I don’t see the issue with providing modders with an avenue to charge for their work. If you don’t like it, don’t pay for them and continue doing what you’ve done.
There's 1001 existing avenues for modders to charge for their work, avenues they use, from Patreon versions of mods to plain simple donations.
The issue here is that Bethesda is trying to get in on that action and try take a cut.
They are laying the groundwork to transform the field for when they make it disallowed to use the other long existing avenues and only allow modding through them, possibly arbitrarily putting a cost on everything and taking a cut on everything.
Yeah, a lot of people I noticed that are for paid mods either aren’t aware or ignore the fact about Bethesda wanting a cut of the money, as well as the fact that mod thievery was rampart on the Creation Club so people could get popular for mods they stole from Nexus. To me, both those facts are a huge red flag about Bethesda’s paid mods model.
EDIT: Consider that some of the most popular mods for Bethesda games are bug fixes. If you had to pay for a bug fix mod that helps the game not break, is that acceptable? It would even further reinforce the idea that Bethesda can ship out an incomplete product, let the players fix it, then charge the players for that fix under the guise of “helping out the mod author”.
But it’s the start of the slippery slope, and having a mindset like yours where it’s more or less “wait until it happens then attempt to do something” is what allows shit like this to happen.
It’s better to prevent it all together than it is to slowly accept the enshittification of what are, ultimately, passion projects or things people do for fun.
Exactly. There's assloads of precedent that if you allow a single company to normalize this crap, it'll be an industry wide thing within 5 years.
It happened with paid DLC, it happened with Microtransactions in full price games, it happened with pre-sales, it happened with subscription fees and season passes in full price games.
People keep pulling this "bwah, it won't be so bad", for it to get 10x worse than anything we expected.
If you're getting into modding a game you don't own, you don't do it for money, because making money off someone else's game hasn't really been a thing until this shit. If you're getting into modding for the money, you're an idiot
The other problem is that with paid mods, other modders can't make compatibility patches unless they buy the mod to test against. Say goodbye to your 1,000 mod modlist all working together in harmony.