In the past Bethesda refused mods to be sold because they had no way of controlling the money themselves. All the money would have gone to the modder, and none of it to them. But after moving their sole distribution to Steam (even if you bought a physical disc in a store, you still have to use Steam to install and play the game), they finally realized that they have a means of controlling sales, so they make the money, rather than the modder. So of course now they are tapping the previously untouched revenue stream of mods.

Skyrim is not the first game to have mods for pay. Valve started it with their own in-house created games like Team Fortress. The fact that they made a lot of money from it is what made Bethesda take notice, and I am sure a lot other game companies. Even though it is far from a new game anymore, Skyrim still has a huge number of players and a gigantic mod library. So it was an obvious choice for the first non-Valve game to go the paid-mod route. It is a win for Valve, and a win for Bethesda. Only the modders and players lose.

It is also worth noting that Bethesda does not call all of its own shots. Just like Bioware does not. They are just a subsidiary of a much larger investment corporation. That corporation has lost a lot of money lately. So they want to make it back any way possible, and selling mods is just one way the mega-corporation can do that.

And yes, Valve opening up the bandwidth for Skyrim mods a little while ago was definitely laying the groundwork for the paid modding. It was a necessary first step for the business. What I can see as a next step is to make Fallout 4's Geck (that is what they call the Fallout creation kit), to be more integrated with Steam, so that you cannot save your mods locally. Instead they will probably only allow saving to Steam's servers. That way Valve and Bethesda will have complete control of the mods, and cut out sites like the Nexus. They will claim it is a good thing, because online storage will protect your mod from being lost due to things like hard drive failures.

Will Valve start charging a monthly fee for Steam use? That I kind of doubt, since even single mmo games with monthly subscriptions usually fail. Very few people are willing to pay $20 a month just to play a game. So I don't believe people would pay Steam a monthly subscription. Instead they would just pirate all their games and cut Steam completely out of the picture. People who do not want to deal with Steam now - when it is free (albeit the internet connection is not) - have been playing pirated copies of Skyrim since the first day it came out.

Of course whether Valve is smart enough to understand that is another matter entirely though. Companies are remarkably stupid when it comes to DRM schemes and piracy. They never seem to realize that DRM does absolutely nothing to deter piracy. Instead it costs them more money to buy the DRM scheme in the first place, makes their game more unstable and sometimes unplayable, and insults paying customers by treating them like criminals. In the end DRM schemes promote piracy, because for many people it is literally the only way they can play the game because the DRM prevents them from doing it legally. Even the remarkable success of DRM-free distributors like Gog.com and donation sites like Kickstarter have not clued most of the gaming industry into the fact that you do not need such absolute control to make money. People will still buy games even when they could pirate them. Simply because we are honest, and want to reward the developer, and insure they continue to make good games.

I closely watched, and commented on, Skyrim's development from the time it was announced up until a few months before release. At that point, I made the decision that I was simply not going to give Beth any of my money for that game, period. I no longer had any interest in what they were going to do with it because I was not going to buy it.

And what was the thing that put me over the edge? What was the thing that made me decide that, even after I'd seen and commented on the elimination of attributes and the elimination of spellmaking, among many other bad decisions?

The Steam requirement. THAT was the straw that broke my back.

I'm scratching my head here still at the lack of sense. It is clear that the modding community overall is not behind pay for mods. BethSoft has provided their CS/CK free and, in return, has sold more games because of modding and not had to repair tons of tiny bugs that the modders do. The situation has been, in my mind, symbiotic with mod makers, players and BethSoft all benefiting. If it ain't broke. . . .

It makes perfect sense. Modding only benefits Bethesda up to a point. It keeps people playing the games, keeps the games at the forefront of the players gaming library until the next game is released. Then it becomes a hindrance. How many people stuck to playing modded Morrowind rather than buy Oblivion? How many stuck to modded Morrowind or Oblivion instead of buying Skyrim? Once that happens, that free program that lets players extend the games lifespan gets in the way, and starts costing them sales. The fact that Morrowind still has an active section on the Bethesda forums shows how many people are still playing the game, and no doubt the high ups at Bethesda consider that lost revenue.

And on top of that, there's DLC. Players already have the choice of buying the DLC as it comes or waiting for the ultimate edition/GoTY edition and maybe getting them cheaper, but mods present another option: content that can be at a higher level than Bethesda can provide, but which doesn't come at a cost. So modding's potentially costing them money there as well.

And finally, there is a penalty to having people playing a TES game right up until the release of the next game; people immediately compare everything they find out about the new game to the old one, which is still fresh in their minds because they're still playing it. So of course people look negatively on the new game, particularly considering the direction Bethesda has been moving in with Oblivion and (more noticeably imo) Skyrim.

Killing off modding can benefit them, and doing it this way means they can sit back and make money while the modding community destroys itself. Sure, it might cost them sales, but the ones they'll lose, the long term modders aren't in their target demographic anymore.

