Pay for mods. If you’ve ever said those three words to anyone who plays or mods a game, you’ve likely gotten a pretty strong reaction, or at least an acknowledgment that – as many Facebook relationship statuses say – it’s complicated.
With Bethesda’s latest attempt at creating a system designed to facilitate this sort of thing having proven just as polarizing as its predecessor, we recently spoke to Dean ‘Prilladog’ Carter, project manager for the massive free Fallout 4 mod Fallout: London, to get his thoughts on whether mods should be paid or free at this point.
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“I hope they pick something up,” Carter said when I mentioned Bethesda’s Creations in the interview, which also touched on the deleted questline that will appear in a future update, and how John Bercow and Neil Newbon ended up starring in it.
“This is the third time they’ve tried it, but they keep backing off,” the modder continued. “If they had stuck with what they did the first time, it would have been controversial, but by now – the first time was about 10 years ago, when they proposed it – if they had stuck with it, 10 years later, people would have just been like ‘oh’. But no, they’ve done it again, they’ve backed off. This is the third time, and maybe the third time is the charm, but it seems to have been quickly forgotten, and the way they implemented it, which is just my opinion, is weird in itself.
“It’s clear they’re promoting Skyrim but not Fallout, probably because of Fallout 76. It seems like they’re doing it in a clumsy way every time. Like, just pick one, stick with it, and keep going from there. I really hope so, because then the modders themselves will know, this could be how I make a living. At the moment, no one knows. Some people know, but now it seems like a cool kids club, like who lets you in the cool kids club? Because some of our team are part of it and others aren’t, but they all apply with the same resume, which is ‘we worked on Fallout: London or we did this big project’. Some people get selected and others don’t, but their applications are the same. So, who chooses? It’s weird.”
“I think we’re on the brink of pure monetization, and I don’t think that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I think it depends on the content,” Carter added, speaking of the wider situation with game modding. “I think the industry needs to work together to figure out whether modding equals free, or equals paid, and then that needs to become the norm.
“I don’t want companies to just see conversions as a way to make money and not give people anything, because I think that’s a dangerous perspective.”
What do you think of paid mods? Let us know below, and be sure to check out our range of handy guides for companions and quests in Fallout: London.
