The spirit was that if really liked something you could donate to support the author to make to more of what you liked, it was choice, and it was supposed to be fun. Now it's a business where you can't even try before you buy (well, that's exactly true for now, but unless there is an enormous world-altering backlash from this I don't really see a future for free mods).

I fail to see how the spirit isn't entirely dead.

The whole paid mode system is definitely going to need a policing system. Maybe it should be run like Greenlight, where you need to pay some sort of upfront fee to put price tags on your mods?

I'm laughing at the fit Bethesda threw when people tried to get money for modding before but now a big company can take a cut.

A couple points from the announce page.

No one is forcing modders to charge anything. If someone wants to do it just for "the spirit," they are more than welcome to.

The option to make money off your art hasn't killed the spirit behind drawing or writing or making music; it's not going to kill the spirit behind making mods.

We still have the http://www.loverslab.com/ and the Lover's Lab.

Don't click the second link.

edit: More like, don't link to advlt mods

Maybe I'm just a pessimist, but the future I see here is one where Joe Bloggs makes a small house mod, sees that someone else is charging for a house mod that offers half the content his mod offers, and then figures he might as well stick a price tag on his work too. And so on, and on, and on.

Are people going to make a time investment then release something for free when could just as easily make some money from doing so? I'm not so sure.

If they give you the tools to monetize your mods, eventually everyone will find Steamworks a more attractive option and eventually Nexus (and others) will be an unpopular platform. It won't happen immediately, it will be a slow transition. Imagine if Steamworks fixes fake ESM limitation; there would be no reason to NOT take advantage of monetization by then. Don't tell me it won't attract people with $$$ in mind.

My mods will always be free. However, I support the idea of paying a reasonable price for brand new content like some of the custom models/meshes folks make (and put many hours into).

Joe Bloggs will probably do that. But no one will pay for Joe Bloggs' half-assed house mod when they can get approximately fifty thousand house mods for free from the Nexus, or a cheaper, better house mod from elsewhere on the Workshop. Joe will then either make his mod free to get people to actually play it, or he'll abandon it with the pricetag intact and we'll really have lost nothing.

The only recompense should be happy users.

Edit: the only recompense is happy users.

Who said it was half-assed? It may very well be the greatest housing mod ever to exist. The point is, either way it goes in the end the user loses out, which is the biggest problem for me. This move stifles the open nature of the community.

I think this move is a terrible, terrible idea.

I'm not a fan of this. I've been using mods since the old days of Escape Velocity plugins on Macintosh and never considered that mods should be payed for. Making and publishing a mod has always seemed to be a more or less selfless act where you made it because you found it fun and wanted to share it with others or to learn how to script/program or whatever other computer skills. Now it may happen that people will abuse the system and sell anything just to make a buck. A retexture for $1.00, oh boy. We already have enough worthless DLC and microtransactions in games, this doesn't seems like it will help. I can understand where a mod maker spends a lot of time making a really good mods and wants to be compensated. But a donation system probably would have been better. Anyways thats my 2 cents.

I can imagine this creating a kind of resentment, too...

There was a discussion back in the days of Oblivion about certain mods, and this attitude of them being 'the best ever', and how 'no one could ever make anything like them again'... I can see a similar issue arising, where someone makes an amazing mod, but another Mod is more popular/well-known, and even though the newer Mod is just as good/or better, it doesn't get a look-in, leading to the author becoming resentful. That could damage community spirit, and maybe even put-off new talent. I've seen similar-ish things in different contexts, so maybe I'm just being pessimistic and the Modding Community isn't like the real-life groups I've seen crumble over such things, but... Yeah, I'm a pessimist, so...

What does "the greatest ... mod ever to exist" mean anyway?

Oh and for those who're so optimistic with their "oh don't worry Nexus won't allow monetization for mods"... remember when Notch said he won't sellout, and stay indie forever... then last year he sold Minecraft to Microsoft and became $2 billion richer overnight? Yeah.

this is just another way to dollar and dime the players, and make money off the mod makers work, plain and simple, has nothing to do with supporting mod authors, a blind person can see it

bet my right buttock that steam gets most of the money from the mod, with some kind of kick back to bethsada

what makes me angry about this case in particular,is that besides the pretty graphics the vanilla game mechanics of skyrim are well for better words broken, the armor cap, crits and bleeding do not scale, most of the perks are pointless, or overpowered,ect,ect

and the modders seem to be the only ones the last few years interested in fixing them, heck before i gave up on skyrim i ran over 40 mods just to make it playable for me

when i first started playing skyrim, it was a constant facepalm situation of what were developers thinking with this?

if you think i will pay 60+ bucks for a half made and thought out game, then more $$ for mods to fix it then no I will not

but i am sure there are enough dingleberrys out there in internet world to make this worthwhile for steam and beth

sad though is it not

I agree with this. The market will support unique and interesting mods, and the average one will not sell well IMHO.

I'm not sure what to think about it. It does seem to be the right thing to do, especially when it comes to modders who really put time and effort in their creations, but at the same time... I don't know.

Fine, let's say that Joe makes a really great house mod and charges $10. Personally, I wouldn't pay $10 for a house mod, even if it was a great one. I'd rather get a pretty good one for free, and I suspect that so will most people. Joe sees that no one is buying his great mod that he spent tons of time on, and drops the price or makes it free. The market regulates.

Even if Nexus allows for it, no one will ever require it. And if they suddenly do? You can always host your mod on Dropbox, GoogleDrive, or any number of other upload sites.

will modders start to pull their creations from Nexus to sell them exclusively on Steam?

this move has real BAD potential implications for the modding comunity and for all the people enjoying Skyrim.

an endless stream of free mods is what kept Skyrim going for all these years. True, neither Bethesda nor Valve so far gained anything from Mods but how many copies of Skyrim were sold in all these yers because of mods? just how much Valve and Bethesda are gaining from monetization of mods?