Bethesda has announced the Creation Club, which will be bringing paid user content to The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim Special Edition and Fallout 4. This will be paid for content that will be made by Bethesda, and certified outside creators, adding new content and systems to the games in question. However, Bethesda is insisting that this will not be a repeat of the paid mods initiative it tried once before with disastrous results.
“Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they’d like. Also, we won’t allow any existing mods to be retrofitted into Creation Club, it must all be original content,” Bethesda explained. “Most of the Creation Club content is created internally, some with external partners who have worked on our games, and some by external Creators. All the content is approved, curated, and taken through the full internal dev cycle; including localization, polishing, and testing. This also guarantees that all content works together. We’ve looked at many ways to do “paid mods”, and the problems outweigh the benefits. We’ve encountered many of those issues before. But, there’s a constant demand from our fans to add more official high quality content to our games, and while we are able to create a lot of it, we think many in our community have the talent to work directly with us and create some amazing new things.”
So, it sounds like Bethesda is treating this more as outsourced DLC for their games? It will be interesting to see how the community takes to it this time around, that is for sure.