But it seems it's come back with a vengeance with the Creation Club, which seems a determined effort to combine the infamy of Horse Armor with that of the paid mods fiasco of a couple of years back.
And the result of this economic alchemy seems a Games-as-a-Service concept with the twist of partially outsourced content production. A nice turn!
The positive image of this profit optimizing instrument (in truth a creative cooperation between Bethesda, external partners and the best and most honourable community modders to just make the players' favourite worlds of Fallout and Skyrim a little bit bigger, just placing some cherries on top of our favourite cream cake!) seems yet a bit blear-eyed looking from the recent past (and most reactions were appropriate, I'd say), despite of their attempt to ironize their horse armor and adding it (or content of this kind)
nevertheless (it was a Power Armor, named as 'Horse Armor' in the E3 Trailer). Pretty bold. The bitter taste will hopefully remain.
I must admit, I'm concerned this will grind out in the process, if Bethesda installs some 'practical' barriers for unpaid modders and/or integrates players so deep into their network (which all big companies have been doing for a while) that free mods will stop existing (i. e. become invisible) or will seem so uncomfortable to get compared to official creation club content (searching & finding, compatibility, installation) or will just seem less professional and shiny than promoted creation club content that it will finally become the first address for the mass of players (the nest is well-feathered). And even if this pilot project won't have an effect on the players' behaviour, perception and evaluation and if there were stable, kind of 'natural' distinct groups of players (those who buy new content and those who use free mods) and even if they won't lower the criterias for official partner-shipped content (to get the better version of their previously attempted paid Steam Workshop) and won't affect the altruistic, non-monetary culture of modding by introducing monetary interest, I'd rather prefer them to focus on improving their games (in several departments) instead of trying to generate more money with low-effort goodies (which will probably be the majority of new content) along with a few, more extensive prestige projects to justify the whole system. That's indeed the problem I'd have with bigger DLCs as part of the Creation Club: they would tend to increase the acceptance of strategies that are rather against than for the players (overprized content).
We'll see. I just hope that Bethesda won't try to bait you with shoe-DLCs. Could you resist?
It's good that Larian stays away from this business and is more likely to create an Enhanced Edition or Addon than to serve canned cherries after the cake is half-eaten already.
