Starfield's Creation Club Controversy - Luke Reacts

so in case you've not seen it there was an update to probably the greatest game of last year um like step aside balder's gate tell you what Todd our Lord and savior he um in His Infinite Wisdom praise be to Todd praise be to Todd he decided to make the first major major update for Starfield a big revamp of the content offering now that sounds great right wow more content being offered what could possibly go wrong well how they've done this is through the creation club and if you don't remember the creation Club this was something that I believe initially started in like the 2018 era when they were trying to boost revenues to make themselves look better for a potential sale to Xbox same time when they were pushing for uh fallout 76 all the live service stuff with the redfall all that was happening at the same time so did the creation Club effectively what it is is it is paid mods under the guise of supporting the modders okay so just to put it in um in simplest terms how in case you are just a like a console player and you've you've never done any modding that's totally totally fine just to briefly explain it most mods are done through a platform like a Nexus mods Nexus mods is a fantastic site where you can go in there and actually like select individual games that you'd want to mod and then you can add all sorts of different things so if we click Starfield here you can see there's all of these mods new this week popular in the last 30 days so there's all of these mods here and I want you to remember some of these okay so like improved follower Behavior NPC sync walk speed so NPCs walk the same speed as you um or increases you to match the NPC's walk speed so like you're actually synced up when you're walking from place to place new ship module customization stuff various crew no more clones increases appearance of specialist crew faces from 32 in the vanilla game to 500 all sorts of crazy things that can improve the game right um name replacement overhaul to just replace everything to look like Star Wars you know there's tons of stuff here so how this normally would work is you'd find the mod that you'd want so let's say improve follower Behavior you'd go in here you would download it or after you log in if you have a mod manager like V text installed on your computer that automatically installs these mods to the game so you can just basically click a button and it's working in your game it's way easier than it used to be still there will occasionally be mods where you have to go in and manually do it where it's like you drag this folder into this folder copy this file into that folder override the permissions and do this this and this modify the inii file to say this instead of that sometimes you have to do that but a lot of these mods now just work it just works you press a button and it works so with that said all of these are free as you can see I mean as we're we're sifting through there's no price tags associated with any of these simple Dynamic boost packs astrogate like all these things okay so simple Dynamic boost packs all all of that these are all free and that's how mods have worked for ages is that the community would work together and if you really wanted to support one of these modders like I don't know if this one does a lot of the time they will have like a tip link where you can go in and Pitch them a few bucks if you really appreciate the work that they've done if you want to uh help them out you can like sign up for their patreon or whatever a lot of time there's stuff like that but on the whole the mods are free what bgs realized is that there's a whole community of people on like Xbox for example that would love mods but don't have the means of getting the mods so they decided oh well we could do console mods where we could bring some of these onto a platform you could install them onto a console version of the game which is awesome I love that but then they were like well there's some overhead involved with that we've got to be prepared to handle all that overhead and that could be expensive so maybe we find a way to like monetize it a little bit and this is again in the age of like Fallout 76 and redfall when they were trying to boost revenues to look more more valuable for when they were acquired in the future so they needed to do that and one of the ways they could do that was through paid mods one of the other things they've done is they've tried to get away from the accusations of this being greedy and instead pivot to no we're not greedy we are supporting we're supporting our uh modders so one of the ways that they they claimed they did this I don't think this has the actual footage anyway they've done previous tours and stuff where they'll invite these modders out to Bethesda game studios's offices they'll walk them through the building be like wow look at all this amazing stuff and then they'll do little interviews they get to meet Todd and all of that so they kind of rub shoulders rub elbows and get real friendly and they'll post videos of this and be like see by you engaging with the creation Club you are supporting these people that's great but let's not get it twisted what the creation Club is is a platform for microtransactions and they give a cut to modders who create a lot of it but there are also things that are in here that are straight up made by Bethesda game studios and sold as microtransactions this right here trackers Alliance the vulture this is a Bethesda game studios creation or mod that is paid so this one I think was 700 credits when you log into the game for the first time they give you a th000 for free which is the only reason I have this one cuz for the critique I wanted to test it and see what is actually involved here and basically this you know adds a new contract to The Trackers Alliance board um when you were in uh Aila Aira Shakira whatever the city's called so a lot of people saw this and were naturally very upset they're like it's one thing if modders are putting something together and then getting some Kickback for it already it's a little crazy how expensive some of these are some of these are free you know water retextures further faster smarter booths boosts so this is one of the free ones we saw in Nexus mods color fil filter removal I installed this one and