Lower right: Armor glitches through UI, among other issues).Īs it turns out, the time window to develop the paid mods was offensively short. Lower left: Pre-baked lighting on poorly-textured swords from DOTA2. (Above, center: Poor quality assurance on a door. How, then, could a community with a 3-year history of quality mod releases suddenly exhibit such impropriety? Pick Two: Cheap, Fast, Good. Unfortunately, the mods that shipped via Steam Workshop were far from quality in fact, most of them were outright worse than free alternatives available on the workshop itself or on the Nexus. These initial mods were developed by veteran modders approached by Valve and Bethesda, the pair seeking an initial offering worthy of user investment.

The very first and most evident problem with the paid mods system was the quality of the products selected as the poster-children.

Valve’s not the only culprit in this spiral of PR insanity and community backlash. With the recent explosion of free-to-play titles with monetized User Generated Content, like Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, and – to some extent – CS:GO, it’s no wonder Valve decided to give Skyrim a shot of the same business model.Īlas, as we now know, that project was a catastrophic failure. The list is long, but some of the best-known PC games are rooted in this background: Counter-Strike was a Half-Life mod, Team Fortress Classic was a Quake mod remade in the GoldSrc Engine (itself a Quake engine mod) then in Source, Dota was a Warcraft 3 map, Killing Floor was an Unreal Tournament mutator, and the list goes on. It was on GoldSrc that we saw the first cases of free community mods transcending their amateur roots and evolving into full-fledged, professional games. The GoldSrc engine was not the first to provide modding capabilities, but it stands as a significant milestone in the existence of this intensive and appreciated gaming niche. It’s easy to see where Valve is coming from with the original concept: The company solely exists with thanks to mods. We have rehosted just a few of the dozens of images. You can check them out on imgur here and here. When the issue was still hot and the outcome unclear, I made two albums regarding the quality of these mods. The concept was received with brutally negative feedback from the community and, less than a week after the release of the system, Valve and Bethesda decided to shut it all down.

On April 25, Valve revealed to the public a collaborative effort with Bethesda and a handful of selected modders, aiming to bring monetized mods for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to the Steam Workshop.

Nexus mods vs bethesda mods