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Do You Think the Delayed Creation Kit Will Have a Long Term Negative Effect on Modding?


mmaniacBG

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While modding is beneficial to both parties, and it does drastically extend the life of a game, which in turn likely helps move a little extra DLC, and maybe even a few more copies of the game... the majority of mod users will already have owned the game, and thus mods wont really bring in money for them imo. Which is why they considered paid modding, its a win win for them. They can continue to be very supportive of modding, and make their games very mod friendly and even create tools for it, while still gaining profits from the mods.

 

If they made as much money from mod support as you seem to imply, they wouldn't have bothered even trying paid mods, imo. The reality is mod support cost them money, which is why I am not 100% against paid mods if they implemented it fairly, smoothly, and minimally.

 

Look at the normal product life cycle of a game around Skyrim's time, then look at Skyrim's product life cycle. Look at the number of units sold after it had passed the normal life cycle. It is enormous. Yes modders already own the game (duh!), but many purchased the game precisely because it was moddable, and they kept playing and then purchased additional dlc because mods kept them interested in the game. None of this even attempts to capture the extraordinary level of free advertising gained through a modding community the size of Skyrim's. There are likely tens of thousands of people who would've never heard of or considered Skyrim if that hadn't come across via a mod site like Nexus.

 

They tried paid modding because they saw the potential of significant revenue stream without little to no expense of internal resources. They'd be stupid not to try and take advantage of that.

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While modding is beneficial to both parties, and it does drastically extend the life of a game, which in turn likely helps move a little extra DLC, and maybe even a few more copies of the game... the majority of mod users will already have owned the game, and thus mods wont really bring in money for them imo. Which is why they considered paid modding, its a win win for them. They can continue to be very supportive of modding, and make their games very mod friendly and even create tools for it, while still gaining profits from the mods.

 

If they made as much money from mod support as you seem to imply, they wouldn't have bothered even trying paid mods, imo. The reality is mod support cost them money, which is why I am not 100% against paid mods if they implemented it fairly, smoothly, and minimally.

 

Look at the normal product life cycle of a game around Skyrim's time, then look at Skyrim's product life cycle. Look at the number of units sold after it had passed the normal life cycle. It is enormous. Yes modders already own the game (duh!), but many purchased the game precisely because it was moddable, and they kept playing and then purchased additional dlc because mods kept them interested in the game. None of this even attempts to capture the extraordinary level of free advertising gained through a modding community the size of Skyrim's. There are likely tens of thousands of people who would've never heard of or considered Skyrim if that hadn't come across via a mod site like Nexus.

 

They tried paid modding because they saw the potential of significant revenue stream without little to no expense of internal resources. They'd be stupid not to try and take advantage of that.

 

 

Well, the paid mods came rather late in Skyrim's lifespan and it came on steam, and I wouldn't trust steam on quality control when it comes to mods.

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Its a little off topic, but while talking about features included / removed by bethesda, and DLC... if you go through and extract the original vanilla meshes like I did, there is actually a folder called "create a bot", containing a lot of pieces for the framework of automatron. And of course, the DLC robot parts are contained in a create a bot folder, too.

 

So, I have no doubt in my mind that automatron was originally intended w/ the vanilla game. The big question is, did they start to implement it and simply ran out of time, and left the resources in to make it easy to pick up where they left off for a DLC? Or did they intentionally pull the feature to make an extra $10 per DLC download.

 

I like to believe, perhaps naively, that it was the former rather than the latter, because I quite like Bethesda. But it its still an interesting thought regardless.

 

If it's any consolation, Bethesda runs two weeks during their production where their team works on whatever fun ideas they have. One directly in the middle, one at the end. Their various staff basically make a whole bunch of silly mods and whatever features are the most fun they'll schedule to include in their DLCs. As a result some of the work that will be used for DLCs is done before the game ships, however it's sloppily implemented and something they could never include without proper testing cycles and integration into their game code.

 

I think Automatron content was firmly in this category. Before judging Bethesda too harshly, just remember that Survival Mode (which is brand new content made post-game) is being released for free. So clearly they're not just unethically trying to milk every drop of content for as much money as possible.

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Then why go through the trouble to bring mods to consoles?

 

In my mind, there's two reasons for this.

 

1) It makes them look advanced and technologically progressive. They're basically the first company to do this which will look great to future investors, get them free publicity for their games in media and win them some support from their end-user fanbase.

