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?