Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Paid mods are back - Bethesda's "Creation Club" for Fallout 4 and Skyrim

Self-Ejected

Drog Black Tooth

Self-Ejected
Joined
Feb 20, 2008
Messages
2,636
Nice. The obvious implications are:

-- Better quality, because modders get more motivation.
-- A certain percentage of modders trying to nickel and dime the sheeple.
-- Poorfags getting riled up.

reddit is already REEEEE'ing over this lol
 

Executr

Cipher
Joined
Sep 24, 2014
Messages
303
From the FAQ at https://creationclub.bethesda.net/en

  • What is the Creation Club?
    Creation Club is a collection of all-new content for both Fallout 4 and Skyrim. It features new items, abilities, and gameplay created by Bethesda Games Studios and outside development partners including the best community creators. Creation Club content is fully curated and compatible with the main game and official add-ons.

  • What types of content will be included in Creation Club?
    Creation Club will feature a wide variety of content including but not limited to:
    • 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.
  • What platforms will Creation Club support?
    Creation Club will be available in Summer 2017 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC for Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition.
  • How do I get Creation Club content?
    Creation Club is available via in-game digital marketplaces in both Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition and purchased with Credits. Credits are available for purchase on PSN, Xbox Live, and Steam. Your Credits are transferable and can be used in both games on the same platform.
  • Can I become a Creator?
    Whether you are a professional developer, artist, or modder; you can apply to be a Creator here. Be ready to share work you’ve already done as part of your application.
  • If I’m accepted to be a Creator, what can I create and what is the dev process?
    Creators are required to submit documentation pitches which go through an approval process. All content must be new and original. Once a concept is approved, a development schedule with Alpha, Beta and Release milestones is created. Creations go through our full development pipeline, which Creators participate in. Bethesda Game Studios developers work with Creators to iterate and polish their work along with full QA cycles. The content is fully localized, as well. This ensures compatibility with the original game, official add-ons and achievements.
  • Are Creators Paid For Their Work?
    Yes. Just like our own game developers, Creators are paid for their work and start receiving payment as soon as their proposal is accepted and through development milestones.
  • Is Creation Club paid mods?
    No. Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they’d like. Also, we won’t allow any existing mods to be retrofitted into Creation Club, it must all be original content. Most of the Creation Club content is created internally, some with external partners who have worked on our games, and some by external Creators. All the content is approved, curated, and taken through the full internal dev cycle; including localization, polishing, and testing. This also guarantees that all content works together. We’ve looked at many ways to do “paid mods”, and the problems outweigh the benefits. We’ve encountered many of those issues before. But, there’s a constant demand from our fans to add more official high quality content to our games, and while we are able to create a lot of it, we think many in our community have the talent to work directly with us and create some amazing new things.
 

DramaticPopcorn

Guest
It was to be expected. Looks like steam won't be recieving their share per mod, btw.
 

Urthor

Prophet
Patron
Joined
Mar 22, 2015
Messages
1,872
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Can't wait for Bethesda to start the ole nickle and dime of content creators with their second attempt at paid mods.

They're not advertising the revenue split for the in game transactions at all, I can only assume that "developmental milestones" translates to we'll pay you 25 bucks an hour for your work then tell you to fuck off as your custom laser rifle skin earns us tens of thousands in micro-transaction revenue.
 
Self-Ejected

Drog Black Tooth

Self-Ejected
Joined
Feb 20, 2008
Messages
2,636
But seriously tho, what's the big deal. Valve's been allowing people to create paid mods for their Source games for a long time and nobody's bitching about it. Modders who are in it for the thrill are still releasing their shit for free. Skyrim's workshop and the Nexus site will still be where they are. All that Bethesda is implying is that they're willing to "upgrade" some mods to the semi-official DLC status, which is p cool, since there's going to be certain quality standards, they can't promote obvious schlock and smear their own reputation.

But eh, seems like the most obvious reaction is to get mad about it.
 

Althorion

Learned
Joined
Apr 22, 2017
Messages
111
Well, it’s Codex, so of course people’s first reaction will be to get mad…

But I don’t see any problem either, just as I didn’t see it in the first place. No one is forcing you to sell mods, no one is forcing you to buy them. If and when they will, you’ll have something to get pissed about. But right now? That’s not that different than Patreon—only it’s another company that takes some of creator’s profits.

I can mostly see positives about this—developers will care more about the modding support (since they directly profit from it), modders will care more about their creations (likewise)… And if the Bethesda will go too far and, for example, will force mods to be paid for, it’s easy as pie to boycott them and force the change in policy, the very same way the horse armour DLC for Oblivion was the last cosmetic DLC they’ve released.
 
Self-Ejected

theSavant

Self-Ejected
Joined
Oct 3, 2012
Messages
2,009
While quality assurance is definitely required, I see a problem here: now they can deliberately give us vanilla games with only mediocre artwork (imagine Elder Scrolls 6 with Skyrim graphics) and say modders can do the rest (i.e. high end trees and foliage). They win. Some modders win. Customers pay for every "enhancement" which should have been there in the first place.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
But seriously tho, what's the big deal. Valve's been allowing people to create paid mods for their Source games for a long time and nobody's bitching about it. Modders who are in it for the thrill are still releasing their shit for free. Skyrim's workshop and the Nexus site will still be where they are. All that Bethesda is implying is that they're willing to "upgrade" some mods to the semi-official DLC status, which is p cool, since there's going to be certain quality standards, they can't promote obvious schlock and smear their own reputation.

But eh, seems like the most obvious reaction is to get mad about it.

The original paid mods attempt was opposed for two reasons:

1) The ideological argument - "Mods should always be free! You are encouraging greed and destroying our communities!"