 

2) Bethesda have been all about modding for a while, lots of their games have a great deal of modder support and it's worked well for them in the past. The future of game sales is (unfortunately) in consoles, so Bethesda is thinking ahead and trying to combine their old modding support attitude with the new market demographics.

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Then why go through the trouble to bring mods to consoles?

 

In my mind, there's two reasons for this.

 

1) It makes them look advanced and technologically progressive. They're basically the first company to do this which will look great to future investors, get them free publicity for their games in media and win them some support from their end-user fanbase.

 

2) Bethesda have been all about modding for a while, lots of their games have a great deal of modder support and it's worked well for them in the past. The future of game sales is (unfortunately) in consoles, so Bethesda is thinking ahead and trying to combine their old modding support attitude with the new market demographics.

 

The future is not in consoles... Consoles are on the verge of declining rapidly with the new short life span upgrade PS4 is pushing out.

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The future is not in consoles... Consoles are on the verge of declining rapidly with the new short life span upgrade PS4 is pushing out.

 

I certainly hope that you're right since I use a PC myself. However looking at what sales figures are available and judging from what people I know in the industry are saying, I can't help but get the impression that the console dollar is a bigger and bigger target for developers. However this is just speculation, I could easily turn out to be wrong and I hope that I am.

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Then why go through the trouble to bring mods to consoles?

 

In my mind, there's two reasons for this.

 

1) It makes them look advanced and technologically progressive. They're basically the first company to do this which will look great to future investors, get them free publicity for their games in media and win them some support from their end-user fanbase.

 

2) Bethesda have been all about modding for a while, lots of their games have a great deal of modder support and it's worked well for them in the past. The future of game sales is (unfortunately) in consoles, so Bethesda is thinking ahead and trying to combine their old modding support attitude with the new market demographics.

 

The future is not in consoles... Consoles are on the verge of declining rapidly with the new short life span upgrade PS4 is pushing out.

 

 

Well, I doubt they are declining due to the lifespan, the lifespan is most likely intentional. Most people will buy it for the sake of being new, like some people buy every new version of the iPhone.

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Then why go through the trouble to bring mods to consoles?

 

In my mind, there's two reasons for this.

 

1) It makes them look advanced and technologically progressive. They're basically the first company to do this which will look great to future investors, get them free publicity for their games in media and win them some support from their end-user fanbase.

 

2) Bethesda have been all about modding for a while, lots of their games have a great deal of modder support and it's worked well for them in the past. The future of game sales is (unfortunately) in consoles, so Bethesda is thinking ahead and trying to combine their old modding support attitude with the new market demographics.

 

The future is not in consoles... Consoles are on the verge of declining rapidly with the new short life span upgrade PS4 is pushing out.

 

You are right but unfortunately this is terrible news for PC gamers. The gaming platform that is replacing platformers is not the PC, it is the mobile device like phones and tablets... -_-

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Then why go through the trouble to bring mods to consoles?

In my mind, there's two reasons for this.

 

1) It makes them look advanced and technologically progressive. They're basically the first company to do this which will look great to future investors, get them free publicity for their games in media and win them some support from their end-user fanbase.

 

2) Bethesda have been all about modding for a while, lots of their games have a great deal of modder support and it's worked well for them in the past. The future of game sales is (unfortunately) in consoles, so Bethesda is thinking ahead and trying to combine their old modding support attitude with the new market demographics.

Those are just ancillary reasons/benefits. They are doing because they know, healthy modding community around a game contributes to a significant increase in sales for that product. Bethesda representatives themselves attributed the runaway success of Skyrim to "thats were mods are."

 

Its a great thing for them and their customers. Its smart of them to capitalize on it, but their primary reason is to make more money, not as a goodwill gesture to their fans. Making more money for the company is a very good thing for everyone involved, shareholders, employees, and customers alike.

 

There's no reason to be disingenuous about it or come up with some high on a horse reasoning.

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Those are just ancillary reasons/benefits. They are doing because they know, healthy modding community around a game contributes to a significant increase in sales for that product. Bethesda representatives themselves attributed the runaway success of Skyrim to "thats were mods are."

 

Its a great thing for them and their customers. Its smart of them to capitalize on it, but their primary reason is to make more money, not as a goodwill gesture to their fans. Making more money for the company is a very good thing for everyone involved, shareholders, employees, and customers alike.

 

There's no reason to be disingenuous about it or come up with some high on a horse reasoning.

 

Isn't that exactly what I said?

Edited by PoliteRaider
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