@Mythic842: There's a reason it's called 'conspiracy theory' and not 'fact'. I was AWOL during the Skyrim paid mods scandal so I don't know how to 'properly' respond to such a revelation, but from an outsider's perspective, more power to them.

@2pacDre: Look at Unreal's business model. In fact, see the business mode of most things. There's either a big entry cost or a proportional model. If you flip the thinking, if I were to get all the money, wouldn't I profit off Bethesda's gaming model and marketing to make money? Saying it's a one-way street is morally bankrupt.

dazzerfong wrote:

@Mythic842: There's a reason it's called 'conspiracy theory' and not 'fact'. I was AWOL during the Skyrim paid mods scandal so I don't know how to 'properly' respond to such a revelation, but from an outsider's perspective, more power to them.

well true it is their stuff but it is still a bit shady though

dazzerfong wrote:

@2pacDre: Look at Unreal's business model. In fact, see the business mode of most things. There's either a big entry cost or a proportional model. If you flip the thinking, if I were to get all the money, wouldn't I profit off Bethesda's gaming model and marketing to make money? Saying it's a one-way street is morally bankrupt.

Thats fair enough. I think most people would agree that either no money or a 50-50 split is probably the most favorable way to conduct business. I personally find myself on the side of the modders. The Skyrim Paid Mods gave the consumer the option of how much to pay for a differing section of mods, with a minimum "donation" set at $2.50. 75% of that went to Valve/Bethesda. The problem was some mods (like the Pure Waters modder) found their work uploaded by someone else, whom was profiting off of their hard work. Both approaches have pros and cons, but it does not bode well.

@Mythic842: In what way exactly? Because when I'm reading through the articles and forum posts on it (all over the web, not just here), it can more or less be boiled down to the few articles:

1. People don't want to pay for something that used to be free (fair enough, but not a factor into who's right or not).
2. People think modders were getting the short end of the stick (again, fair enough, but that's between the modder and developers, not what you think is morally right).
3. The 'corruption' of modders due to money (don't see that argument for traditional artists. Double standards much?)
4. The stiffling of creativity (not really, if you ask me......money is a great incentive
5. Asset theft (this is one of the rare ones I agree with. Right now, Nexus is rife with it)
6. Support. Tricky one, and again, I agree with this one. No matter what you do, some people will always have problems. Thankfully, Beth has tried to minimise it for a lot of problems, but some problems will still afflict users.
7. Modders don't deserve money to begin with as it's passion. That's not an argument, that's a moral assertion. And as one, it's a horrible one.

Personally, I don't really care if there's paid mods or not. It's not my main driver for income. That being said, I don't mind selling my mods for 10c each for s**** and gigs

as exciting as this discussion is, i still dont believe that beth is dumb/greedy enough to try this. after all they seem to depend on modders fixing the stupid shit they put into their games. i just dont think theyd want to ruin their way of getting away with half-assing things.

lukaboot wrote:

Gonna be some dark times ..... @donta1979

Na not really, people will get a free place to host their mods, the ones that want to sell them will be paid, and the modding communities like here will be the place where ripped content/personal mods will go like it has been. Since the nexus is setup the way it is, they cannot do ripped content mods since they make so much money they are a for profit. There will always be free mods, free mashups, free custom mods, but there will be ones that will be want it? Pay the artist and studio for it. When it does come time again for paid mods hopefully Bethesda and other studios start putting their importing/exporting tools out for the public they will probably have to. So those that do free mods will win regardless.

When Beth locks down on the Creation Kit plugins such that it has DRM, then that will be dark times. Until then, there's always the possibility of other smaller communities like this one or LL filling the niche, and as Donta said, exploding in size due to that.

I can safely say for myself that I won't pay for mods. I can't always pay for the mods that I want to use, because that could eat at my budget a lot. Financial reasons aside, I don't like being forced to pay for a things, I was always able to get for free.

Sure I can get some people deserve to be paid for all the hard work they do, like the great modders we have here in our community. Yet I prefer to be able to donate to them instead of being forced to pay for somebody's work.

