About the author
Nick Pearce is the veteran modder behind the award-winning, critically acclaimed Skyrim mod, The Forgotten City. He is currently working on a beautiful story-driven game to be announced in late 2017. For news and updates, connect with Nick on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, or sign up to his mailing list here.
The pros and cons of Bethesda's Creation Club
On 11 June 2017, Bethesda announced Creation Club, a platform through which users on PC, PS4 and Xbox One will be able to purchase content for Skyrim and Fallout 4 developed in partnership between Bethesda and “the very best” third party content developers.
The announcement triggered immediate community concerns that Creation Club is just a rebranded “paid mods” system, which was announced and quickly cancelled back in 2015. However, a close analysis reveals the new system is significantly different. From the information available at present, some of the key differences are:
“Paid mods” was uncurated, meaning anyone could sell anything for any price. Creation Club is to be curated by Bethesda, meaning content developers must submit a pitch to Bethesda for approval, and undergo quality assurance testing prior to release.
“Paid mods” allowed content developers to set a price for their content, and receive 25% of the revenue. Creation Club involves Bethesda paying content developers an as-yet-unspecified amount, and selling content on Bethesda.net.
“Paid mods” allowed content developers to sell content that had previously been free. Creation Club is limited to the creation of new content.
In light of ongoing community concerns and confusion around Creation Club and its relationship to “paid mods”, it’s timely to revisit the most common arguments for and against the monetization of third party content.
The arguments for the monetization of third party content
1. It’s inherently fair for skilled content developers to be paid for their work.
There is no human right more fundamental than the right to be paid for work. This should be self-explanatory, but here’s an illustration: Imagine your neighbor is an amateur handy-man and has made some modifications to your house for free because he enjoys it. Now imagine one day he says he’s started his own business and is going to start charging from now on. Your options are: (a) pay for his services, or (b) decline his services. No reasonable person could deny his right to charge for his services, simply because they used to be free.
2. The current system benefits everyone except content developers.
The current system is broken, in that it benefits everyone except the people doing most of the work. More particularly:
Bethesda benefits commercially from third party content (even when it’s free) because its games attract a strong following thanks in part to the content that is available.
Content users get to enjoy a massive amount of additional content.
Third party content hosting platforms receive revenue from advertising.
Streamers, who broadcast themselves playing Bethesda games loaded up with content, often receive advertising revenue and donations/subscriptions.
Content developers lose money. This is because making content tends to take a lot of time, and time has a monetary value. To illustrate the point, content developer Jonx0r wrote that making celebrated Skyrim mod Wyrmstooth took him approximately 2,000 hours. He subsequently decided to quit modding because of the heavy toll his hobby had taken on his career.
3. Bethesda is entitled to introduce paid content.
From a legal or rights-based perspective, Bethesda is entitled to sell intellectual property which it develops jointly with content developers. On the other hand, the role of content users, as prospective purchasers, is limited to either buying content, or not buying it; they have no legal right to free content, nor are they entitled to decide whether content should be available for sale.
4. Creation Club will result in more and better content.
Economics 101 tells us that giving content developers a chance to profit from their work will help attract and retain talented people, and keep them motivated to do their best work. In a competitive marketplace, content users would “vote with their wallets” and reward Bethesda for commissioning good quality content, and penalize them for commissioning bad content. Over time these market forces would create an abundance of good quality content.
This system may even also allow some content developers to generate enough income that they could work on development full time, producing much more content than they could by working only in their spare time.
The arguments against the monetization of third party content
1. Bethesda will sell bad or overpriced content.
The argument goes that Bethesda will try to sell more horse armor DLC, or similar.
However, Economics 101 tells us that in competitive markets, bad or overpriced content generally doesn’t sell. Bethesda’s curation / quality assurance system should ensure bad content is never put on sale. In the case of overpriced content, very few content users would buy it. Bethesda would quickly recognize the need to lower its prices. Realistically, in a paid content system, consumers could collectively exert downward pressure on prices by refusing to pay for content until it came into an acceptable range.
Further, competitive online marketplaces tend to make it easy to browse for content by category, as well as promoting popular content on special lists (such as Steam’s “Popular new releases” and “Top sellers” list). Such features ensure that popular content receives extra attention, while bad content disappears into obscurity.
2. Developers will try to make low effort content.
The argument goes that developers will be lining up to pitch content that requires the lowest possible amount of effort, like retextures or new weapon models.
However, Bethesda's profit motive means it will have an incentive to respond to the desires of content users by carefully selecting the type of content it approves. It no doubt has excellent data already on the relative popularity of each different type of content. In other words, Bethesda will presumably be aiming to match supply with demand from content users.
3. This new content is just “mods” which aren’t worth paying for.
The argument goes that mods aren't worth paying for, for various reasons like quality and simplicity, and should be free.
However, there is very little difference between the work of professional game developers and highly skilled modders / content developers. The idea that one has value but the other has no value is a curious one. Ultimately, the value of something is determined by what people are prepared to pay for it, and since we know gamers in other communities (eg. Valve’s Team Fortress 2) have happily paid millions of dollars for third party content, we can expect there will be many gamers who are happy to pay for Skyrim and Fallout 4 content, even if others are not.
4. A better system would be a donations system.
The argument goes that content users can be trusted to donate to content developers via PayPal or Patreon, so it's unnecessary to put that content behind a paywall.
This is one of the more curious arguments, for two reasons:
First, this argument is usually presented as though a donations system would be a compromise between the current system, and the proposed system. In fact, there is already a donations system in place on the Nexus and it has been in place since before the paid mods system was introduced in 2015. The fact that so many opponents of paid content seem to be oblivious to the existing donation system is clear evidence they have never made a donation.
Second, no matter how good a content item is, the number of people who donate will be negligible. Skyrim mod “The Forgotten City” drew critical acclaim from IGN, PC Gamer, and Kotaku, was the first mod in history to win a national Writers’ Guild award, and was described by Skyrim Mods Weekly as one of the best Skyrim mods of all time, and yet fewer than 0.01% of users donated. In other words, continuing with the current “donation system” simply means that, in practice, over 99.99% of people would access the content for free.
5. Developers who want to monetize their content are just greedy.
The argument goes that content developers who previously worked for free are being greedy in seeking to monetize their work.
By way of background, in the “modding community” there are two groups of people:
Content developers, a small group of people who create content in their spare time; and
Content users, a large group of people who use the content of others but create no content.
An example of the relationship between those two groups is as follows: Of the 1.1 million people who downloaded the award-winning, critically acclaimed Skyrim mod, The Forgotten City, as of June 2017:
Fewer than 5% of players “endorsed” or rated it;
Fewer than 0.5% left a comment; and
Fewer than 0.01% made a donation.
Hence, the idea that it is content developers here who are "greedy", and not those content users, who seek to deny content developers the opportunity to generate income from their largely thankless work, is a curious one.
In many cases, high-quality content takes hundreds or thousands of hours to create, as in the case of Wyrmstooth (2000 hours) and The Forgotten City (1700 hours). As above, this time has a monetary v
