How ‘Fallout 4’ Has Helped Bethesda Put Their Plans For Paid Mods On Hold

After fans let Bethesda know that they didn’t like the studio’s idea to support paid mods for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim following the implementation of the monetary system earlier this year, the developer decided to quickly terminate the program. While they would still like to find a way for the modding community to receive compensation in the future, Bethesda’s Pete Hines told Gamespot this week that their plans for paid mods have been put on the back-burner, as work on Fallout 4 has now taken the developer’s full attention.

“Honestly, [we have] bigger fish to fry right now than sorting that out.”

However, Hines revealed that it is likely that Bethesda will eventually revisit their plans for paid mods after they are finished with Fallout 4. He confirmed during the interview that the developer will likely try a different approach to handling paid mods in the future but they are more concerned with creating Fallout 4 as the moment than trying to figure out how to fix what gamers didn’t like about Skyrim‘s paid mods.

“I think our stance on it is we’re going to re-evaluate it going forward. I think that we feel like there is a case to be made that people who spend a lot of time working on mods ought to be able to have a way of monetizing what they’re doing.”

While Bethesda hopes to be able to give content creators the right to earn money, the studio also wants to make sure that the community is also on board with how paid mods are implemented. Since fans didn’t like the system that was implemented for Skyrim, Bethesda showed their commitment to player input by quickly killing the paid mod program. Despite the developer’s desire to have paid mods for their titles, Hines didn’t know at this time if the feature would return after work on Fallout 4 was completed.

“I honestly, genuinely, don’t know what it means for the future. It was an idea we worked on with those guys for Skyrim; it didn’t pan out. It came back down.”

In addition to actually developing Fallout 4, the next upcoming entry of the popular series is giving Bethesda yet another reason to not worry about paid mods for now. For the first time ever, Fallout 4 will bring player-created mods to home console systems. After last month’s E3 reveal, Bethesda detailed how they plan to introduce mods to the Xbox One and PS4. The developer has since stated that giving console gamers access to mods is something they’ve wanted to do for a long time, and Fallout 4 will finally give them that opportunity.

As this November’s launch of Fallout 4 quickly approaches, Bethesda promoted the launch of a new official website for Fallout 4 on Friday.

[Images via the Bethesda Blog]