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A few years back, Valve and Bethesda caused quite a stir when they attempted to bring ‘paid mods' to Skyrim. Previously free mods suddenly had a price tag, there was no assurance that paid mods would be compatible with your save game and the overall quality of the first batch was pretty low. Now, Bethesda is trying its hand at additional paid content for its games with the Creation Club but this time around, some much needed changes are in place.
For starters, no previously free mod for Fallout 4 or Skyrim will be accepted into the Creation Club. Instead, Bethesda's own in-house developers, some third-party developers and only ‘the best' community creators will be making brand new content for this platform. All mods on the Creation Club will be curated and tested for compatibility to ensure that nobody's save game gets corrupted. Anyone that wants to submit content to the Creation Club must first pitch the idea to Bethesda and await approval.
The Creation Club will focus on six primary categories for additional content in Fallout 4 and Skyrim:
- WEAPONS: New weapons, material skins, parts, etc.
- APPAREL: New outfits, armor, and items for your character.
- WORLD: New locations, decorations, foliage, etc.
- CHARACTERS: New abilities, characters, companions, etc.
- CREATURES: New enemies, mounts, pets, etc.
- GAMEPLAY: New types of gameplay like survival mode, etc.
Rather than buying Creation Club add-ons with real money, Bethesda will sell you ‘credits', which you can then use to buy what you want. Bethesda is doing its best to convince us that this isn't the same thing as paid mods and in some ways, it is very different, though the core idea still remains the same. Still, we will need to see the first wave of content and their prices before we can judge Creation Club content on its worth.
KitGuru Says: To me, the quality assurances and curation factors are the two key things that make this different to paid mods on Steam. The fact that an idea needs to be pitched before being accepted is encouraging but how high will Bethesda set the bar? Will the content actually be worth paying for? I don't think many people are going to be very accepting of this until those questions are answered.
This will be a huge flop
I think thing anybody who wants mods for these games will just go nexus mods
Yep, and so they should. Mods are not a market for the developer.
except these will be like officially supported mods and the makers will be paid for it. this is the best possible solution imo
I have no gripe with a modder getting paid for their work, but this is bethesda. Maybe instead they should release a game that does not have game-breaking bugs in it. Or just hire on to permanent staff the team that did the unnoficial skyrim patch, fixing those bugs. Once again, if a mod is worth it, i dont mind throwing a few bucks at it, but bethesda has the cart before the horse here.
5% of the overall sale of their mod maybe, but it won’t amount to much. a better option would be for nexus to stop being such ***holes about patreons and donations.
so, how long before modders start pulling their work to keep ‘select mod authors’ from cannibalizing it for profit?
5% to Bethesda is actually very reasonable. 95% to the modder is fine with me. It was the 30% Steam, 30% Bethesda and 40% modder split that put me against this before
Even better, get approved as a ‘select modder’ and then charge non-select-modder people to post their mods. Heck, get an LLC business license and pay taxes on it even. A modder’s ‘publishing company’ if you will.
And then you get a ‘business call’ from 4 large people wearing valve shirts and a facetime with gabe newell asking why you are ‘stepping on toes’ and if your kneecaps are healthy enough for this endeavor………