I think the game looks way better that weird color filter that was on everything you can just take it away and so now it's not all grayish blue everywhere you go I think it looks way way better so there's things like that that are still free and that you can install and it's fine improve follower Behavior that's it yep what I find hilarious the top mod is The Unofficial Starfield patch they have a platform where you can get mods installed for their game and the top mod is a bug collection of bug fixes because Bethesda hasn't gotten around to doing it but they got around to making the platform to distribute the patch somebody else made for their game like you can't make this up literally most popular this month most popular is the Starfield patch I know it's it's duct tape but it kind of looks like toilet paper so I find that I I choose to believe that it's it's toilet paper but that being said like there's so many weird things with this um zeroc cost space crew I just like this cuz you can have who you want on your ship without having to do arbitrary like upgrades and stuff that take forever uh but even this like a thousand credits this is a Bethesda game studios mod become the captain of your own ancient Mar with 22 new decor items all craftable through decorate mod in outposts ships and housing visit any ship service technici to apply the new module and you go in here and like this this is it it is like a single Hab that has this stuff in it and that is a th000 credits which to be clear is like what 10 bucks about 10 bucks for that and again this is official but they claim this is a platform for mods for you to support the moderate or the the mod creators out there little joeo regular people like you and me that are putting Mods together and they want to do this for a living and you listen to like that interview with Todd Howard that he did with Maddie and he's talking about it as well no we want to really Empower those creators to continue making amazing things and we want to make sure that they can do this for a living if they want to it's like okay okay but then why like why is this here then cuz let's be honest this is just a platform for paid microtransactions where they can sell you little things like this to get more Revenue out of the game that you've already bought or got through Game Pass whatever and then they have other stuff in here that is made by other people that's that's made by you know smaller mods and uh mod creators but even like a lot of these a lot of these are free infinite carry weight you just download it and then it it sets the carry weight to a million so you don't have to worry about carrying uh equipment you want more beards just hit download and it's added whereas Bethesda probably charged 10 bucks for it so a lot of people like that are actually putting stuff up here are just doing it for free cuz they want to make the game better but this this is why like again you can't just take everything at face value when somebody tells you oh no we're doing this to support the little guy it's like okay well the little guy is posting all of his stuff for free on your platform you say it's meant to support them you are selling stuff for $10 that is not worth a dollar like okay okay dude so as a result of these paid mods you can see recent reviews have plunged to mostly negative and and a lot of it is just specifically about paid mods it's like Fallout or Skyrim except exploring isn't fun yeah despite the overall negative review I do actually kind of like this game with a big fat asterisk and all sorts of that yeah things with paid mods all sorts of stuff a big booty all the things you would expect from a good healthy review section on a steam game so people have gotten very upset about it and when Todd went on Mr madd's channel to do an interview starting to think like I I think it was definitely in the works before this but I think one of the new objectives for That interview was to try and calm people down about the paid mods so they probably started talking about doing the interview like late last year early this year and it just took this long to actually happen see have to schedule it out so far and I think in the process of that they decided to talk about paid mods and how they could calm people down um but all Todd really said about it was we're going to take a look at that that's really all he said so um on Steam starfields user recent user reviews are now mostly negative after disgruntled players hit out at Bethesda for charging $7 for a single Starfield Mission the second mission of the recently released trackers Alliance is only available as a Starfield creation and cost $7 or 700 credits that's the one that I showed you just a minute ago Creations are built via starfields creation kit and include free and paid mods Creations include New Missions gear skins and weapons here's the official blurb they said trackers Alliance establishes the first several missions enabling you to live your best bounty hunting life the first mission the star jaer will have you in contact with a mysterious tracker located in settlements through the settled systems from there let the Hunts begin and there are other problems with this like I talk about this in the critique but like there are whole bits where they say like oh you can't just take a ship that you've stolen and like scrape the serial numbers and stuff off and then sell it to somebody else for a major profit and the reason that they say that is because it would destabilize the game's economy if you could just go steal any ship and then sell it to a scrapper and then make a ton of money like there'd be no reason to really do quests you just be swimming in money um so they'd have to find other ways to maybe put a bounty on your head or for that to get you caught up with something and how they did it was like the worst way to handle it in both ways where they they made it so you can actually scrape serial numbers effectively and sell a ship you've stolen but it's for such a laughably low amount it's not even really worth the trouble so it's like yeah I'll take this off your hands basically for free and it's just a it's it's a bit of a joke but in this trackers Alliance Quest the first Bounty you do you're going after a guy that runs a chop shop where they do this very thing it's like a whole faction that you're