Maybe making a mountain out of a molehill, but I can see how this can ultimately benefit Valve and Bethesda. Bethesda's gotten away with making questionable moves in the past, and Valve continues with its horrendous consumer practices, so I doubt they're particularly worried about this backlash.

My only real beef against Steam is the DRM they force upon all of their users. As an online storefront, I have no problem with them.

But the DRM - requiring you to start the Steam Client every time you play the game to validate that you own a legal copy of the game - is totally unnecessary.

I have been thinking about what I said about future Geck/Creation Kits forcing you to save your mods onto a Valve or Bethesda server, and I am changing my mind. The reason is simply bandwidth and storage space. It would cost the companies a lot of money.

Instead what they might do is first outlaw all third party mod-organizer programs like OBMM or Wyre Bash. Bethesda loves to brings lawsuits against other companies. They are in court more often than most District Attorneys. It would not matter if they won or lost either. They have the money to simply bankrupt any mod maker in court. But they would win, as it is their game, and their modding software.

So then the only way to activate a mod would be through the game itself. Or more likely, through a Game Setup page on Steam, where you store all of your game settings and your mod load order. Mods uploaded to the Steam Workshop would be given a digital watermark. Then after you buy a mod and download it, when you go to the Game Setup page to put it in your load order, the server would check for that watermark, and refuse to activate it unless it is there. That way people could make all the mods they wanted. But they could only use the ones that came from the Steam Workshop. Including the ones you made yourself. That would give Bethesda and Valve absolute control over every mod, and they would be able to profit from every single instance of a person using them.

Sorry, but every single person who continues to do business with Steam is part of the problem. I hate saying that to someone I like and respect, but it's true. As long as people continue to bend over and take it, Steam will continue to do it, and it really doesn't matter how much the customers might complain along the way. The only thing that stands the slightest chance of making them stop is if enough potential customers refuse to bend over for them at all. Unless and until that happens, nothing is going to change.

I have been doing the opposite. I am deleting mods I currently have whose authors have decided that money means more to them than the modding community. I saw Arthmoor has a for pay mod, so I deleted the Unofficial Dawnguard Patch. That was the only thing of his I had. Since his Unofficial Patch for the main game only caused bugs for me, rather than fixed them. I will just deal with whatever Dawnguard bugs I meet myself.

Shezrie has sold her soul for cash too, so out went the Hearthfire Kitchen mods she made which I was using. How that will affect my games where those were already built, I don't know. Worse comes to worse I will just not use those houses in those games and mod my own. It would not be the first time for that.

And the maker of Pure Waters is up there too, so I deleted that. I will just have to find another mod that makes water semi-transparent. Or do it myself. Whenever I get back to playing Skyrim. If I ever do that is.

This is not as easy to do as I thought, as Apparently Valve no longer speaks American. And this is after I manually set the language to English...

I also found this on the Steam Workshop. I wonder how much it costs? I cannot tell, since my Finnish is not so good...

Change.org also has a petition you can sign if you are against this. Not that believe it will make the slightest difference in Bethesda's business plans. But it is one way to voice your opinion.

The utter contempt I feel for these people precludes me from taking any enjoyment from a game with their work in it.

Usually I can remove my personal feelings for a musician or actor or other artist/creator from their actual work. That is why I can still enjoy listening to Guns N Roses in spite of what I feel for the members of the band intself (yes, I am looking at the singer in particular). But there comes a point where I just cannot do it, and with those people all I can do is simply boycott their material. That saves me the heartburn of stewing about how much I loath them while I am trying to watch their movie/listen to the song/etc...

When we are all tired from hashing and reacting, it will all still be there. The only way to stop it would be a united boycotting of Valve/Steam/Bethesda; and that will NEVER happen. We are gamers, our games are on Steam, and Fallout 4 is about to be announced and revealed at E3.

So we may as well face it that no matter what we say it won't change anything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-U1HZrV_ZI...eature=youtu.be


Read the subtitles - (Bethesda/Valve meeting caught on camera)

Oh my goodness, that guy's laugh! It sounds like his heart is going to seize up like engine of an old chevy!

I am kind of surprised that Hitler has not popped up to say anything about this. Given his previous opinions about Kanye West, or getting a Wii for Christmas instead of a PS3, not to mention Ben Affleck being cast as Batman...

MALX, thanks for posting that list of paymods. Pretty much what I'd expect - mostly junk.

We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there's a useful feature somewhere here

Wait, I thought FO4 was going to be FOO, FallOut Online?

Actually there was going to be a Fallout MMO made by Interplay. But Bethesda killed it in a court battle. Fallout New Vegas was the result of another lawsuit Bethesda filed against Obsidian. I was not kidding when I said before that Bethesda loves to sue other companies.

