The private and public sector suppression of sexual freedom and freedom of expression is more sinister than you think.
- Thread starter Gergar12
- Start date
Releasing the creation kit early would mean releasing an incomplete version surely? Then they'd have to update it and break all the porn mods, which would lead to this thread.
And I'm saying that it doesn't fit the trend you're describing. You're just so hyper-fixated on that community-made element of the game that you are simply leaping to that conclusion apropos of nothing. You simply looked at the data point of "re-releasing the game" and assumed whole cloth that the point was to get rid of NSFW modders...purely because you don't expect all of the mod creators to bother porting to the newest iteration. That simply does not follow and ignores much simpler explanations that have far greater explanatory power.
Moreover, I'm saying that's emblematic of how you've approached this entire issue. "Why would a streaming platform tailored for general audiences and broadly perceived as having a target audience of adolescents in particular crack down on Not Safe For Work content?" "Why would AI art platforms trying to gain generally applicable traction in both personal and professional markets be cracking down on Not Safe For Work prompts?"
As before, with both of these examples you assume - apropos of nothing - that those decisions must evidence political intervention imposed upon them rather than the much simpler explanation of NSFW content being at odds with their intended brand image. Fuck's sake, the creation of pornographic content is explicitly against Twitch's Terms of Service, but you're still calling foul on them having a no-tolerance policy for streamers becoming "sex performers" (as you termed it) and therefore claiming that it must be connected to everything else.
And cost a boatload of money. Updating or re-releasing an existing (and very popular) game with little more than a fresh coat of paint requires much less work (and has a much shorter turnaround) than creating something from the ground up does.
I mean, the reason is very obvious. We're talking about having sex for money, and it's kind of important that a sex worker be able to negotiate directly, from a position of relative autonomy, what they will and will not do, because someone being coerced into a sex act against their will by an "employer" who essentially owns them for the duration of their contracted work hours is.. well.. there's a word for that.
Again, there are incredibly few benefit to sex workers in becoming "employees". Independence is a huge part of the reason why anyone does it. Selling that independence away for paid sick leave is a truly, truly awful trade.
In an ideal market where all buyers and sellers were rational actors with perfect information and no coercion was possible, sure. Too bad we don't live in one.
...Gets the ball rolling on mods, maybe. Attracts new people to the game? No, it really doesn't do that. The potential to create mods is rarely, if ever, a selling point for a game, and the scant few examples where you can make the argument are those games whose explicit purpose is to be a sandbox (like Minecraft) or to let you recreate things within it (like Tabletop Simulator). Even then, it's a stretch to say that's something that will attract new customers.
Mods are not a general audience thing, they're a niche feature for certain subsets of the userbase. Virtually nobody is going to buy KoTOR because they heard good things about the Brotherhood of Shadow mod, but people who already own the game might look into installing it for their next playthough. And that's for an existing reasonably popular mod. You're talking about a Creation Kit, which is even more niche.
To put it in different terms, the Creation Kit can be reasonably compared to the Dungeon Master's Handbook for Dungeons and Dragons. It is not there to attract new players to the game, nor is it there for the general playerbase. It exists for a very specific type of existing player who has both the desire to create their own module and the both the organizational and technical ability to make it to their specifications. Alternatively, you can liken it to a dealership trying to sell a car by advertising that it comes with access to the dealership's workshop, so you can tweak it on your own time/dollar. That's not something that will attract new buyers, that's something that at best is pitched to the grease monkeys within their existing client base.
Don't confuse your personal investment in the modding community with it being some major selling point for the general market.
Bethesda games are quite possibly the worst single hill to die on, on this one. The last TES/Fallout game released that wasn't a full-retail-price open beta banking on the modding community to drive sales, was arguably Oblivion as that was the last one to go retail without showstoppers. Which is about as positive a thing I can say about the game that had paid horse armor DLC.
Every one since...well, the point Bethesda's quality assurance negatively correlates to the presence of accompanying SDK's and monetized mod marketplaces makes itself.
On the other hand, you could make that argument for games made by basically any other developer/publisher. You even named one or two to make the point. Though, I'd certainly point out the reason players continue to buy older games, is specifically thanks to compatibility mods -- especially those released for operating systems before XP x64, like for example KoTOR. That, and restored content mods.
