Nexus Mods updates its stance on paid mods for the first time since Bethesda’s latest attempt at them, says it believes “modding should be a pursuit of passion first and foremost”

Paid mods are always controversial. Just look at Bethesda’s latest attempt at creating a system designed to facilitate such a thing having proven pretty much as polarising as its predecessors, even if things have died down a bit since that bit of Starfield Trackers Alliance mission controversy back in June.

So, in issuing the update to its policy on paid mods that popular modding site Nexus Mods announced yesterday, its team was never going to please everyone. The good news is that, after some modders and players offered critical feedback on certain aspects of the practical rules it outlined to accompany its stance, Nexus’ team certainly hasn’t buried its head in the sand.

“Over the past year, several game developers have introduced varying paid modding schemes, including Bethesda’s Verified Creators (Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starfield) and InZoi’s Creations Marketplace,” Nexus Mods community manager Pickysaurus wrote in a post. “As a result, we’ve received a lot of requests for clarity on our paid modding stance and our paid modding rules from a number of our users. We are now updating our policies to reflect our official stance.

The new policies outlined were as follows:

• “Linking to paid mods: If the uploader has free content on Nexus Mods and would like to link to the place to purchase their paid content, we will allow it subject to the Advertising Limitations.”

• “Lite/Trial/Preview/Demo versions of paid mods: We will not allow free mods to be shared where they represent an inferior version of the mod with features stripped out to promote the purchase of the full version.”

• “Patches for/Dependencies on Paid Mods: We will not allow any patches or addons for user-generated content that requires payment to unlock (this specifically excludes DLCs offered by the developer – including DLCs that bundle items previously sold individually such as Skyrim’s Anniversary Upgrade). Equally, if a mod uploaded to the site requires a paid mod to function, it will not be permitted.”

• “Collections requiring paid mods: Similar to mods, if any collections are not functional without the user purchasing paid mods, they will not be permitted.”

• “Backlinks are required: If a mod author wants to link from their free content on Nexus Mods to their paid content, the paid content must include a link back to their Nexus Mods profile.”

“We firmly believe that modding should be a pursuit of passion first and foremost, with financial compensation being a nice bonus but not the main driver of creating content,” Pickysaurus explained. “Our mission is to ‘Make Modding Easy’ and we strongly believe that paid modding is in direct conflict with that goal. Modding games is already a complicated process and forcing users to navigate a confusing split of free and paid mods to get their setup working does not represent an easy, accessible and positive modding community.

They went on to outline that the issue isn’t back and white, saying that the site believes long-establiahed modders who’ve chosen to monetise through Bethesda’s Verified Creators program “should be allowed to acknowledge their paid work as long as it isn’t to the detriment of the free modding ecosystem and community”.

The policy drew a bit of a mixed reception, with the rule regarding Patches for or dependencies on paid mods specifically being criticised by some prominent modders and community members.

This led Pickysaurus to attempt to provide some clarificication, writing in an update post that the site had spoken with Bethesda to confirm the diffrence between creation club vs verified creator content. “We consider Creation Club content as ‘official content’ in line with Bethesda’s stance and therefore will treat it like DLC,” they wrote. “This also extends to any Creations published by the official Bethesda Game Studios account on their website. Any other Verified Creator content is considered unofficial and this policy therefore applies to it.”

Upon being reached out to by VG247 for comment on the policy and its reception, Pickysaurus pointed us to a fresh post from today, in which they wrote: “We’ve spent the morning catching up on all the comments overnight and have had a meeting internally to discuss them. Another update on this will follow later today or tomorrow.”

Where do you stand on the issue of paying for mods? Let us know below.