That is good news.

h.e.r. Forbes ran this interesting article a few months ago. At first I thought it was merely ironic when all the paid mod stuff happened over the weekend. But it might be that useful feature. Still, I doubt Bethesda would have the vision, or enlightened self-interest, to do it.

I guarantee that it's not over.

Now Beth and Steam have weathered the worst of the storm, so it'll just be that much easier when they announce FO4, with paid mods, of which Beth will "only" take 35% of the cut.

I'm a cynic, but I think, in hindsight, that this was the plan from the beginning. I never could understand how they thought they'd attach a paid mod system to such a well-established free community, or how Beth thought they could get away with taking a 45% cut. A bit of Occam's Razor would imply that they never did expect either one - they just set the stage so that the worst of the uproar was directed at something other than their newest game AND whatever they do end up doing with that game will certainly be at least somewhat less bad than this proposal, so they can point at it as some sort of generous offer, made specifically to address the community's concerns.

I guarantee that it's not over.

Now Beth and Steam have weathered the worst of the storm, so it'll just be that much easier when they announce FO4, with paid mods, of which Beth will "only" take 35% of the cut.

I'm a cynic, but I think, in hindsight, that this was the plan from the beginning. I never could understand how they thought they'd attach a paid mod system to such a well-established free community, or how Beth thought they could get away with taking a 45% cut. A bit of Occam's Razor would imply that they never did expect either one - they just set the stage so that the worst of the uproar was directed at something other than their newest game AND whatever they do end up doing with that game will certainly be at least somewhat less bad than this proposal, so they can point at it as some sort of generous offer, made specifically to address the community's concerns.

Time to necro this thread, with the announcement of "Creation Club".

It could just be a way to finally get proper mods onto PS4, but it could just be the greed coming back to the surface.

Well, they have said they won't be replacing the free mods already out but what about future titles? They are basically marketing these Creation Club mods as official DLC so there will be benefits to having them. The PS4 issue that Ghastly mentioned for one. Cleaner integration into your game would be another. That said, they will be doing stuff that we were already getting for free, so unless they curtail the free mods somehow, why pay for things you can get elsewhere for free? It just seems troubling to Khajiit.

Ditto. I never felt like they truly gave up the idea of making back end money off the long term fans via paid mods; they just had to drop back and pretend they had in order to regroup and figure out a way to slip it by us without creating an uproar again. By renaming it and comparing it to DLC and not taking any existing mods (but still tapping into the existing modding community) = I see the same modders who jumped into the mix before suddenly coming out with similar mods with different names; or see (what I feared before) the eventual killing off of free mods or mods from any other source but Steam (putting Nexus out of business unless they want to handle the paid mods by the release of Bethesda's next games in the series of Fallout and Elder Scrolls).

My big worry is that they'll start restricting the Construction Kit/Set/Thing to their tame developers. So I, and SubRosa, and mALX, and many others here, won't be able to make their own tweaks to their games. More than half the mods I make are for my game only, and never get published.

The ONLY reason I play TES games is that you can mod them yourself. I moved over from Dungeon Siege when the third of that series had no toolkit, and so I lost any interest. No toolkit = no purchase. Daggerfall was a close call, as all the tools were third-party, but it was free at the time I got it, and I only have Arena because it was in the Anthology set.

So if this is a step away from a freely-distributed toolkit, it's also the end of the franchise for me.

My big worry is that they'll start restricting the Construction Kit/Set/Thing to their tame developers. So I, and SubRosa, and mALX, and many others here, won't be able to make their own tweaks to their games. More than half the mods I make are for my game only, and never get published.

The ONLY reason I play TES games is that you can mod them yourself. I moved over from Dungeon Siege when the third of that series had no toolkit, and so I lost any interest. No toolkit = no purchase. Daggerfall was a close call, as all the tools were third-party, but it was free at the time I got it, and I only have Arena because it was in the Anthology set.

So if this is a step away from a freely-distributed toolkit, it's also the end of the franchise for me.

I can't remember where I read it now, but someone was saying that the CC developers are constrained by their agreements from developing mods outside CC. I.e. no more "free mods" from those authors. It's all starting to look like the model for Uber drivers, where you'd become a de-facto employee without any of the benefits.

Who knows how many were signed up to prevent them developing any more mods, and then didn't have their proposal for CC content approved. Or find that someone else is given the job of creating their idea.

I'm glad I stayed away from it.

Edit: and here's part of an interesting post on Beth's Fallout Fourm.

"So here is what I see as a future scenario. CC will continue to force the ba2 etc content on to people's systems with a series of updates. On systems where the OS cannot actually be accessed directly, this CC content will gradually fill up all available space where free mods were stored. At that point the user will be asked to delete free mods to make room for more potentially paid content or the program will not run. Once the free content is gone completely, the goal will have been achieved. Paid mods or no mods."