Bethesda Reignites The Paid Mods Controversey With ‘Starfield’ Creation Kit
from the deja-vu-all-over-again dept
As the line from the Bill Murray movies goes, “It’s Groundhog Day… again.” Back in 2015, Valve launched its “Paid Creations” platform on the Steam client, through which those who made game mods could list them in a marketplace for a cost. This was done at least in coordination with, if not at the behest of, Bethesda. The backlash was both swift and severe, with a gaming community, that was used to mods made by hobbyist, suddenly had to contend with fees for these mods determined by the modder themselves. It got so bad that Valve nixed the platform shortly after.
But Bethesda never really gave up on the concept. Instead, it released the Creation Club modding in-game store in 2017, but insisted that platform would not incorporate paid-for mods. Then, in 2023, Creation Club was supplanted by the Verified Creations platform, which functioned similarly but brought back paid-for mods for titles like Skyrim. That game is nearly 15 years old and the paid mods program is still controversial for it.
And now Bethesda is kicking the controversy back into high gear, having just released the Creations program for Starfield.
A recent update heralding the release of the Starfield Creation Kit included a new mission that enables players to become bounty hunters for the Trackers Alliance faction, with the promise of future Trackers Alliance missions coming in subsequent updates. But the second Trackers Alliance mission, The Vulture, is only available as a paid add-on costing 700 Starfield Creation Credits—the equivalent of $7, which in reality is $10 because that’s the smallest amount of credits you can purchase to cover the cost.
The move was not well received. Unhappy players immediately recalled Bethesda’s disastrous attempt to launch paid mods for Skyrim in 2015, and of course the infamous Oblivion Horse Armor DLC from 2006. The mission also received unfavorable comparisons to the Starfield premium edition upgrade, which includes the full Shattered Space expansion, the Constellation skin pack, digital art book, soundtrack, and 1,000 Creation Credits for $35: “Is Shattered Space actually just two quests in a trenchcoat?” one redditor rhetorically asked. Steam user reviews, predictably, took a nosedive.
Okay, so there are really two things going on here, rather than one. There are still a lot of unhappy folks out there seething at the concept of paid-for mods generally, including from third party modders. It’s the same problem as with Skyrim and with Valve’s release before. The modding ecosystem with most games most of the time is one in which players do not expect to pay for mods, as those mods are typically produced by hobbyists and distributed for free. While I don’t hate the idea of modders getting something for their work inherently, it’s a massive shift in the ecosystem which isn’t going to be embraced readily.
And then there’s what Bethesda is charging itself for mission mods, which is what the above quote is referring to. The cost to value ratio players are doing in their heads is obviously not sitting well, and it’s not hard to understand why. $7 for essentially a single game mission and some in-game accessories isn’t a great look. The result of all this is fairly predictable as well.
That “feedback” continues to be reflected in Steam reviews, which are now down to “mostly negative” over the past 30 days thanks primarily to the paid mission—which some players find especially egregious given the sense that Starfield itself was a disappointment.
But while adjustments may be in order, Howard emphasized the importance of enabling content creators to monetize their work, which he said was a big part of ensuring the long-term health of the community—and for the most part, he said players dig it.
The mission in question certainly does have plenty of buyers, it seems, but there is also a ton of negative chatter in the community about it. And, while I have to admit that I bought and loved Starfield, and didn’t really agree with much of the criticism around it, the fact is that the game was considered disappointing by a large portion of the customer base. To suddenly have what feels like overpriced singular missions thrown into the mix only adds insult to injury for those folks.
And the really frustrating part is some of the comments by the Bethesda team, including from Executive Producer Todd Howard.
“We hear the feedback,” Howard responded when asked whether Bethesda will change how it releases content like The Vulture in the future. “We need to evaluate both pricing, what we put out for free, how we communicate what’s in something, and really hear from the community there.”
Frankly, this could have been copied and pasted as a response from any of the other responses to the backlash from the other times Bethesda has done this sort of thing, as we’ve noted in this post. Going all the way back to the infamous horse-armor running joke.
Bethesda may be hearing the feedback, but they seem to be ignoring it and making the same customer-angering decisions over and over again.
So it’s Groundhog Day… again.
