Will it work this time? We’ll see
TL;DR: Execs finally think they can get away with it (again) and so paid mods are back on the menu.
I thought they already had paid mods. Isn’t that what was added into the Anniversary Edition?
This is different from Skyrim’s Creation Club program, where previous paid mods were housed, as those modders were hired and paid by Bethesda as contractors.
They sought out modders and paid to have them make content to be included in a DLC. This change lets any mod, including already existing ones, become paid.
I don’t think that’s correct. There’s a vetting process (so it cannot be “any mod”), and it can’t be an existing free mod.
Creations must be standalone, so it cannot depend on other community releases, free or paid. Creations must be all-new to qualify for release. You cannot re-purpose older releases – or work by other authors, unless contracted. Creations cannot contain anything produced through generative AI.
https://creations.bethesda.net/en/creators/bethesdagamestudios
Thank you for correcting me, that’s good to know! That’s nowhere near as bad as I thought it’d be.
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Easy on the revisionist history, there. Valve’s previous attempt to introduce paid mods broke the existing mod system, and took the lion’s share of the profits for Valve and Bethesda. The math on how much modders would make was absurdly low compared to the effort they put in, and most of the available mods were built on a community’s worth of contributions. There was no curation, no protections for creators or consumers, and the door was left wide open for scammers and charletains to sell other people’s work.
It was a terrible plan.
This isn’t about players demanding work for free. Players bought the game (sometimes more than once) and many of the mods fixed significant bugs and problems. Mods provided ui improvements and new content to keep the game fresh.
Quite the contrary, this is Bethesda capitalizing on the free labor provided by the modding community over the years. This new system has already broken SKSE, upon which hundreds of additional mods are built. The SKSE team has already patched the problem, but that’s just one free mod. Who compensates them for fixing the thing Bethesda broke?
People who didn’t live through it and only read news articles are going to get the impression that players revolted in 2015 because everybody wants a free lunch. If it was just unhappy freeloaders, why would they have pulled the feature so quickly? Surely losing the choosy beggars all at once would not have had any effect on revenue, so how can that possibly explain the unmitigated PR disaster and public apology?
I agree that a person has a right to charge for their work. I just feel mods are a real legal quagmire. The best way around all of this is a Pateron style system where a creator is supported but not directly charging for mods.
The issue is that mods often use some part of the original creation so ownership is a tricky issue. However if the company is willing to pay creators then I guess that is OK, like this case.
Bethesda introducing an official way to sell mods solved the legal problem of using the game’s assets.
The modding community is the reason Bethesda has been able to get away with selling the same game for over a decade.
There are a million ways to solve the “legal problem”, such as “don’t initiate legal action against moddders”.
This wasn’t a problem that needed a solution.
That’s a different legal problem as there are situations where if you don’t protect your trademark you can lose it. But I’m not a lawyer and don’t know if that situation would apply to mods.
Even in that case, it’s easy enough to solve: grant permission explicitly under the condition that the assets remain in the context of the game (eg, don’t export them to other games).
Consider other games that explicitly provide a blanket grant for people permission to use their game footage in videos (Team17).
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Just edited to comment for clarity on that. Thanks.
Why are you talking about legal issues when you’re replying to someone talking about moral ones?
No, but modders fix Bethesda’s games for free.
Turning around and charging for those is a bit meh.
I’m not entitled to anything, but still doesn’t mean I’d shell any money for crowdsourced fixes to a 12 y.o. game.Removed by mod
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The world already is infatuated by awful copyright laws.
Let de modders stay amateur before greed grabs them too.
You are missing context and the knowledge of the modding culture. Morrowind modding scene is alive and well and that’s because peıple keep modding for the community and because they love the game, it is not a for profit effort. When the aim shifts from making a great mod to making money it isn’t genuine anymore it is corrupt.
YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A MOD
Fundamentally this is a studio developing games with deliberately missing pieces, missing QoL features, and endemic bugs. And then they’re taking money for people adding those pieces, adding those features, fixing those bugs.
I’m guessing things like the unofficial patch or other bug fixes won’t be sold, and they’ll stick to nice things like new armor and niche mechanics. But even then it feels like mods are a less obvious selling point for Bethesda games the more they monetize the scene.
Who is going to make the unofficial patch? And why would they do it for free when someone is going to make money off of their work. Remember they would be pre-reqs to paid mods.
Ugh.
