A month ago I wrote an article about the Creation Club, and while I still feel what I said is valid, I have come to look again at the concept and now have a new appreciation. This is especially in light of certain trends involving microtransactions that have become a major issue since then.
Lootboxes have become a major concern among gamers, especially when it came to Battlefront II and how some companies have been making their games dependent on Lootboxes to progress in the game. This pay to win model has attracted a lot of negative attention for predatory business practices, while some claim that microtransactions are here to stay. But do they have to be this form of microtransactions?
Bethesda’s Creation Club thus reentered my mind as an alternative. Creation Club is a form of microtransaction, but it is not a pay to win model. In fact, this is the one kind that I can truly point to and say that it is truly optional. I am not suddenly changing my turn and praising Creation Club however, as there are still a lot of problems that need to be addressed. For one, pricing is still an issue and especially so when compared to Bethesda produced DLC such as Hearthfire. Some offerings in Creation Club cost almost as much, for less than half the content. But this doesn’t need to be the case.
Something we are all forgetting, is that the Creation Club was just introduced this year and is still in its infancy. Instead of bashing it and demanding it go away, we should be making our voices hear about what we want changed. Considering this is Bethesda pursuing paid mods even after the Steam controversy, this should make it clear that Bethesda is determined to pursue this idea. It doesn’t have to be in the form it is though.
I agree that there needs to be a lot of changes to how things work, but compared to Lootboxes, Creation Club is actually more consumer friendly. This sounds crazy but its true. A lot of people have also gone in without considering that because this is an official Bethesda service, things have to go through a different process. This is not like Nexus and other free mods, but if Bethesda keeps revising it and working to improve, then Creation Club could actually present a positive future for microtransactions. We just need to make our voices heard about what we want.
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The above was solely the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect those of Real Otaku Gamer or the other staff.
I bet you were expecting this response but i absolutely disagree with you. Let the creation club die. Please and thankyou.
As strange it might seem, i’m normally interested when someone defends a unpopular position, and the same is true for this; however i found the defense quite lacking and best described as shrugging your shoulders and saying “It’s not as bad as loot boxes. Just criticizes it so it gets better.”
Just 5 things to criticizes it for.
1) Causing a headache for noncreation club modders. With Fallout 4, you have to edit ini files to add nexus mods. This process kept changing as Fallout 4 was getting updated, making it harder to mod then it was to install SKSE on skyrim.
2)Form list edits are in the communities opinion, way to low for anything meaningful to come from Creation Club. (Bethy is claiming their streamlining esm[i think] to allow viable overhauls.)
3) Paid creation club mods will not work with normal mods. Say good bye to all the good stuff that uses Script extender if you want to play with your paid for content.
4) The payment scheme. Anyone with half a brain would know, the community will not agree to the mod creators getting paid a flat fee, just so Bethy can pocket nearly all of the money. This act alone basically destroys the practicality for teams and the benefit they’d provide in terms of quality and size.
5) How badly it was planned out. It is obvious this system is jerry rigged together with how the all 3 original platforms were downloading all the assets to their paid mods. Then the constant updates that happen whenever they need to add a paid mod(Not much a problem if you don’t use the script extender). This also gives people a reason to uninstall the product to preserve hardrive space. This is obvious related to platform restrictions with the console, but has been dialed back with the PC version no longer required to download their paid mods assets.
At the end of the day, what value has the creation club added to the market to justify it’s existences? If it’s got none yet, and just needs to be criticized then fixed, i vote we just skip all that by killing it and move back to using the steam workshop. While i rarely used it myself, it’s much more convenient and just works.
I am glad to see your response. I agree the system as is, does not work but I do feel it can be changed. My main concern is that if this fails, and with microtrasnactions being a big deal now, something worse may come