Filed Under: mods, paid add ons, paid mods, video games
Companies: bethesda
Comments on “Bethesda Reignites The Paid Mods Controversey With ‘Starfield’ Creation Kit”
Paid mods are just the studios outsources their DLC for no cost to them. Maybe the studios should be paying the modders for increasing the value of their base games.
Copied and Pasted
I’m not sure why you’d expect more from Howard, continually rehashing past efforts is sort of his thing
It depends where the money goes...
I’m not against paying for mods. Some mods in some games are an utterly insane amount of work and add a legitimately “It’s a new game” amount of content.
What I’m against is (after paying for the game itself), paying for “credits” and then buying community-made mods with “credits” and the mod creator gets like, 30%, at best, of the money. Fuck that. But I’d fully support including paid-mods in a game as long as A> a modder can release their work for free if they so choose, and B> if it is paid, the publisher gets no more than 5% (It sucks, but that’d cover credit card fees anyway — I don’t like even the 5% but depending on the model, there’s excuses/legit expenses to go up to roughly that amount without really screwing the people who are doing the actual work), and the modder gets 95%.
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Ungrateful parasites like you deserve nothing.
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clown moment
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Fuck off, Terop. We’re sick of you stinking up the comments here.
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Communist scum.
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your clown license you dropped it
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Yeah, fuck communists! Capitalism is the way to go! Everyone is free to exploit everyone else for a side gig microtransaction convenience fee 25% tip profit! I’d go on, but I’m not being paid to write more. For a longer diatribe on the glories of unfettered capitalism, I accept venmo, cashapp, zelle, bitcoin, buttcoin, shitcoin, dogecoin, crackerjack prizes, arcade tokens, customer loyalty cards, EBT, and Nuka Cola Caps. Offer excludes Trump Trading Coins and DJT stock. I’m not a fucking moron.
Bethesda Reignites The Paid Mods Controversey With ‘Starfield’ Creation Kit
The Skyrim “paid mods” are still a thing. When I finally managed to navigate the needlessly complicated mods section in Skyrim Special Edition I found loads of mods that needed in game money to download. From Bethesda I assume. I have avoided any such as I cannot see the need to fatten the purses of a company I already bough stuff from. Next thing you know that will be trying to insert ads into their games, and they know where they can insert that idea.
Devils advocate time...
Seeing how the free mods community generates so much content and even a little cash for modders through voluntary contributions over a very long period of time, a game publisher can’t help but want in on that action. If nothing else, it would be a great way to stabilize/increase long-term revenue from a release. Yeah, Morrowind is still being played 20 years after release and new mods still come out for it, but all that puts into Bethesda’s coffers is goodwill and advertising.
So they are going to keep trying to do some form of paid mods until they get it to work — either by coming to a reasonable compromise with the community or by ramming it down their throats. The worst-case scenario is that they stop releasing the creation kit publicly for new games and you can only get it by signing into and being verified for the in-game “Creations” app.
Even if they get their customers on-board with the idea of paid mods, the trouble is that the prices of paid mods are inflated by the number of hands in the pie. The Steam-based paid creations were particularly egregious because Valve and Bethesda between them were taking something like 70% of the sale price. The in-game creations mitigate this by limiting Valve’s role, but you still have to buy the points through Steam, so they are clearly getting a cut of the baseline. Also, the pricing of creations suggest that Valve and Bethesda are still splitting something like 30-50% of the price. This 700 point mission would probably be reasonably priced at 300-500 points from a consumers POV.
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Except Bethesda botched the creations update right out of the gate.
Value
I received a promotional copy of Starfield with the purchase of a new video card. I’d been a fan of some of Bethesda’s other works so I thought it might have possibilities. I played for roughly 60 hours and gave up. The many quality issues destroyed any sense of immersion which is vital to the enjoyment of any fiction. Ultimately, in spite of the fact that I received a ‘free’ copy, I paid too much for it in my time. I imagine that anyone who actually paid for it would be angry and I find it impossible to imagine why anyone would pay for mods.
…enabling content creators to monetize their work…
Yeah. More like enabling truckloads of people who don’t actually care about a game or community to flood the space with paid-for crap. And setting the stage for the next form of “DLC” from the rightsholder.
If committed community mods creators really wanted the money, there are loads of ways for them to do that already, including content*-indirect methods like kofi, patreon, etc.
*i hate this fucking usage of the word.