I don't buy my music, I use youtube downloader to get what I need. Why? Because I can and it's free so why not? I only bought one song on Itunes before, cause I couldn't find just the song on youtube. As far as I can remember I only bought one Album myself.

I pay for my games sure, but I RARELY pay for the full price (only collector editions). If I can get it cheaper somewhere else, I'll get it there. And I doubt that I'm the only one who thinks this way.

Through the years people have made great mods absolutely for free, because they wanted to make something for the community and the games they loved. Some of those people eventually got hired by gaming companies to work on their games.

If I could mod, I would have done it because I wanted to and share it with people. Not out of profit. but I can't so there's that. The thing is with the paid mods some modders did get in my honest opinion greedy. An example without naming any mods or modders: You have a mod that through out the years/updates was always free and suddenly for the latest version said creator thinks he or she needs to be paid for it.

That leaves for me a bad after taste really, you gave us something on a very long time for free and in the end you decide to charge for it? Then yeah don't be surprised some people get pissed off.
Not to mention who says the price put for said mod is fair? Somebody else might say 5 bucks is to little while I say it's to much. Popular things cost more money, due to the fact that they are popular and people are willing to pay for it.

My opinions aside looking at if paid mods coming back or not; I hope they don't come back but it still is possible. It's kinda similar to how most DLC's are: Just content they cut from the game to make more money out of it. People are still willing to pay for stuff like that, while it should've been in the game from the start.

Companies will keep charging us for the most stupidest things there is cause we keep paying for them regardless. A great example is Team Fortress 2, how many people didn't cash out money for just stupid hats in a game?  After the hats game the new guns, I can get it takes forever to obtain them through drop rates but still 5 bucks for a gun or a stupid hat?

The worst thing to happen into paid in game items is Painted Guns: I mean really? You pay for a fucking reskin of your weapon that you could have easily downloaded from a modding site? Are you fucking stupid or what?

Honestly if paid mods are coming back, the gaming community is to blame itself. I mean you're willing to pay for a fucking reskin, new hat, new weapon or a fucking voice over by Snoop Dogg.

I was glad the community worked together to push back the paid mods, but a few where still willing to pay for them. Sadly because of this a lot of great mods where taken down and disappeared for good.

It's like with the Iphone 6 first release they had two versions: standard and one even bigger and more expensive. Apple had it at the right end with that: Why two versions? Cause people are willing to pay for it.

I hope nobody got offended by my opinion and I would like to thank once more our great modders of the community for all their hard work.

@William Lionheart: Wow, what a self-righteous post. You expect modders to be a charity or something? It sucks if you have to pay for mods, but labeling them as greedy? Low move.

Remember, no-one forced you to buy anything.

The people who attempt to monetize Fallout/Skyrim mods (and there have been plenty) tend to underestimate the giving nature of modders. Now if a modder chooses to charge for their mod, good for them. Mods take work. It's not unheard of to request compensation for work.

In the end, as long as there are free modding tools, there will always be those who are willing to create just for the love of creating.

Well I personally don't have problem with paid mod IF I know that the modder get 100% of the money not like 25% with the steam paid mod.

To be honest it doesn't surprise me that modder would like to be paid, they spend their free time to make something and some mod out there are really great, some even better than Bethesda official dlc and we all agree to pay for those dlc, why not for some great mod ? Is it because It's not a BIG company behind it and just one guy ?

Well i do believe paid mods can come back and possibly will.To be honest i don't care too much about that, while there are modders who would like to charge for their works, there are others who like to do it for passion and,in my opinion, those will never charge. I will be honest i'm more than willing to pay for a mod IF it is of great quality.In my opinion, if paid mods come back it will probably affect the community in various bad ways, but also in good ways as well. For instance think about it, now that you are PAYING for the mod the author will have to be more creative and make sure his work is TOP quality, worth of being paid.I wouldn't care, for example, to pay for the Frontier mod(Considering it would cost something around a DLC)because their work is top quality, hell even better than the original.Another good thing is that probably with paid mods, authors with contract with Beth would have acess to special tools, for importing/exporting,or even adding animations to the game.On the other side this system would great a barrier between the modding community, on one side the paying modders(that were once free ones) and on the other the free modders, that work for passion.

