No Plans For Fallout 4 Paid Mods, Says Bethesda

DeepReaver

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As long as it is not at launch, it will be a PR disaster once the community is established and they try to do what they tried to do with skyrim. They cannot afford to destroy the mod community given that although there is money there, it is a nightmare of legal issues on copyright's alone. On-top of that there is the maturity issue, how they will manage sex mods without locking them out? How will they deal with modders building off of one another... Then there is the lack of sales through piracy given the loss of complicity in mods, it is a mess.
 

the7ofswords

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Just for the record Der Spiegel is not a gaming magazine. It's a German news magazine, and a very well-respected one at that. It's interesting that an article about Fallout 4 would run in its pages (or on its web site).

That would be like saying since since Time did an interview with David Letterman that it's an Entertainment and Celebrity news magazine.

OT: I'm certain the idea of paid mods isn't dead, and frankly I'm OK with that. The implementation they initially tried was lop-sided and broken (not to mention breathtakingly clueless), but I think such a concept could be made to work, eventually.
 

direkiller

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Darth Rosenberg said:
I really like the idea of paid mods - if done 'right'. So I'm really not fussed about the idea coming back, and frankly believe it's inevitable.
I don't think there is a way that it can be done right realistically anyway

Having to check for stolen content, stolen mods, copyright infringement, scams, and non-supported non-working mods while still giving mod developers a viable cut seems nigh impossible.

Unless you are very selective on who is in the program, but then it seems more like outsourcing DLC rather then a traditional mod.
 

Nergui

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direkiller said:
Darth Rosenberg said:
I really like the idea of paid mods - if done 'right'. So I'm really not fussed about the idea coming back, and frankly believe it's inevitable.
I don't think there is a way that it can be done right realistically anyway

Having to check for stolen content, stolen mods, copyright infringement, scams, and non-supported non-working mods while still giving mod developers a viable cut seems nigh impossible.

Unless you are very selective on who is in the program, but then it seems more like outsourcing DLC rather then a traditional mod.
There's also mod incompatability (such and ENB and Falskaar), load order and dependancies. TES/Fallout modding is in such a state that adding monetized modding is a fiasco looking for somewhere to happen. There are games where this sort of thing could work, Skyrim isn't one of them and for it to work in Fallout 4, the moddability of the game would need to be restricted, which would kill interest.

Bethesda already indirectly makes bucket loads of cash from modding due to interest in playing their games with mods. TESV: Skyrim is one of the few multi-platform games with higher sales for PC than either console, especially since many people bought the PC version having started with the console version.

captcha - saturday detention (THE BREAKFAST CLUB!!!)
 

Estarc

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If Bethesda want to revisit the paid mods system, they need to do it from the game's launch. That was the problem with bolting it on to the Skyrim community. Too many mods making use of other modders work, modders suddenly locking updates behind a paywall, no curation, etc etc...

If you are going to have paid mods announce it before the game launch, like, right about now, and curate it heavily. If they try to add paid mods for Fallout 4 at a later date, once people have gotten used to them being free? Another backlash is inevitable.
 

Smooth Operator

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Well I certainly don't see them ever coming out and saying this shit is launching, they didn't do it the first time and what is more modders who were invited to do mods for them weren't allowed to talk about it either, so do not expect them to ever tell you how things will go down. Expect them to deny everything until you have irrefutable proof.
If it's coming it will be so far under the radar no one will even know about it until weeks later, most likely they will just put some stuff on offer in their store (yes they are coming out with their own store client), and once people start noticing that stuff came from community creators then Bethesda will tell you... some PR bullshit, I was going to say the truth but that just isn't how business works.

And I don't have a problem with well packaged and tested content coming from community, just don't muddy the waters between random fucking around mods and legally accountable consumer products, these things are worlds apart.
 

Hagi

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I personally think the way to do this would be less of a paid modding system and more of a licensing system for unofficial DLC. With content being vetted before and not after being released to the public. At least to start off with.

Allow modding teams to approach Bethesda with ideas, prototypes, examples of past work etc. to obtain a license. Only granted when you're dealing with Falskaar-level quality. Then before release check the quality and legality of the work and finally release it as unofficial DLC if it passes.

At the end of the whole thing you want to end up with 20 or so high quality paid mods.

That's something that'd convince me paid modding could work.
 

Muspelheim

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Apr 7, 2011
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"Currently".

But still, it shows they're putting some thought into it. Payed mods weren't a problem in and off themselves, but the slap-dash way they were first introduced and what it meant to the whole modding ecosystem at large.

We will see.
 

ShakerSilver

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Nov 13, 2009
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Hey, you know that digital platform Bethesda revealed to distribute their games and modded content? Yeah, that surely won't be used to maybe act as DRM for the next iteration of the Creation Kit and for modded content for their future games. I'm so SURE that the way Todd worded it by saying there are "currently" no "plans" for paid mods is SURELY not some way to weasel word their way out of this.

