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
love how we are getting an enclosure of the commons in the digital world
I used to tell the kids that back in the day we could host our own servers, load custom skins, load whatever mods we wanted, make our own mp maps from scratch, mod the game to make stuff like counter-strike and team fortress. Fucking everything is locked down and monetized now if it's not some small indy title.
:bloomer: you can still do that, there is still vibrant communities for plenty of games like that and new indie titles (and some bigger ones ala paradox) are still built around doing that to a massive extent
Back in high school a friend of mine straight up hosted a Quake Arena LAN party.
It's a bit tricky to wrap your head around the idea that game publishers do not like mod communities, like at all.
Like sure, mod communities give positive press and nurture a fanbase but that's the extent of the benefits publishers see.
'But they keep people interested in the game and get more people to buy a game over its lifespan'-- they don't want that. They don't want that happening.
They don't want people investing their limited time and attention spans in modding their old games. They want their attention spans nested in their current GaaS venture.
They don't want people spending their money buying their old moddable games on steam sales at a reduced price. They want them to spend their money on the $60($70)($80) new thing so their sales numbers looks good.
Then they want people finished with the old new thing and moving onto the new new thing as soon as possible. Unless it's a GaaS in which case get excited for the next season, which they want you to pay for.
I dont think thats true for Bethesda though since they only release 1 game every 5 years at best anyways. Itll be 15 years between Elder Scrolls games when the next one comes out
I'm sure (most of) Bethesda the Game Developer Studio likes modding communities. Bethesda the Publisher has been in a protracted cold war against modding communities since the 2015 paid mod fiasco.
Since then we've had modders getting poached for Paid Mods 2 (the Creation Club), everything with how Fallout 76 is run internally. Even the re-release of Skyrim Anniversary Edition was another swing at the mod community (each new big feature release temporarily breaks all the major script mods, most big expansion type mods have to make extensive patches) and an attempt to derive more profit from the Paid Mods.
Monster Hunter World is more condusive to playing modded content together with your friends than Fallout 76, and World has no official mod framework whatsoever.
EDIT: I've seen some game industry lectures of publishers saying 'yeah people spending a ton of time modding our games sounds great, but we're not getting revenue from it so it's a problem'. I'm trying to track it down, I might need to search Jim Stephanie Sterling's archives for it.
:think-about-it: but you are getting revenue from it. You suck at making video games and all your customers know it
On reflection I realize I made a big comment that basically just says I agree with you and your conspiracy.
Uhhh my point was that I think Microsoft and Bethesda (Softworks LLC) are maneuvering against mods to sell more of their own games and DLC since they do see them as competition in both attention spans and content to consume.
that would basically end their popularity, and drive them back into the niche they used to be
bethsoft games are only as popular as they are because of how easily moddable they are
but these are tech companies, so 50/50 if they do the thing that will obviously tank them, while doing the surprised pikachu faceQuarterly profits uber alles. The community has been pushing back on Todd's monetization bullshit for literally a generation now and he just keeps going. It's been 12 years since skyrim and i don't remember since fallout iv. How many gamers even remember how vital the mod scene was to making those games playable? I had to go in to the creation kit and create a one-off mod to fix a hard crash that prevented me from completing the main quest since Beth can't be arsed to fix their own games.
Mods have always been Bethesda's saving grace so they don't have to worry about the game being more than half functional at release. Projekt Red would have received a lot less backlash if they had released a creation kit with Cyberpunk so fans could fill in all of the gaping holes.
paid mods aren't what will fuck them, lacking an enormous array of free mods will
Just a quick point. If you begin releasing paid mods, then you need an ARMY of IP-controllers, in order to prevent getting into a protracted peoples war with Disney. if you release a product, that people pay money for, and said product is too close to Disney's IP, they will move heaven and earth to ensure that you don't ever see a cent. One of the reasons why people have been able to mod Shrek, or Thomas the Tank engine is because it's way harder to prove that Disney suffered any damage when the IP was used for something that earned no revenue
Wrong. They are part of the pantheon of the maybe three normie games that the average dad buys in a year, along with Rockstar games, CoD and whatever sports or car game is applicable to the console and region, and yes, those dads play on console
Those dads used to be the kids asking their parents to buy games for them. They used to get "it", but now what "it" is changed and now "it" is weird and scary! It'll happen to you!!!
if your dad is in his 30s maybe
and even so, the majority of the sales are to the usual gamer crowd
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.
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.
Yeah but the suits in charge are dipshits just like every other suit in the world
I don't want Microsoft or Bethesda to see a cent from modding, but at what point are mod creators allowed to charge for their work? A lot of the conversations around this sound a lot like empty consumer activism, completely ignoring the reality of people working thousands of hours to provide you content for free.
Modders should def charge for their work but Msoft or Beth should not be related at all. Even Nexus being a storefront for mods would be better than that. Make something like itch.io for mods
