PC Gamer's opinion about Bethesda's Creation Club:

It's great that Bethesda wants to pay modders, but Creation Club mods should still be free

Bethesda doesn't need to charge for mods—they've been passively profiting from them for years.

Here we go again! Bethesda taking another stab at paid mods—despite saying that Creation Club isn't paid mods. It is, though. There will be new mods you'll have to pay for to use. But there's also been more thought put into Creation Club than the dreadful and half-baked Steam paid mod system from back in 2015. While the last attempt generated anger over the thought of paying for mods and fear that such a system will destroy the modding community, Creation Club itself isn't anything to be too worried about. In fact, with one small change, it could be a great system.

Creation Club, which was announced during E3, is an improvement over the 2015 attempt on Steam in almost every respect. Bethesda is hiring modders to create new content for Fallout 4 and Skyrim Special Edition, and charging players to use it. It won't monetize any existing mods—everything in the Club will be something new, Bethesda says. Been using free mods? You can keep using them, and if Bethesda keeps its word, you won't see a monetized version of an existing mod with new features show up for sale.

Creation Club is also a curated system, unlike the Wild West of Steam's disastrous attempt, which was a chaotic come-one come-all invitation that led to people uploading and attempting to sell previously free mods, or mods that weren't theirs, or mods that used code or assets from other mods without permission. Bethesda says it will be vetting each mod through an application and approval process, which will (we hope) mean no one can just sneak in with something they didn't entirely make themselves.

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Thanks henriquejr!