As someone who grew up in and lives in the rural/suburban Midwest...man, oh man, do you vastly underestimate the aftermarket/customization scene. Auto manufacturers and dealers tried to wage that battle decades ago and lost; now, the best they can accomplish is manufacturing and selling pre-modified models. The MX-5/Miata's reputation was made on it being so modification-friendly.
I think you also miss my point. I'm not saying that these things are without appeal. Hell, I've got a shortlist of personal "must-use" mods for Skyrim that I've suggested on these boards.
My contention is Gergar's assertion that rushing out a new creation kit will attract new players for a given game, to the extent that he sees their failure to do so as "making no business sense" and evidencing an ulterior motive, because he presumes that its release would "bring in boatloads of money". What I'm saying is that is vastly overestimating the impact of such a feature. For all that modding for Bethesda games has garnered fame, only a small fraction of players actually mod their game (IIRC, the numbers I heard for Skyrim were around 8%, though those are old figures now), and only a fraction of those players are actively involved in the modding scene themselves. My point is that by the numbers that's a niche market that cannot be spun as a driving factor for these purchases.
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It's not an untrue statement, but it is one which needs a bit of context.
Starfield's production budget was $200m, and as the gaming industry's production-to-marketing cost ratio generally sits around 1:1, we can estimate a total cost of $400m. Meanwhile...$70 game, it was announced 10m copies sold in the game's first month. Let's be liberal with our assumptions with how sales look now, and go with 15m copies to date after initial sales slowdown and Christmas purchases. That tracks nicely with Bethesda's announcement last week of 13 million players total.
$1.05b gross revenue. 30% of that generally goes to distributors, so that's $335m net revenue for ZeniMax.
(15*70*.7) - 400 = 335
"I'll wait for the first major update/modding tools to come out" is a pretty common thing to hear with Bethesda open-world games, especially when it comes to long-time Bethesda fans. But still, let's asspull a nice, conservative number for the sake of argument -- let's say had Starfield launched with its creation kit, to-date sales would have been 2% higher. That's 300,000 copies more that might have been sold to date.
Or, once we've crunched the numbers, $349.7m net revenue. 2% higher sales doesn't equate to 2% higher net; in this case, it's 4.4%. That's a pretty damn substantial margin -- based off conservative estimates of the opportunity cost, against liberal sales figures.
(15.3*70*.7) - 400 = 349.7
((349.7 / 335) - 1) * 100 = ~4.4
At this point, you might ask what the development cost of the creation kit might be compared to that margin. Well, it's $0. Bethesda's made no secret creation kits are the first thing developed after the engine itself, since it's what they use to make their own games. It's how they've done business since Oblivion's development. Any costs for the creation kit's development are accounted for by Starfield's $200m initial development budget.
But it'd be more accurate to say the costs of Starfield's creation kit were covered by Skyrim's $85m development budget twelve years ago, as they're both Creation Engine games...and the heavily-marketed, alleged Creation Engine 2 has adequately proven itself thus far one giant nothingburger.
I found the quote you're citing.
Bethesda's claim is...rather strange, with some questionable wording in context of other statements made at the time. The questions we should ask ourselves of this quote, are "8% of which audience?" and "how did they get that number?" Those are pretty important questions to ask, here.
That statement was made in 2015, and at that point Skyrim was only available on PC, PS 3, and 360. The original release was never backwards compatible with PS4 or Xbone, as SE wouldn't come out until 2016, and CC 2017. Not that any of that matters to my point: at the time that blog post was published, PC was the only platform on which you could mod Skyrim.
Contemporary Skyrim sales figures were 20m copies sold, 6m of which were for PC. 70% of those who bought copies, couldn't even mod their games. If it was 8% of the entire Skyrim audience and only 30% of those could mod in the first place, that means 27% of the people who could mod, did.
