You do not have to be a gamer to be familiar with the video game developer, Bethesda. The name itself might not ring a bell, but their two most popular franchises, Fallout and Elder Scrolls, of which Skyrim is a part, most definitely should.
For over a decade, these two series have dominated the market for open-world roleplaying games. Both games essentially allow you to do whatever you want in either a post-apocalyptic or medieval environment, respectively.
Bethesda has also historically given gamers an option no other developer has: the means to create and download your own custom content, or “mods,” within the games using a free developer-made program.
This year, however, they have implemented a system to monetize these mods.
Under the guise of a cool sounding name, the Creation Club, certain Bethesda made or approved “high-quality” mods can be sold for “credits,” which are purchased with real-life money.
This takes the greatest aspect of Bethesda games away and has spawned a massive community of independent creators who make gaming about milking fans dry.
The paid mods are a dressed-up version of the microtransaction pandemic that has destroyed mobile gaming before it even got off the ground. They are beginning to water down the mainstream gaming industry as well.
Yes, there are still free mods which will not be monetized. However, even “better quality” mods should not cost money if others do not. Bethesda has, of course, denied the Creation Club’s being centered around paid mods at all. 
“We’ve looked at many ways to do ‘paid mods,’ and the problems outweigh the benefits. We’ve encountered many of those issues before,” Bethesda’s website said. “But, there’s a constant demand from our fans to add more official high quality content to our games, and while we are able to create a lot of it, we think many in our community have the talent to work directly with us and create some amazing new things.”
This kind of thinking would make sense if we were talking about massive expansions including new in-game models, areas or quests, but this is not the case at all.
Official expansions could add the kind of content to their games independent mod makers do not have the means to create. However, the first items in the Fallout 4 Creation Club were armor and clothing.
The managing editor for Destructoid, Brett Makedonski, in response to Bethesda’s claim that higher quality warrants a price tag, said this logic does not negate the issues paid mods create. 
“It doesn’t change the fact that these really are just paid mods,” Makedonski said. “$5 seems about 10 times too expensive for a set of power armor.”
These items are, at best, on par with free mods. This leads me to believe this move of Creation Clubs is to ease gamers into paying for all mods.
Bethesda attempted a similar move back in 2015 but axed the idea after tremendous blowback from consumers.
Now that they have made the idea prettier with this “developer-guaranteed” quality, they are trying again.
If we take away the fancy wording, the Creation Club is the seed of an in-game system which will divide the creative community and potentially kill the idea of free mods altogether.
The very fact consumers overwhelmingly hate this idea should be enough reason for a company to stop pushing it.
The Creation Club trailer has a like-to-dislike ratio of 3,000 to 67,000. Steam forums and Bethesda forums alike are abuzz with users trashing the developer and calling them sell-outs.
User KristyBanalia, a mod maker on Reddit, said, “If I wanted to get paid, I’d be trying to find a job in the industry. Getting paid adds a certain pressure and responsibility that I really don’t want to take on, but I’m perfectly happy to pick and choose projects I’m passionate about to contribute my skills and work to.”
Besides a few mod makers who would obviously have a conflict of interest, no one wants to have to pay for mods. No one has interest in paying for content that has been free since its inception.
I will never buy any titles adhering to this money-grabbing scheme until it is rectified.
The gaming industry is succumbing to greed, and if one of the final bastions of customer empowerment is falling in line, it might spell death for the very quality Bethesda claims it is trying to protect.