Skyrim Workshop Now Supports Paid Mods Options

[Acadian]

Gstaff, of Bethesda, announced on the Bethesda forum that Skyrim Workshop Now Supports Paid Mods. Here's the thread.

To say the reaction there has been underwhelming is a massive understatement. If I spend more than a moment pondering unintended consequences and pitfalls, I’m afraid I must agree with the ominous implications this has for the future of modding. A ton of posts on that thread already beat up the subject pretty well.

I confess I prefer as little to do with Steam as possible and have never touched their 'workshop'. I get my mods from Nexus, but the implications are disturbing - even for private hobby modders. Naturally, Steam is taking a big cut of all proceeds. Does this mean that for future games, the CK/CS will only be made available to 'for profit' Steam workshoppers? This seems to validate the concerns many of us have about Steam and their ability to control what you thought you paid for.

[SubRosa]

My only real beef against Steam is the DRM they force upon all of their users. As an online storefront, I have no problem with them. While I lament the good old days of buying a disc in a store, the reality is those days are over. Online distribution is simply the way of gaming now, and always will be. Which is not really a bad thing. I saves the distributor money since they do not have to own a factory to produce dvds, or chop down a thousand trees to make boxes to put them in, and so on. But the DRM - requiring you to start the Steam Client every time you play the game to validate that you own a legal copy of the game - is totally unnecessary.

I have been thinking about what I said about future Geck/Creation Kits forcing you to save your mods onto a Valve or Bethesda server, and I am changing my mind. The reason is simply bandwidth and storage space. It would cost the companies a lot of money.

Instead what they might do is first outlaw all third party mod-organizer programs like OBMM or Wyre Bash. Bethesda loves to brings lawsuits against other companies. They are in court more often than most District Attorneys. It would not matter if they won or lost either. They have the money to simply bankrupt any mod maker in court. But they would win, as it is their game, and their modding software.

So then the only way to activate a mod would be through the game itself. Or more likely, through a Game Setup page on Steam, where you store all of your game settings and your mod load order. Mods uploaded to the Steam Workshop would be given a digital watermark. Then after you buy a mod and download it, when you go to the Game Setup page to put it in your load order, the server would check for that watermark, and refuse to activate it unless it is there. That way people could make all the mods they wanted. But they could only use the ones that came from the Steam Workshop. Including the ones you made yourself. That would give Bethesda and Valve absolute control over every mod, and they would be able to profit from every single instance of a person using them.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Apr 25 2015, 10:47 PM