Publisher-Approved Paid Modding Policy

[Blackread]

1 hour ago, Chernobylite12 said:

I don't need that decision to be made for me - I bought a paid mod because it looked interesting and a mod author I like the work of got a couple bucks off that - isn't that a win for everyone?  

The only loss was what I might have spent for coffee one morning.

Of course the decision is for everyone to make by themselves. Just like it was for Nexusmods to make theirs. And the decision Nexusmods made in no way prevents you from spending further money on mods or supporting your favourite mod authors in other ways. But I think people should be aware of the damage their decisions might do to the modding community as a whole.

I find it funny that people defend paid mods by "supporting mod authors". If you are interested in supporting that particular author, why not skip the middle man (Bethesda) and directly donate money to them instead? Then they would get your support in full amount too. It's not like Bethesda in any way participated in developing the content you purchased.

[Khundiann]

11 minutes ago, Chernobylite12 said:

But paid mods are entirely optional - so what's the big angst about them, other than entitlement? 

While I think we agree in that modding is primarily a hobby, for some people it has been successful enough that they have been able to make it a bigger part of their lives.

The argument of paid mods = bad is entirely dependent on us only acknowledging the parts that benefit Bethesda or hurt users.

 

But forgetting that users still have the option of getting the content if they want it or still having access to the free mods that have always existed, and the mod authors getting something out of the deal as well. 

Sending any form of confirmation to beth that asking money for mods is acceptable, especially buying the paid mods is bad. If anything is going to move them to change the TOS or EULA in relation to mods is the profitablity of these CC and VC schemes.

9 minutes ago, showler said:

Seems egotistical to think that mods are that important to Bethesda that they'll give up a new revenue stream to protect them.

Seems even more egotistical to think that sites like Nexus Mods are that valuable when Bethesda has their own mod hosting service which also serves their largest customer base on consoles.

Bethesda could change their TOS and make it so Nexus Mods was no longer allowed and I think it would have far less impact on them than people here think.  A lot of mod creators already post their mods on Bethesda.net and would continue to do so.  The mods we would lose would be the ones that are less beneficial to Bethesda to begin with.

I can tell you that Skyrim has lived this long because of mods, and beth knows they have much of their continued revenue to thank to modders and mod websites like Nexusmods. They would have to be in serious denial not to acknowledge that, hence the reason they want to have control over the modding ecosystem and monetize it. Nexusmods would have received a cease and desist pretty fast when they introduced the CC platform, if beth didn't value this entity as a money maker for them.

I'm pulling out of this discussion, I have said my piece and seems there will not come anything productive out of it anymore.

[DavidJCobb]

The decision to disallow patches for paid mods runs directly counter to the stated goal of "making modding easy" in the short term, and I and others I've spoken with think that that's intentional. This feels like a deliberate attempt to make paid mods, in specific, less reliable and harder to use in order to undermine them; and if that indeed is the goal, then IMO it's shady not to say so outright. Picky has already said explicitly that the decision is ideological anyway.

Despite the practical and technical problems with Verified Creations --

• The marketplace hosting literal asset flips -- you can find the original asset packs online, and easily verify by eye alone that someone just converted them to NIFs and resold them
• The marketplace being filled with overpriced low-effort content, akin to the "DP splitting" issues we see on Nexus but turned up to eleven
• The marketplace being paradoxically open: Bethesda lets in creators they shouldn't and doesn't hold them to any standard of quality or ethics once they're in, but also doesn't let just anyone sell
• VCs can't depend on or contain separate community assets or unofficial content types, such as frameworks, libraries, and SKSE DLLs, inherently limiting their scope and capability; and they don't get developer support such as new engine features, so they aren't even on equal technical footing with DLCs
• VCs can't require any sort of user-side post-install build process (e.g. DynDOLOD, leveled list patchers, most animation modding, etc.)

-- we're meant to believe that VC is such a powerful competitor to high-quality free mods, and such an imminent threat to the free modding ecosystem, that patches between free and paid mods must be disallowed in order to protect free modding. That's the only way the decision makes sense: the short-term costs must be less than the long-term ones. Given the current problems with VC, I don't believe that to be the case; I don't believe that a handful of good paid mods can shift the value proposition of paid modding enough to deal any significant damage to the free modding ecosystem.

And who pays the short-term costs of the Nexus's decision?

• Patch authors who want free mods to be accessible to users of paid mods that would otherwise be incompatible
• Free mod authors who have the time and money to ensure their own works are compatible
• Paid mod authors who produce content that is high-quality enough, and hopefully priced ethically enough, to merit those sorts of patches
• Paid mod users, whether they be the stereotypical "lowest common denominator," or more emotionally invested community members who want to see good creators compensated for their time and work
• Free mod authors whose works end up being incompatible with paid mods, who risk missing out on downloads and mod usage because people are more likely to stick with their sunk costs

And who doesn't pay the short-term costs of the Nexus's decision?