I was thinking of reinstalling skyrim, a game I’ve paid for multiple times, but I won’t now. This will almost certainly break some of the mods I usually use. I mean, fucking hell. The game’s over 10 years old now. Plenty of people have bought it more than once.
And yes, I know that you can prevent updates, but I’ve had the thing update anyway even when I disabled that. Forget about verifying file integrity.
Can’t we just enjoy the game we paid for, without Bethesda trying to fuck us over again?
Imagine if you bought a car, and the car company came over to your house without your permission, and started fiddling with rims so that the tyres you bought no longer fit.
Buy the gog edition. Most mods support it now, and easier to stop updates on it
Copying @bilb@lem.monster 's comment
I don’t think that’s correct. There’s a vetting process (so it cannot be “any mod”), and it can’t be an existing free mod.
Creations must be standalone, so it cannot depend on other community releases, free or paid. Creations must be all-new to qualify for release. You cannot re-purpose older releases – or work by other authors, unless contracted. Creations cannot contain anything produced through generative AI.https://creations.bethesda.net/en/creators/bethesdagamestudios
I’ll never pay for mods unless they are as big as the base game. My issue is simply money vs amount of mods. I use so many of them and I’m not going to pay 90€ for the game and 5€ each for 1000 mods. (RimWorld I have even more than that. Skyrim about 700). You’d need to be insane to believe that paying this much is healthy. Of course someone who uses 3 mods will argue paying 20€ per month each, is fair.
I just don’t trust that a mod I payed money for would remain playable indefinitely.
Paid*
“Payed” is a nautical term.
Good to know.
I just want them to stop trying to break my mod setup.
I have no problem paying for good mods but I’ve not allowed Skyrim to update because I’d have to go through hundreds of mods to figure out which ones the update broke and I’m just unwilling to do that .
With the new restrictions that mods can’t retroactively become paid mods, nor can they be dependent on others sounds fine on paper.
But consider what having this kind of system in place will do for future games and mods. I believe this will discourage collaboration and ultimately will cause a decline in quality. If paid mods can’t build off of others, then there would be less incentive or option to build integration of mods. Anyone remember mods like cobl, cm partners, and fcom for Oblivion? Those would be impossible with paid mods. And since most modders would (rightfully so) like to maximize their income, I reckon many would exclusively make their portfolio be paid mods, even with restrictions on what they can build.
I believe this will discourage collaboration and ultimately will cause a decline in quality.
Thus began the enshittification of Mods.
The mods made under these rules seem guaranteed to be shittier than others.
Appearance and armor mods are out - no Bodyslide. Vast amounts of mods are dependent on SKSE, so those are out. A lot of the coolest stuff these days is possible only with SPID and other such frameworks for mods to use. Those are out.
So, either this will cause a significant decline in mod quality if modders actually try to build for it (to say nothing of the cost - even at $0.50 per mod some of my installs would cost $500+)…or most modders will ignore it, and it’ll go unused, cause it’s too hard to make good mods under these limits.
Great, I wonder who gets paid for all the mods that provide functionality for other mods.
Products aren’t services.
Only legislation will fix this.
I don’t see the issue with providing modders with an avenue to charge for their work. If you don’t like it, don’t pay for them and continue doing what you’ve done.
You’d have a point if the changes made to implement didn’t break the existing mods.
Yeah that’s not cool, but isn’t it the typical update brokenness? Can’t you revert to an old patch?
The other problem is that with paid mods, other modders can’t make compatibility patches unless they buy the mod to test against. Say goodbye to your 1,000 mod modlist all working together in harmony.
I understand the resistance to paid mods in more mainstream games, but in the simulation community paid mods are an accepted thing, and good paid mods are almost universally thought to be worth the price of admittance. The effort involved in making a high-fidelity recreation of a specific racecar or aircraft takes a lot of time and resources, and the people who go through the effort of doing so deserve to have their time and costs offset. Hell, I have only made a few free mods, and I’ve made a few hundred in tips off them all the same.
Bethesda is a company so naturally they’re going to want to try and profit off of mods. But outside of the compatibility hiccups this doesn’t really sound that bad. It’s a nice way for modders to get paid for their work, it’s optional and it’ll hopefully make modding more accessible in general. The bigger concerns (to me) would be how badly are Bethesda ripping off modders, and whether it would fracture any communities, for instance if it was too difficult to make an ‘official’ mod as well as a traditional one, leading to modders abandoning one or the other. So long as Bethesda handle it well it could be fine.
