The issue I find myself having along with a lot of other friends is Bethesda poor choice in words. The sec you say anything relating to paid and mods gamers start getting their pitchforks and torches. The gaming community has a history of going after paid mods. Even though the price of Triple A title still being around $59.9 it is rather cheap when you consider its lack of inflation on price. Gamers for a while now have been feeling the nickel and dime effect of not getting everything included in a game after paying the full Triple A price.

They should have sold it more as working with the content creating community to hire part or full time creators into the studio. In developing new content such as DLC’s both free and paid; along with, microtransaction. Bethesda just saying they going work with Modder’s so they can “increase compatibility” of the mod and then slap a price tag on it is a bad way to go about it. It makes modders sounds like a sellout.

Many big modders are already expected to reject as they have in the past anything like the Creation Club. Most of them do it a way to build a portfolio to get hired into the gaming industry. It can also be great for relieving stress on a passion project and they way want to avoid the stress of dealing with the corporate environment. Usually when a modder wants or needs some money for their time spent they will just ask for donations on their site.

While Bethesda does have the ability to directly sell to the customer a lot of their sales is from third party platforms. The standard rate many platforms charge for sales is 30-40%. Let’s assume 40% so we have 60% remaining going to Bethesda and the modder. On top of that you also have taxes that will have to be taken into account. Bethesda will have invested a fair bit of dev time into creating, maintaining, testing, and shipping out this type of content. A really good programmer these days can easily run you over $250,000 per year. Even if we assume Bethesda is only using employees on this project for $50-150k each per year I just can’t see the lions share going to the modder. With how many people that are expected to negatively react to paid mods I just don’t see them only taking a 10% cut. If they have to take something like 30-40% this leaves a meager 20-30% cut for the modder. That is a bad deal.