That's relevant because in 2014, Howard was quoted as saying,
Or to read between the lines, Bethesda was looking as early as 2014 at how to facilitate mods for console players, to boost sales on those platforms. It only makes sense Bethesda would later claim only 8% of Skyrim players in total played with mods, especially in a blog post about why Steam Workshop monetization failed and how to improve mod accessibility for their entire audience. We know with hindsight their endgame was developing and releasing Creation Club, because that's what they did.Todd Howard said:
That's not even going into the giant catastrophic mess that was Creation Club through PSN, with Sony's draconian restrictions on what mods can be allowed. After that debacle, I was surprised Bethesda was ever trying to publish Starfield on PS5 in the first place, and wasn't saddened to see the PS5 version kiboshed after their acquisition by Microsoft.
Even assuming it was 8% of PC players, how did they get that figure? Was that the number internally gathered by Bethesda based on data harvesting, or was that the percentage of players using Steam Workshop? Was that a projection based off download statistics from Nexus? And, how has that percentage changed over the past eight years?
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It's funny you mention the Bethesda mods menu/Console. There are ways to get Loverslab mods on there. You go to the WIP section and join an NSFW discord that does "drops" of NSFW mods on there, and it works. Now I haven't done it because I have a PC. But it works.
One guy got Loverslab's Sexlab to work on the Switch's Skyrim Port.
One guy got Loverslab's Sexlab to work on the Switch's Skyrim Port.
Bluntly, this is hitting the same issue that Gergar did and are equivocating a statement that "a given percentage of players have modded their game" with the idea that "mods brought that percentage of players to the game". That is an entirely different statement, and not a remotely safe assumption.
Point of fact, I'd go so far as to argue that anyone who'd say "I'll wait for the first major update/modding tools to come out" is overwhelmingly likely to be part of Bethesda's core user base, and that such a statement demonstrates a familiarity both with the typical quality of Bethesda's titles and are rather explicitly waiting for patches (official or community-made) to address that issue. Put simply, they're already locked in as purchases, but are waiting specifically to avoid the "day 1" (so to speak) bugs that experience tells them are inevitable. Such statements are not reflective of the general market, but instead what we in the marketing would call the "love group" (an existing user base that is already predisposed towards purchase and intimately familiar with your brand's strengths and weaknesses). Which is again to my point about the modding scene being principally populated by existing players and that it is not a driving factor for bringing in new sales.
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I'd say it's a pretty safe assumption when even Todd Howard himself admits without a shred of irony in interviews with major gaming news outlets this is exactly the case.
Are they pre-ordering the game, or are their purchases counted in first-quarter sales figures, which are the industry-wide predominant key performance indicators of whether or game has been successful or not? Or, as in the case of a triple-A title released in calendar year Q3 for...some inexplicable (spoiler: it's actually totally explicable) reason that hasn't had a follow-up major post-release patch, are their sales being counted for first-quarter or Holiday season sales?
[Microsoft wanted Starfield's initial sales -- you know, before they fell flat -- reflected in their FY24 Q1 earnings call.
Source: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/fy-2024-q1/press-release-webcast
Reporting quarterly and YoY revenue increases -- and mitigating revenue decreases -- give investors stiffy-squishy parts in their pantsular regions. So, you know, there's that.]
And in most cases, that consumer group is the one counted upon to drive sales, not impede them. I think you really need to take a step back and consider the implications that Bethesda's "love group", by your own admission, are the ones not buying the game during its most critical sales periods.
Eh fuck it, you ain't gonna consider those implications I mentioned on your own. To hell with "new sales" or expanding their consumer base, this is about Bethesda's ability to retain customers. That's the point: consumers get burned by Bethesda products, they decide to wait in the future for modders to do Bethesda's job for them.
That's not a "love group" and it's certainly not reflective of "locked-in" sales regardless of quarter. That's a consumer base making purchase decisions premeditated upon what third parties are capable of doing with the software; should Bethesda prove unwilling or incapable of delivering third-party tools or facilitate third-party content, they're not going to make the decision to purchase which means Bethesda doesn't retain their customers.
This is exactly why Howard said what he did in 2014, why Bethesda needed to figure out how to facilitate modding on consoles, and why Bethesda is hellbent for leather on continuing to integrate (monetized) third-party content into their games' marketplaces. Bethesda is a software developer releasing SDK's in open beta, with narrative demonstrations attached to call it a game, and charging full retail price for it. So, with that in mind, the assumption is more like "mods brought that percentage of players back to Bethesda's products".