2) The "market regulatory" argument - "The average mod is worse than the average game, so why would you let anybody release a mod on Steam with no gatekeeping whatsoever when you don't allow the same for games? Unleashing a torrent of shit on the market is bad for consumers."

This addresses #2. It'll be interesting to see how it works in practice. If the gates are kept high enough, people who claim to oppose paid mods because of #1 might find out that it's not so bad after all.
 
Joined
May 6, 2009
Messages
1,875,975
Location
Glass Fields, Ruins of Old Iran
Skyrim's workshop and the Nexus site will still be where they are.

We have no guarantee of that. As for the questions, I think this article explains the issue better than I can at 5am. They already made the "everything will go through our quality control" promise during their first attempt, and we know what happened. (I also don't believe the "We will work with the creators" claim, work will be 95% on the modder's side, except maybe for the biggest and most popular mods)
 

Althorion

Learned
Joined
Apr 22, 2017
Messages
111
While quality assurance is definitely required, I see a problem here: now they can deliberately give us vanilla games with only mediocre artwork (imagine Elder Scrolls 6 with Skyrim graphics) and say modders can do the rest (i.e. high end trees and foliage). They win. Some modders win. Customers pay for every "enhancement" which should have been there in the first place.
And before now they couldn’t? It’s easier and more reasonable (for the customers) to stomach a game that was deliberately made to be fixed with free mods than the one that is supposed to be fixed with payed ones…
 

oldmanpaco

Master of Siestas
Joined
Nov 8, 2008
Messages
13,609
Location
Winter
The other problem was that so many mods were/are dependent on other mods. Didn't the SKSE guys have a fit because people were going to charge money for mods that used their resources?
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
They already made the "everything will go through our quality control" promise during their first attempt, and we know what happened.

Any system that works by letting you hit "publish" and your mod appears on the market instantly is DOA. But if it's going to be like Steam was for games before Greenlight, that's something else.

In general, I think it's clarifying to draw analogies between the market for mods and the market for full-fledged games. A mod store that's like contemporary Steam would be pretty bad. A mod store that's like GOG? Better. Something even more highly curated than GOG? That could actually be good.

Since I assume Bethesda don't have the resources the carefully check thousands of mods, this could end up being either decent (if they find a way to focus on the few mods that are really good) or terrible (if they give up and just wave almost everything through).
 

Bester

⚰️☠️⚱️
Patron
Vatnik
Joined
Sep 28, 2014
Messages
11,003
Location
USSR
Is it 30% for bethesda, 70% for modders this time? last time it was 30% for beth, 30% for steam and some laughable 40% for modder. If it's 70% this time, that's at least some progress.

Shame it'd still be unprofitable to mod anything other than games like skyrim. I.e. games like poe/torment are out the window.
 

Zetor

Arcane
Joined
Jan 9, 2003
Messages
1,706
Location
Budapest, Hungary
There were paid mods for the Sims and shit, like, 15 years ago. The entire idea about paying for user-generated content generated a lot of drama back then, with some sites dedicated to pirating the paid mods for ideological reasons, the paymod-sellers trying to get those sites sued (I think), etc. I encountered it because it made some minor waves in the Freedom Force community with some sites looking into possibly making $$$... which had the obvious response of Marvel doing a massive witch hunt on all sites that hosted mods with their characters and threatening Irrational Games to the point that Ken himself had to post a CYA.

Speaking of which, even putting the potentially unmanageable QC on content aside, this sounds like a support nightmare in the making unless they REALLY limit who can be in the 'creation club'. Tracking down obscure incompatibility issues and bugs will be ~fun~ especially since I assume all that will be done by Bethesda...
 
Last edited:

ArchAngel

Arcane
Joined
Mar 16, 2015
Messages
19,886
Last Bethesda crap I bought was Morrowind and that was from a bargain bin. This shit will not affect me one bit. I download and try Bethesda games just so I can bash them better, don't care for mods and shit anyways.
 

Urthor

Prophet
Patron
Joined
Mar 22, 2015
Messages
1,872
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Is it 30% for bethesda, 70% for modders this time? last time it was 30% for beth, 30% for steam and some laughable 40% for modder. If it's 70% this time, that's at least some progress.

Shame it'd still be unprofitable to mod anything other than games like skyrim. I.e. games like poe/torment are out the window.

Last time it was literally 25% for the modders, because Valve took the line that "the modders can't take home more than 25% because that's the rate we do for steam hats/ Dota2 skins." It was complete bastardry and one of the major reasons people opposed it.
 

vonAchdorf

Arcane
Joined
Sep 20, 2014
Messages
13,465
It was to be expected. Looks like steam won't be recieving their share per mod, btw.

Steam will profit from the Credit sales.

Since I assume Bethesda don't have the resources the carefully check thousands of mods, this could end up being either decent (if they find a way to focus on the few mods that are really good) or terrible (if they give up and just wave almost everything through).

They showed new weapons and gear as an example. Which means it will have to be slightly better (stat-wise, not mod quality) than the gear you find, or people won't buy it. To me it looks like they want to add F2P mechanics to the game, where you increase the ARP/LTV by offering near limitless ways to spend money for "hardcore fans/whales".
They of course had a joke reference to horse armor in it, and also showed a more ambitious "survival mode" item in the store, which could be some reason for hope.

But I wonder if the system is flexible enough for that - the whole planning process they laid out doesn't look like it's very suited to iteration / change in plans.
 
Last edited:

Seethe

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 22, 2015
Messages
967
I don't think there's a scummier, shadier video game company than Bethesda. Their laughable attempts at marketing this as something positive makes them look like total clowns.
 

MWaser

Arbiter
Joined
Nov 22, 2015
Messages
607
Location
Where you won't find me
Always knew I should have become a Skyrim Modder.

Look how many opportunities Bethesda is consistently creating for a potential me to have earned good profit from.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom