So I'm gonna discuss this from the perspective of a modder, not just a player. Now don't get me wrong, I'm no bigshot - but at this point in time and life cycle of FO4, I think I'm decent pulling 50k downloads in the last 3 months (bearing in mind the majority of players have moved on by now.) Anyway - here's the deal. Creation Club is an insult to everybody. It's an insult to players and consumers, it's an insult to modders and it's an insult to Bethesda themselves. Players: It's an insult to you because Bethesda is undermining your intelligence and self control over your wallet by offering up overpriced goods - I'll talk more on pricing below. Especially for console players - due to the lack of external assets, Bethesda is banking on the fact that you cannot get skins any other way - that's why 90% of the current content is skins, aside from the backpack. Everything else there is simple retextures and rearranging vanilla assets. Modders: It's an insult to us because it encroaches on our niche in a way we never asked for. Firstly - let's start off at how CC was marketed - if you go back to the E3 reveal of it, they implied they were working with modders to pull this off. As it turns out, they haven't even replied to applications from some of the literally most prominent modders out there and there is little to no evidence of any being contacted or accepted. Even worse, this entire round of CC content was purely Bethesda made - basically has nothing in the world to with mods or modders. These are just Bethesda made micro-DLCs. They want you to believe we modders are in on it, because they know that as a player you'll feel a greater sense of obligation to pay us. What alot of people who don't mod see it as is tedious work that takes hours of our lives away, and thus we should be paid - but in a modder's mind that is the furthest thing from reality. Basically alot of non-modders feel guilty not paying us - and I'm telling you we want you to NOT pay us. Bethesda has built a guise that you're supporting modders - that's a falsehood. We don't want to be paid - if we wanted to paid, we would fill out applications to Bethesda for an actual job. A modder's goal, generally, is to improve the experience of something they already paid for - both for themselves and other players. I don't know of many (or in fact ANY) modders who even have a single penny in their mind when they cook up mods. Sure they're out there - but they are the VAST minority. This problem is far greater though - even if Bethesda didn't plainly lie - and in fact modders did work on content, it still wouldn't be any better - all that would mean is that a multi-million dollar company has decided to exploit their biggest and arguably most dedicated fans. What alot of people don't think of is the fact that without mods, the FO4 playerbase would probably have died down to 1/10 what it is now, at this stage in time. The game has been out for 2 years, it's no longer fresh and relevant, most players have moved on and finished it - and unless you REALLY like the game, the replay value is basically gone once you try the different faction endings... hell if not for mods, even I would't touch the game anymore, my own mod is the only reason I still play. It's us modders who keep Bethesda games on life support well past their time. And that's where the problem is - we fix and improve Bethesda's games, give them a viable playerbase for years longer than the games should have - all this while they ignore glaring issues and never patch them, leaving us to do it - and now they expect to profit from us doing it? Not cool. All of this is just plain insulting to Bethesda themselves, for them to sink this low. Their reputation, already in the drain from the amount of time they re-release games, is now suffering more. I mean really, how desperate do you have to be to try and do this a SECOND time, after it failed the first go, it doesn't matter how you brand or market it, nobody wants this crap except the people who really just don't know better. Bethesda like the idiot who sticks his hand on the stove burner and doesn't let go, then complains he got burned. Seriously, they have Idiot Savant perk active 100% of the time, too bad those XP bonuses haven't equated to any sort of improvement on their part. Quite frankly CC is also a ripoff to everybody involved. The player is paying 1 cent per CC currency, not too bad right - well let's look at a cheap item, a pipboy skin. I can make this in 1 minute flat and I'm not even joking. Bethesda now charged you 50 cents for it, for literally a picture wrapped around a 3d mesh. So I mean, if you want to pay 50 cents for a picture that does absolutely nothing, sure. But what about the profiter? Let's pretend for a second those skins were made by a modder (they weren't) but let's pretend. What do you think Bethesda would pay them, probably a meager 1-2 cents a sale, if they're lucky, and that's probably with exclusion to the free 100 currency you get from Beth. Basically they're being nickled and dimed for their own work - the only one reaping any sort of profit at the end of the scheme is Bethesda. There's also the huge issue that 100% of the content they released on CC already exists - made by modders, distributed for free - AND is better quality than Bethesda's CC garbage. To a none modder, this won't mean much - but these new CC files are .esl, meaning they can only store a limited amount of data - the chance of seeing any actual quest mods or interesting content is rather low... And my final - final point - despite being limited in size, CC content is going to add up - the reality is CC is going to be hell on all our hard drives if it continues to develop. Unbeknownst to console players especially, but on PC you can see it plain as a day - the game actually downloads all the things in the store - even if you can't use it, the Chinese Armor is saved on your console. You just pay for the unlock. The problem here is that your machine is now being bloated with crap and archives you can't even access or use. Even more hilarious is that all those archives have already been ripped by PC modders, and then redistributed for free. Basically the system is also completely insecure. Your work isn't safe submitted to them. All I can say is I'll continue to provide my mods for free, and I pray for CC's quick and inevitable death. I don't feel like being a AAA developer's patch mule or commission b*tch.

This is Bethesda turning into Activision, soon it their games will be full of squeakers just like Activision's.

They should've offered a treasure trove of cool shit at launch.

I don't like the idea of paid mods. While it'd be nice for those content creators to receive compensation for their work, it just seems like a shitty way for developers to further capitalize on their communities. Besides, I really don't think that's why people make mods.

I think the concept is good, it is there, but the problem is that Bethesda wants to act as a medium so they can take their money too. Bethesda doesn't allow authors to make money off their mods, and the only way they can is for Bethesda to sanction them with things like the CC.