And in case anyone misses the subtleties of my point, failing to retain customers means lower sales than one might have otherwise had. Which indeed means Microsoft's and Bethesda's decision to release Starfield during CY23Q3/FY24Q1 absent its creation kit, had an opportunity cost in terms of potential sales in its most critical sales periods. They may well be able to pick up those sales later when the creation kit is released and mods start coming out, but what that doesn't do is increase sales during CY23 Q3-Q4.
And, just so we're abundantly clear on this, once again for those in the back those sales were based on the release of the creation kit, not the game itself, which means by logical necessity without the creation kit those sales would not have occurred. Modding tools are sine qua non for those sales. That is the definitive proof for myself and gergar's argument that modding tools drive sales for Bethesda products.
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Well, Germany has solved that by deciding that consent laws still apply and that specifically sex workers can retract consent at any time like everyone else and can't give up this right in any form of contract, whether employment or service sale.
I am not sure there actually any benefit for a brothel owner to directly employ sex workers via just renting out the space and providing a referral service.
a worthy attempt (from the sound of it), but the underlying economic incentives are unchanged. so it's probably not a solution so much as a mitigation.
...Except once again you're equivocating between the idea that Howard wanted to monetize the modding scene (which is to say, add microtransactions to the game to create a recurring source of revenue for an otherwise single-purchase product) with the idea that it's a driving force for sales, and are so doing by treating late adopters as lost sales because - while they explicitly announced intent to purchase - announced that they wouldn't be early adopters. More to the point, you're equivocating between your own position that an early release of the CC would have an observable impact on early sales, and Gergar's far less reasonable position that the CC would drive so many new players to the game as to mean that it makes no business sense for them to rerelease their cash cow before that creation kit. Gergar's explicit position, need I remind you, was that the fact that they haven't yet released the Creation Kit is so bizarre as to constitute evidence - in and of itself - that Bethesda must have been ordered not to do so by Microsoft at the behest of the Government in order to passive aggressively hurt sex modders in service of a pervasive puritanical agenda.
I suppose this is what I get for using industry jargon in making my point. So let me try to explain this to you. In marketing, we think of potential buyers in terms of segmentation. And we do a lot of segmentation, because our jobs rely so strongly on understanding and communicating with our audience. To list just a few examples, we segment by age, region, hobbies, jobs, life stage...and of course familiarity with and disposition towards the brand.
In this last method, we use three major segments. There's "hate group", which are the lost causes who are so predisposed not to buy into the product or service that it's not really worth trying to win them over. There's the "swing group", which are those who don't have strong opinions on the brand and thus have the potential to be swayed for or against it. As these are usually far and away the most populous and the most easily swayed for or against the brand, they're usually the focus of our campaigns. Then there's the "love group", which constitutes an existing customer base for the brand and is already predisposed towards a future purchase. This does not mean that they do not require any convincing, just that they are already near the bottom of what we call the conversion funnel (typically around the "consideration" stage, which can adequately be summed up as the phrase "I'll buy if...").
Example: I'd be considered in the love group for Bloodborne despite not having any current intent to purchase (due to my unwillingness to put down the money towards the game and the new console I'd need to play it). This is because I am an existing user of FromSoft products and predisposed toward purchase for those products. In simplest terms, I'm someone who is inclined to give a title further consideration if I learn that it's a Soulsbourne game. I may not be a guaranteed purchaser now, but that is because of surrounding circumstances (namely the lack of compatable console), not lack of interest in the product itself, and indeed would be counted as a likely purchaser if those circumstances were to change (either by my acquisition of a compatible console or by the game becoming available for a platform I do own).
In the example you're using, the people under discussion are described as further down the funnel than I am in that example. Whereas I'm saying "I'd buy if something changes", the people we're discussing here are literally announcing that they already intend buy it but are waiting for circumstances that they're treating as a foregone conclusion. In this sense, they're not terribly different from the "I'll wait for it to go on sale" crowd. This is what I mean when I say it's locked in.
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As if people needed even more reasons to take the Switch with them during bathroom breaks... (*looks shiftily towards my Switch*)
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