Modders deserve to be paid — but Bethesda’s Creation Club isn’t enough

Arguably, no company in modern games has benefited from the work of modders more than Bethesda. My first experience with The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind role-playing game over a decade ago involved installing it, meeting the first few inhabitants of Seyda Need, shaking my head in horror, and then typing “morrowind face mod” into Google. (It worked, and it was great.)

Every Bethesda game since has benefitted tremendously from the work of modders, even to the point where for many players, it’s almost impossible to imagine a game without them. Hundreds of music tracks and enemy rebalancing in Fallout 3; full conversions for Oblivion; gorgeous weather and fan patches making the Bethesda-published New Vegas the classic it should have been; everything Skyrim — from raunchy sex to fishing to making the civil war functional; to the giant packages of settlement building in Fallout 4. Half a million people still play Skyrim every fortnight, and it’s impossible to imagine that long of a tail without people creating new characters, quests, weapons, lands, systems, and terrifying dragon reskins constantly, and for free.