Bethesda's Creation Club policy change opens door for monetization of currently free mods

A recent change in Bethesda's Creation Club, their official paid mods platform, might bring big changes to the modding landscape of several games. Creation Club relaunched for Skyrim (and also Starfield) last year as an in-game mods storefront. In its rebirth, several restrictions present in the original 2017 version of Creation Club Content were removed.

This includes the removal of a clause that essentially lets mod authors repurpose their old mods into brand-new paid mods on Bethesda's in-house marketplace.

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Why the Creation Club policy switch-up might be bad for the Bethesda modding ecosystem

The modding scenes in Bethesda games are huge, especially with Skyrim and Fallout. Earlier this year, the player surge of Fallout from the Amazon TV show hype crashed Nexusmods servers over a busy weekend. By and large, this giant ecosystem is populated with free mods and contributions from thousands of individual talents.

The Creation Club community is getting too big to ignore now

Historically, Bethesda's attempts at shoehorning paid mods services have not made a dent in the larger Bethesda modding landscape in the last ten years. Up till recently, there were no paid mods that did not have a free alternative of equivalent or better quality.

However, the current iteration of Creation Club has spawned a few exceptions to this norm. Bards College Expansion, released in August 2024, is a $10 Skyrim DLC packaged as "Content" (a paid mod). It is a milestone release for a few reasons: it is high enough quality to justify the price tag, its reception has been overwhelmingly positive for a paid mod, and it's from a team called Kinggath Creations that plans to make more.

At this point, it's safe to say that the current Creation Club is not a layabout that many remember from 2017. This refurbished version has the potential to change how we perceive modding in Skyrim, Fallout, and Starfield. Let us cut to the chase: what exactly changed?

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The allowance that might cost modders (in more ways than one)

Compared to the original 2017 Creation Club, the current Creation system for Starfield and Skyrim allows for a lot more creative liberty. Originally, for example, mod authors could not even implement voice-acted NPCs into their mods. While most of them are for the better, the bylaws snuck in one change that might be a double-edged sword.

The laizes-faire ecosystem this will eventually create may be a double-edged sword (Image via Bethesda.net Creation page)

If you become a member of the Verified Creator Program, there are only a handful of restrictions to limit what you can and cannot sell. Earlier, a mod had to be 'original' for it to qualify as a product on this storefront. The current policies say the following:

"Your previously released free content may be re-purposed for Creations released through the Verified Creator Program."

To give credit to their intentions, Bethesda does mention these repurposed paid mods should "be upgraded or otherwise distinct from the original", and requests that they "remain available for free in its original form for the community" when the paid version does go up. However, these are recommendations and not requirements.

The current way of remuneration for creators on the Creation Club program is royalty-based, and it's far more profitable than the Nexus Donation Points system. It is therefore conceivable for an author to make their previously free mod exclusive to the Creation Club funnel.

The ethics of this practice is up for debate, as modding does take up time and effort. Meanwhile, the big problem it poses right now is for the larger ecosystems of modlists. Many players benefit from curated modlist systems available for these games, including Nexus' own Collections system, and the third-party Wabbajack auto-installer program.

With this change, if even a minority of mods start getting pulled off Nexus, this might make a modlist unable to complete for users trying to download fresh copies and cause various logistical problems for modlist creators.

A freeform modding scene will always be there for Bethesda games, given how large the communities have become over the years. However, the current moves by Bethesda certainly ring an alarm for it, if not the start of a death knell.