9 years ago
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Bethesda Talks Skyrim's Paid Mods Controversy
We talk with Bethesda marketing exec Pete Hines about The Elder Scrolls V's failed system and whether or not it might return.
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The main problem was obvious, what are you going to do for mod that depends on other mods to work? Mod on which 10s of people worked on it? On crappy mod falsely advertising the features?
The idea wasn't bad, it was poorly implemented.
Agreed, I like the idea of paid mods. There's no reason content creators shouldn't be paid for their work. What I don't like is the hands off approach and the way valve tried to monopolize on it, before actually coming up with a plan and making the proper tools to make it work. Damn near split the community in half.
The best way I can see it happening is with not a mandatory payment, but a donation option. Mods are volatile. Unless you download patches or edit things yourself, they have a decent chance of not working together. I would not be a happy person if I paid for a mod that can't coexist with my current setup.
Another thing they overlooked was the already established community. The TES games have an insanely active and thriving modding community and introducing such a controversial thing rocked their world. It simply worked for over a decade, why fuck with it?
It would have been way smarter to introduce it with a new title and even then step by step over the years, do it like with the DLCs and microtransactions, start with a donate button. Then moderate it and offer big new mods that never were free to begin with (and not released before) for a small fee. Then finally give authors the option to choose free/donate/paid for new mods, leave the old ones alone. Boom you got yourself a transformed community. People hate change, make it gradual enough and you can deal with the occasional dissenters quietly, people will just dismiss them as doomsayers.
I think for the bigger mods they would have to do some QA with them, or maybe collaborate with a couple of modders to make a specific pack of mods that play well together, like a mini-DLC or something. I play Skyrim, Fallout 3 and New Vegas with a whole bunch of mods, and sometimes they have a few hiccups. For example, in my Fallout 3 my character sometimes tilts 90 degrees up or down at the waist when firing a rifle. I find it kind of hilarious, but it would bother me if I paid for all those mods and their powers combined somehow had that effect (especially knowing how difficult it can be to figure out the culprit). It's easy for inexperienced people to mod their game into a corrupted mess, and by making the mods more accessible to the general public you are going to have a lot more people angry at Steam/Bethesda because 'MY GAME IS BROKE' after installing 300 different hairstyle mods.
That's a really big can of worms right there. I wonder if they ever had a plan do deal with that kinds of things. I mean, practially everyone I know has made experience with mod incompability. QA would not only be important for bigger mods, think about game updates breaking things. You'd buy a mod and next week's patch breaks it, do they intent to force the authors to keep actively updating/fixing? And for how long? Imagine an expansion coming out a year after release and suddenly you sit on three dozen dead mods. If they were free... well that sucks. But paid mods? Were it alright if installing Dragonborn broke Hearthfire?
I would also add the unofficial bug fix patches that Bethesda never seems to get around to doing for their games. In that case, players would have to pay twice for a fixed game, when Bethesda either should have fixed the bugs their selves or paid these community members who did their job for them when they wouldn't do it.
My stance, as it always has been, is that modding is the gaming equivalent of fan fiction. Derivative works that people spend time making out of their mutual love of the original work. You don't see fan fiction writers clamoring to get paid because the notion is absurd. And this connect between the two leads to my problem with this statment:
You know, if a fanfiction writer wants to make money doing what they're doing they become a professional writer. Similarly, if a modder wants to make money doing what they do, they become a game developer, designer, ect.