod will play nice with your game. Not to mention the game can't even properly purge data left over from mods you have installed then uninstalled unless it's just a texture mod if it has scripts it's gonna leave some shit behind gotta use a 3rd party save cleaning tool to do that and most of the time that is just asking for more trouble.Not even going to talk about animations and adding new ones in.

I see a whole lot of issues of people paying for mods that just don't function with their save their other mods their hardware their whatever a lot of vectors for shit to go wrong.

At least Bethesda now requires for the mod to be unique and only available to creation club so that hinders the mod stealing for profit on the other hand it just enables the reverse with piracy of paid mods This is just a can of worms that Bethesda did not need to open and it looks like the only option to change their mind is to make creation club to much of a hassle to moderate or just stop buying and playing any of their new games if you feel that strongly against it.

The way I look at clean-up, is that it's primarily the responsibility of the developer of the specific mods. If you build a mod that leaves a footprint, you know best what that footprint is and it's your responsibility to provide a cleaner. It works like that in any software branch. You deliver your software with the ability to uninstall completely. I'm aware (since I work with software a lot) that uninstalls are usually the last thing one the minds of developers, but the zero-footprint movement has caused developers to produce more clean installs in recent years. Ironically this was far less of a priority in the past, while it was exactly then, where HD space and clutter wearing down performance mattered.

Zero footprint should, has to, become a priority for modders as well.

Edit:
On the subject matter; I personally believe that paid mods don't have a chance. I believe they pretty much work on word of mouth, which, if you monetize it, will fall to specific Youtubers reporting on the subject matter, which will lead to this vicious circle where it becomes indecipherable which Youtuber is a paid shill and which one is truly neutral. Known modders won't have issues, but new modders, without exposure, will have a hard time getting known.

Of course, if they wrap it into a refund system and don't overprice, perhaps it's a solid initiative.

[Deleted]

Ehum, uhh... Unless Bethesda is going to try and force Nexus to shut down, this is wholly, 100% irrelevant and has no bearing on any modding going on anywhere.

[Karon]

Wouldn't be such a big deal if there wasn't the fact that Bethesda shit is unplayable without mods that fix most of the game breaking bugs.

[Xargoth6634]

So people are mad that other people who spend a lot of time coding and working on mods would like to be compensated for their time? Those greedy bastards!

[Deleted]

So people are mad that other people who spend a lot of time coding and working on mods would like to be compensated for their time? Those greedy bastards!

Yeah... I doubt this is something the mod makers have put in motion, as they're already getting compensated on Nexus via donations. Pretty sure Bethesda is the one trying to make money off of mod makers' work, and it's not really that people are "mad" about that - although I suppose we could be - but more that Nexus is already a well-established and working method of getting mods, and trying to integrate mods into the game without a mod manager and LOOT is just going to lead to more bullcrap.

And, of course, none of the script extender mods can be on Bethesda's services, because they require said script extender executable to work, and that's a third party no-no for Bethesda.

[Xargoth6634]

Yeah... I doubt this is something the mod makers have put in motion, as they're already getting compensated on Nexus via donations. Pretty sure Bethesda is the one trying to make money off of mod makers' work, and it's not really that people are "mad" about that - although I suppose we could be - but more that Nexus is already a well-established and working method of getting mods, and trying to integrate mods into the game without a mod manager and LOOT is just going to lead to more bullcrap.

And, of course, none of the script extender mods can be on Bethesda's services, because they require said script extender executable to work, and that's a third party no-no for Bethesda.

Yeah fair enough, that makes a lot of sense, actually. I don't know much about coding but if Bethesda is trying to piggyback onto content creators' work that does seem like double dipping since they already got paid for the game and such.

[Zeek Daniels]

As a person who doesnt play with mods im perfectly fine with this =)

[Roshar]

Wouldn't be such a big deal if there wasn't the fact that Bethesda shit is unplayable without mods that fix most of the game breaking bugs.

Maybe it'll finally stop people buying their shit games.

[Super Kami Dende]

If the content they can create in Creation Club is of quality AND good quantity, such as new areas or actually storylines that could be consider DLC size, then I will be fine with dropping 1-2$ on new additions to games I love.

[Xargoth6634]

Maybe it'll finally stop people buying their shit games.

Yeah, most of their games are way too non-linear for me. I have a limited amount of gaming time these days, so when I play a single player game I like something like Dishonored (one of Beth's games I really enjoyed) where I can play through a storyline in a set amount of time and feel like I'm really progressing. With Skyrim there was just so much in the game (and tbh though it was beautiful, the content wasn't all that compelling to me) that I never felt like I was getting anywhere by putting a couple of hours in.

I can't judge how "shit" most of their games are since I didn't get that far into them, so I'm not sure what kind of a difference modding makes. (Don't think it would do much to address my issues with the games) The only thing I did to change the game experience in Skyrim was to increase my character's run speed because while doing so was a bit immersion-breaking, I just don't have time to run around everywhere and (to my recollection) you couldn't fast travel til you'd gone somewhere normally first.

[Aeula]

Well then, any modders that sign up for that will be shunned by the community for the rest of their lives.
Thankfully it's already starting; the Beyond Skyrim modding team has already made it clear those who try to sell their mods won't be welcome amongst them.

I'm not surprised Bethesda went this rout again but holy fuck am I disappointed. They've become so greedy, trying to cash in any way they can even if it means damaging the modding community.