Yeah no, I stopped trusting Todd after his mountain climbing and spears limitations tripe.
 

Akisa

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LordLundar said:
"no plans" is a weasel phrase. It essentially boils down to "right now we won't but we'll probably change our minds when we see just how much we can milk out of it." Blizzard is notorious for using the phrase and then implement whatever they had "no plans" for within 3-6 months.
Frankster said:
I'm not breathing easy at all.

For starters within this very thread there are people who WANT paid mods, all it takes is one moment of weakness, one moment of enough people going "duuurr huuur let's give paid mods a chance, EVERYONE will benefit!" and once it's entangled with enough gamers then it becomes very hard to get rid off.

The language used by the devs show they haven't exactly put the matter to rest either, there are no "current plans" because the backlash is still fresh, but they haven't forgotten about the idea completely, it's lurking around there still.

Vigilance is eternal.
DeepReaver said:
As long as it is not at launch, it will be a PR disaster once the community is established and they try to do what they tried to do with skyrim. They cannot afford to destroy the mod community given that although there is money there, it is a nightmare of legal issues on copyright's alone. On-top of that there is the maturity issue, how they will manage sex mods without locking them out? How will they deal with modders building off of one another... Then there is the lack of sales through piracy given the loss of complicity in mods, it is a mess.
Modders building off each other is one of the biggest problem implementing paid mod feature on an already released title. They need to release a new game with paid mods in mind, and mess with a released game.
 

Strazdas

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May 28, 2011
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The guy does not even know how long his own paid mod system worked and he is mocking fans? It is a very legitimate concern considering they are launching their own online platform that they claim is, amongst other things, for mods and that they are bringing those mods to Xbox. But of course people are going to ignore it and praise him for saying that they dont plan to rape their game. Not doing monstrous thing is something being applauded, what a strange world we live in.

008Zulu said:
As someone who downloads their mods pretty much exclusively from Nexus, this was never a concern for me. My biggest concern at this point is if Bethesda.net will be a digital distribution service required for Fallout 4.
It should have been, though. During the Skyrims dark week there were authors that pulled their mods from Nexus entirely to monetize in steam workshop and others that stuffed their Nexus one with a popups ingame with advertisement hoping to annoy you to pay them. Yes, in under 1 week we already reached the popup hell stage with mods.
 

008Zulu_v1legacy

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Strazdas said:
It should have been, though. During the Skyrims dark week there were authors that pulled their mods from Nexus entirely to monetize in steam workshop and others that stuffed their Nexus one with a popups ingame with advertisement hoping to annoy you to pay them. Yes, in under 1 week we already reached the popup hell stage with mods.
The mods I really only get are those with high endorsement ratings. Mods with all that popup crap usually find themselves at the bottom of a very long list.

I'm of the mind that all mods should be free. If you make a mod then it should be free because you are doing it for the love of the game. If you want money for content, then make your own game.
 

Strazdas

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May 28, 2011
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008Zulu said:
Strazdas said:
It should have been, though. During the Skyrims dark week there were authors that pulled their mods from Nexus entirely to monetize in steam workshop and others that stuffed their Nexus one with a popups ingame with advertisement hoping to annoy you to pay them. Yes, in under 1 week we already reached the popup hell stage with mods.
The mods I really only get are those with high endorsement ratings. Mods with all that popup crap usually find themselves at the bottom of a very long list.

I'm of the mind that all mods should be free. If you make a mod then it should be free because you are doing it for the love of the game. If you want money for content, then make your own game.
The mod with popups was Midas Magic. The file is currently set to hidden [http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/3413/?], but before paid mods it was the most popular spells mod in skyrim. So yes, those with high endorsement ratings did it. SkyUI - the mod so popular it has twice the endorsements the 2nd place has - went paid mod route and abandoned nexus version making it outdated. So simply using popular mods isnt really a solution.

I agree with you that mods should be free, but that does not mean that paid mods attempts pose no danger to mods that were free before.
 

Hero in a half shell

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Dec 30, 2009
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Now, keep in mind that Howard did stop short of saying "no paid mods ever," and Valve specifically stated that it wasn't shelving it's paid mods initiative permanently, stating that it "believes there's a useful feature somewhere here," and it would re-visit it with a community that is not quite as entrenched as Skyrim's.
Okay, so they've quite rightly decided there would be too much whiplash effect in Skyrim and (possibly) Fallout's established modding community, and they therefore need another community that is not entrenched.

I wonder how this gels with Bethesda's other recent announcement about working on whole new projects. They wouldn't be designing these whole new projects to be extremely moddable games that they can bring paid mods to from the start?

Maybe a little too tinfoil-hatty, but maybe not?