Bethesda announces Creation Club; you can now purchase mods for Fallout 4 and Skyrim
One of the controversial announcements at E3 this year has been the Creating Club Bethesda is planning on releasing for PC, Xbox One and PS4. This is pretty much a marketplace where players can purchase mods for Fallout 4 and The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. We don’t really know what the price of the mods will be yet, but we do know that we need to purchase them for real money. And it is also extremely likely that Bethesda will take a large chunk of the profits, which allows them to create a revenue stream for a 6 year old game.
This might not sounds too bad. I mean, what’s wrong with paying for more content? The problem lies with the fact that both these games have been modable by free mods since they were released. With this announcement we probably need to start paying for the content we have been able to get for free during the last years.
For Skyrim and FO4 we will most likely still be able to download mods just as regular, but less tech-savvy people probably needs to pay to get it. The real concern is however for the future. It might very well be possible that Bethesda will only allow mods to be installed from the Creation Club in the new games they are releasing, effectively making the traditionally free mods cost money. I'm afraid that we will not be able to freely download and install mods in the next Elder Scrolls game.
What exactly are mods?
Mods in Bethesda games can be anything large or small, from simple texture edits to large game-changing add-ons that adds completely new features or areas. These have traditionally been developed for free by anyone that wants, and there is a huge modding community in both these games. The creators never expected to be paid for these, and they were all created only by passion. Most do accept donations, but I'm pretty sure they don't really get much.
Skyrim HD mod, which improves the texture quality of the entire game.
Mods can also be absolutely ridiculous!
Don’t get me wrong. I really think content creators deserve to be paid for the work, but enforcing payment is not what either the gamers or the content creators want. It seems like there will be a pretty standard pricing, so content creators in the future Elder Scrolls and Fallout games might not even be able to give the content away for free, or even for very little money if they wanted to.
I fear enforced paid mods will be the future of many games, which can have two options. It can either slow down creation by having the creators loose interest, because I believe most of them do it for the passion, and not for making money. On the other hand it might get a lot more people interested in creating mods for the games, which will lead to more and better mod content. I guess we will need to wait and see how it all turns out, but right now the reception on the internet seems to be mainly negative.
Are you willing to pay for mods in games such as Fallout and Skyrim?
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.
Steam already offer(ed) paid mods for Skyrim and it was not received all that well (many were priced MORE than Skyrim itself. I am not sure what Bethesda are thinking here and how they feel they will avoid the backlash from a few years ago against Steam.
I'm ok with paying for mods, however there needs to be some sort of quality control and a good solution when it comes to hardware-related problems, compatibility issues with other mods, etc. because these things will happen.
Currently, if something doesn't work it's not really an issue but with a platform like that I'm not sure how they want to solve this without ripping off players.
It would be nice to have a fair system to reward modders. It's a lot of work. Then again, it will make modding more problematic because the moment money is involved copyright issues probably will arise to some extent.
It also could cause damage to the modding community by inviting profit oriented people flooding the community with mediocre content.
If Bethesda wants to do this right, they also should consider keeping the fees low, trying to pay for servers, etc. but I have this feeling this is just about to become another cash cow, trying to rake in as much profit as possible - and in the end most gamers might not even care if they are being screwed as long as they can consume some virtual stuff.
In my opinion it's a very good projet because it will allow people who are making mods to upload their project on an official platform and monetize their work.
yoo idk how to delete posts so i'm just replacing them with this text.