Skyrim Enhances Its Paid Mods Feature, Coming Soon To Starfield?

Skyrim was released in 2011 and now at the end of 2023, Bethesda has updated its paid mods feature in the game. This comes with the latest 12 GB update of Skyrim Special Edition through Creations where modders can not only put up their own creations for players, but also apply to the Bethesda Game Studios Verified Creator Program to set prices for their Creations. By becoming a Verified Creator, you can earn royalty for the mods sold within Skyrim Special Edition.

Community-made content has ensured that Skyrim gets the longevity it has right now, and through paid mods, Bethesda hopes they can provide fans with more ways to play.

Creations rolled out on December 5 for Skyrim Special Edition and Skyrim Anniversary Edition for PC via Microsoft Store, Steam, and Epic Games Store, as well as Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Xbox One X|S, PS4 and PS5.

Once you update the game, you will see that the Mods and Creation Club menus have been combined into a unified Creations menu. Plus, a Resource Pack is added to the game to assist Creators.

Check it out in this video by JuiceHead:

Note that this update has broken SKSE mods, so those who use them need to check with the modders’ pages to see when and how the creations can be fixed to avoid conflict with the updated version of the game. Here are the full patch notes for Skyrim’s update.

Community Reactions

Previous Skyrim Paid Mods Controversy

This isn’t the first time for paid mods in Skyrim. Back in 2015, this feature was added to Skyrim after Valve began supporting them. However, due to overwhelmingly negative feedback, it was taken off. The previous controversy was because Valve let devs sell game mods at a price in the Steam Workshop, whereas users said that mods should remain free.

Steam Removes Paid Mods in 2015

After the backlash, Valve shared a blog post on April 28, 2015 with this statement:

“We’re going to remove the payment feature from the Skyrim workshop. For anyone who spent money on a mod, we’ll be refunding you the complete amount. We talked to the team at Bethesda and they agree.

We’ve done this because it’s clear we didn’t understand exactly what we were doing. We’ve been shipping many features over the years aimed at allowing community creators to receive a share of the rewards, and in the past, they’ve been received well. It’s obvious now that this case is different.

To help you understand why we thought this was a good idea, our main goals were to allow mod makers the opportunity to work on their mods full time if they wanted to, and to encourage developers to provide better support to their mod communities. We thought this would result in better mods for everyone, both free & paid. We wanted more great mods becoming great products, like Dota, Counter-strike, DayZ, and Killing Floor, and we wanted that to happen organically for any mod maker who wanted to take a shot at it.

But we underestimated the differences between our previously successful revenue sharing models, and the addition of paid mods to Skyrim’s workshop. We understand our own game’s communities pretty well, but stepping into an established, years old modding community in Skyrim was probably not the right place to start iterating. We think this made us miss the mark pretty badly, even though we believe there’s a useful feature somewhere here.

Now that you’ve backed a dump truck of feedback onto our inboxes, we’ll be chewing through that, but if you have any further thoughts let us know.”

Starfield to get paid mods?

Since this update, it has got people wondering if this will come to Starfield soon. They have already brought it to Fallout 4 previously and the creation club has been in Skyrim for a while too.

Community response on Reddit has been mixed. User Antarioo says that “paid mods create a support problem. Mod creators can no longer tell users to f**k off and touch grass when it inevitably breaks when there’s an update or when they want to stop supporting a mod. Is Bethesda going to pick up the support? Ofc not.”

Another user squidparkour has some interesting observations on the FAQs, check them out below.

CEO Phil Spencer and Todd Howard believe that Starfield “will have a Skyrim-like long lifespan” and that it will be supported for a long time after launch. This is in line with the rumors and speculations that paid mods may be added to Starfield soon.

Source: Nexusmods

Starfield mods are currently available via Nexus mods where mods like StarUI inventory, Script Extender, Upscaler, Achievement Enabler and Performance Optimizers have more than 500k downloads.

The devs are hard at work to get more people engaged in Starfield, with updates including a fan-demanded feature and also by replying to negative Steam reviews with their perspectives on how players can stay hooked to the game for longer.