And there is also a BIG problem: piracy


As it happens with the original content, the paid mods would be vulnerable to piracy as well

@onowrouzi: Completely agree. Modders deserve compensation, but my problem was the corporations utilising "intellectual property rights" to corner modders into an almost exploitative relationship, whereby "you do all the work, we will take 75% because business law". I like the way nexus has done it which allows you to support your favorite mod authors for a single/rolling payment at the download screen. Those who wish to mod for free good for them. Those who request compensation, more power to you as well (modder time is not cheap - everyone has expenses).

In short: I am with darkjak94 and onowrouzi. I would pay for mods - I don't want to pay Bethesda/Valve extra

2pacDre wrote:

With this new Fallout 4 achievement mod controversy, will modding slow down do you think? It seems that Bethesda has been attempting to establish a modding monopoly, first with paid mods for Skyrim last year, and now with Bethesda.net. I'm not sure why this decision was made but it certainly is not very user friendly.

This is a controversy? Really? There's a mod that removes this issue entirely.

I see no reason why a lack of achievements would have any negative effect on people making mods. That's a ridiculous assumption. Even when the paid mods thing was new, that didn't stop people from making mods. Why would it?

I find little wrong with any of this, though. Achievements exist as something earned when the player completes some task that requires effort. Mods can make that task totally effortless. But at the same time, so do console commands. Which means I'm inclined to say that it has to do with mods coming to consoles, where achievements are held in higher regard. There are no console commands on PS4 and Xbox, so the only threat to the legitimacy of achievements is mods. Steam achievements are almost totally worthless.

@dazzerfong There's a huge difference between charging for a mod from DAY 1 and charging it from Version 6, while version 0 to 5 was free. Just cause everyone else is doing, is greedy to me.

I mentioned I'm willing to donate to the modders, but I don't like being forced to get access to content I want.

@William Lionheart: Fair point. In the end of the day though, it all boils down to the fact you're unwilling to pay. Which is fine, for the record: however, slamming the modders are greedy is disingenuous. Would you label me as greedy if, given paid modding suddenly existed, I were to shift my mod to Steam while stalling all development on the unpaid side?

That being said, donations are the 'safe' but insufficient answer for a middle ground: we appreciate people donating (I'm especially surprised people actually donated to me), but for bigger mods, it's ridiculous how little money people donated. The biggest irony is that the Youtube mod reviewers make money by showcasing mods, and yet they don't exactly split the profits.

I reckon that a monetisation scheme like YouTube ads is needed to fill the gap in, or even something like Patreon (which for whatever reason is illegal for modding). That way, it's a lot more on even ground/

@ONI Agent Locke: Ssshhhh, logical thinking isn't allowed here!

Honestly, i think most PC players are going to stick with what they know while also adding their files to bethesda net. I don't think it's a terrible thing that they made their own service to make it simpler and more streamlined. But if paid mods rear their heads again, i'm sure they'll be shot down just as quickly. Donations are totally fine, because it's always nice to support a content creator that you like, but nobody should be forced to pay for mods. It doesn't make sense to me.

As for achievements, there's already a mod that lets you play with mods and still get achievements. So that is already taken care of.

I don't see modding as we know it going anywhere anytime soon.

Grimmex wrote:

Honestly, i think most PC players are going to stick with what they know while also adding their files to bethesda net. I don't think it's a terrible thing that they made their own service to make it simpler and more streamlined. But if paid mods rear their heads again, i'm sure they'll be shot down just as quickly. Donations are totally fine, because it's always nice to support a content creator that you like, but nobody should be forced to pay for mods. It doesn't make sense to me.

As for achievements, there's already a mod that lets you play with mods and still get achievements. So that is already taken care of.

I don't see modding as we know it going anywhere anytime soon.

Bethesda said they won't bring paid mods back for fallout 4 neither will they for skyrim.