• Con artists who buy asset packs for ten dollars, hastily convert them to NIFs, and flip them on Bethesda's marketplace
• Opportunists who pump out low-effort content, or who drip-feed items, at $5 a pop
• Bethesda, who puts the word "Verified" on that garbage without assuming any of the accountability that "verification" would imply to an end user: all the profit with none of the responsibility

In the short term, it is almost exclusively people who engage with modding in good faith that are negatively affected by the new policy for patches, while actual troublemakers and malicious actors are completely fine; and we need to believe that despite VC rarely being worth paying for, it is, again, such a threat in the long term that screwing the former over in the short term is acceptable collateral damage. I am not convinced. I've seen plenty of folks cheerleading this ban on patches because they think the Nexus's goal is to defeat greedy corporations encroaching on the modding ecosystem, but I don't think the ban achieves that at all. It does nothing to stop Bethesda from monetizing slop; it does nothing to raise the standards of the audiences that Bethesda is targeting with that slop; and though it creates a new disincentive for authors with any interest in craftsmanship to join VC, it doesn't actually remove any existing incentives to do so.

Banning patches for paid mods is a bad policy decision and it should be reverted in full. There are minor concerns to be had with some aspects of the other changes, but the patch ban is so egregious as to eclipse anything else.

---

As a side note:

Regarding the one unhinged poster with dreadful reading comprehension who keeps belittling everyone else's intelligence: people here have rightly pointed out that they're derailing the thread with a dozen pages of garbage while contributing nothing of value. There's a solution to that: on mobile, open the hamburger menu, tap Account, and go to Ignored Users. You can add that user to the list such that their posts are collapsed out of view by default, so they can snarl and scream into the void without any of you having to be distracted by them. Save your breath and starve the fire of oxygen.

[ZiplockBaggies]

7 minutes ago, DavidJCobb said:

There's a solution to that: on mobile, open the hamburger menu, tap Account, and go to Ignored Users. You can add that user to the list such that their posts are collapsed out of view by default, so they can snarl and scream into the void without any of you having to be distracted by them. Save your breath and starve the fire of oxygen.

 

Been following this thread and wish I knew about this sooner lol. Thank you!

[Nezahuatez]

I think this thread kind of demonstrates why the game industry is as anti-consumer as it is despite the loud cries of disapproval you find everywhere online. When pushing back against these corporate practices costs anything (meaning in "convenience") it is seen as significantly more undesirable. Thus corporate greed, which is far more resistant to criticism, continues to drive the narrative.

[trainwiz]

8 minutes ago, Nezahuatez said:

I think this thread kind of demonstrates why the game industry is as anti-consumer as it is despite the loud cries of disapproval you find everywhere online. When pushing back against these corporate practices costs anything (meaning in "convenience") it is seen as significantly more undesirable. Thus corporate greed, which is far more resistant to criticism, continues to drive the narrative.

This is a pushback against corporate greed? The policy change for paid content that makes explicit exceptions for the massive corporation but not for the works that pays the independent artist?

[mystraven777]

My two cents as primarily a user: 'No dependencies on paid content' promotes a healthy free and open ecosystem that will not devolve into a polluted jungle of paid dependencies on Nexus. This is directly in line with the site's mission statements: 'making modding easier' on Nexus and creating an 'easy, accessible and positive modding community' on Nexus. Strongly discouraging entanglement with paid content ensures that, prioritizing Nexus users and our long standing free modding community, paywalls are kept off site, out of sight, out of mind. We can rely on a cohesive, end-to-end free-to-access platform without the frustration of ever dealing with "paywalled" functionality.

Not to mention that paid content isn't hosted on Nexus and doesn't profit Nexus; paid content is the competition. Since Nexus does not host paid mods, it owes no support, gateway or advertising for paid content.

Finally, while bugfixes and patches seem like a reasonable exception to allow, any exception makes moderation at scale more complex and arbitrary. Whereas a blanket ban on paid dependencies is much easier to communicate to modders and users without ambiguity, and much more expedient to moderate at scale.

I'm glad such a core platform as Nexus is taking a strong uncompromising stance to uphold the accessibility that has long defined modding, especially Bethesda games modding. Our hobby deserves a dominant platform where participants are not being pressured into monetizing their creations, for once.

[Justascarypuppet]

1 minute ago, mystraven777 said:

I'm glad such a core platform as Nexus is taking a strong uncompromising stance to uphold the accessibility that has long defined modding, especially Bethesda games modding. Our hobby deserves a dominant platform where participants are not being pressured into monetizing their creations, for once.

In what way are patches that allow for synergy between VCs and free mods any more of a "pressure" to buy monetized creation than the advertisement of such VCs, which is still allowed under this rule?

[mystraven777]

2 minutes ago, Justascarypuppet said:

In what way are patches that allow for synergy between VCs and free mods any more of a "pressure" to buy monetized creation than the advertisement of such VCs, which is still allowed under this rule?

In the ways explained by the three previous paragraphs?

[Chernobylite12]

22 minutes ago, trainwiz said:

This is a pushback against corporate greed? The policy change for paid content that makes explicit exceptions for the massive corporation but not for the works that pays the independent artist?

If you're an ideologue then yes this is pushback - I suspect that most people have got it figured that being a VC gets you a low fraction of what Bethesda is pulling for those mods.

 

To clarify i think that idea of this being anything other that a performative stamping of feet is questionable.  The only people who lose here are users.