Bethesda is now owned by Microsoft meaning Starfield will be on gamepass day 1. Gamepass already heavily restricts how you mod your games with protected folder bullshit at the OS level.
I have a feeling that it'll be really hard to use nexus with Starfield if not entirely impossible as Beth and Msoft will want to kite you through their new mod store where they take a sizeable chunk from mod makers
Maybe
They did try to do that years back for Skyrim mods and it backfired quite explosively, although I suspect part of the issue was trying to monetize mods which had been freely available for years. Granted, they ended up doing paid mods for Fallout MMO, but that seems a bit different, given the MMO aspect. Then again, this is Bethesda, architects of the 'Horse Armor' bullshit that helped launch a thousand DLC ships; they could absolutely blow their owns toes off
There was a huge backlash, but they did it anyway and there are still paid mods in Skyrim SE and Fallout 4. I'm with OP on this one, in fact I think they'll go a step further and lock down the creation kit for anyone who doesn't join "the marketplace".
Paid mods open an entire legal can of worms that I can't really explain other than saying that every single intellectual property law nerd that I went to law school with (a fucking depressing number of them) were salivating at the amount of billable work that this would generate for whatever firm they worked for. I cannot stress enough how bad of an idea it is to begin to sell paid community mods. Especially now that Microsoft is involved, every potential claimant would just be seeing dollar signs, and the lawyers are fucking sharks who smell blood in the water the microsecond that the first case is filed.
But they're already doing it no?
Creation content is commissioned.
I don't think Microsoft would allow it. They so badly need a win without reservations when it comes to releasing a big game. We'll see though.
Never underestimate M$' ability to release terrible products because they deputized a single boomer product manager to do whatever seemed cool to them.
Fallout 76 isn't a real mmo. The mp structure was total bs. You couldn't host your own servers and it was a pita getting in the same server as your friends. This was all a choice on Beth's part. They waited i think over a year before you could even rent your own server.
They could have let you host your own dedicated server and mod to your hearts content, but fucking Todd wanted to slaughter the golden goose. And now we havent had an ES game in twelve fucking years so they can make shitty gamebryo mass effect that no one wants nor asked for.