going after to get their guy I think his name is Hannibal or something and the whole thing is like yeah they run a chop shop where they take ships that have been stolen and then scrape them and then sell them off to the highest bidder and make a ton of money doing it it's a a big enough thing that they have a whole Space Station Chop Shop basically it's it's like well you just contradicted like I thought this wasn't viable I thought you couldn't do this in this universe cuz it would be tracked and you'd get screwed you can sell broken or stolen ships now I'm pretty sure you could always do it it was just for like basically no money no profit so like you would steal a ship and then you take it over and it's like yeah I'll take it off your hands for 1,200 credits or for 800 credits or something and it was like okay well then why did I buy B with all this I could go do a little like fetch Quest and make 5,000 so why why am I why am I doing that so anyway there's there's a lot of examples of this in bgs games where like they set one rule over here and then a few months go by and they totally contradicted over here because they just like eh it's fine people won't think about it that much it's whatever and they just leave it there and it's really really frustrating if you're trying to play the game in as one total package you know let's see so the second trackers align transmission the vulture is available within the New Creations menu and what Bounty Hunter is without their trusted methods to get the job done it's it's just another mission that they're charging $7 for now they can pivot they can be like uh well this is because um they give you a th000 so it's basically a free Mission that's not how that works okay that's not that's not how that works at all uh it's still 700 credits like whether you choose to use the free ones or you try to buy it that's just we're we're getting silly so they continue on with this in an interview with the YouTube channel Mr mdpls Todd Howard responded directly to the criticisms and confirmed plans to look again at bethesda's pricing he said we hear that feedback too Howard said first of all I'll say that stuff gets priced based on things that we've done before both in creation club and then Fallout 76 and we're always trying to be looking at what else is out there really make sure we're giving value to everybody and where we're not hey you know we definitely will adjust the one thing I want to say on The Trackers Alliance that was really an attempt to something we did in creation Club where we'd say Hey you can get this special outfit and you can get this special weapon we wanted to put them together and then thought let's go the extra mile and wrap those around a quest okay but now we definitely see the feedback right and that's not what we want at all in terms of oh no this looks like a faction that we're chopping up and then selling for 700 credits at a time and so I do think we are going to take a look at that and how we deliver content like that and whether we're changing pricing or breaking it up or whatever we should do that so great feedback from the community I do not believe for a second I I have way too much respect for this man that I have a burning candle for similar to what people do for their holy figures I I I respect this man too much to believe that he is that stupid that he was not aware the community would' be upset that they were charging seven bucks for a quest in a single player game I don't believe for a second that came as a surprise I think they knew I just don't think they care that's a different that's a different thing you know because again the whole premise with these mods is that they want to find a way to further monetize these games over the long term these games that they make are played for a decade at a time they they are very successful in the long term nobody's questioning that and Bethesda has always wanted to find a way to monetize it to make it more profitable to have these games that are played for decade you know or decades uh with Starfield or with Skyrim rather they just sold it 15 times and would do like a slightly altered version each time and people kept buying it with Starfield they're not going to do that as far as I can tell like they might do a game of the Year Edition cuz they found one person that called it game of the year and they'll they'll re-release a special edition like that maybe they've already done that I don't know but what it seems to be is that their plan for a lot of their games is to create basically live service single player games where they support it longterm with annual story updates and expansions and then a lot of paid mods and stuff like that and that keeps it afloat that keeps the money flowing in because again if Fallout 5 is not expected until like 2032 2035 somewhere between there the next Starfield game is probably not coming until the late 2030s which is crazy uh it will probably be between 10 and 15 years before we see another Starfield esque game so when we're talking about that amount of time it's like yeah makes sense why they would want to find some way to monetize this in the short term as you know stretching into the long term so that's I mean let's be honest that's all this is you know what what I can't stand is when developers or PR treat the community like they are extremely stupid and trying to frame this around uh well no we wanted to deliver more content to players you could just deliver more content to players like you you could do that if you wanted to send out free uh expansions and things or paid expansions and then you fill and free content here and there I think people would be fine with that uh we could respect it if it was a big expansion that was deserving of our money we would do that and imagine every year they're doing like a a far Harbor sized expansion that would be a great way to keep the game alive for years and years and years that would be great this is not that this is a platform for you to sell microtransactions which quickly approach macro transactions um with $10 rooms which is what I mean this is a room for $10 that's what it is that's what this is It's a platform for that but even this you see 336 likes I would not be surprised if 336 people probably well more 9,000 people bookmarked it saved it for later so they still probably sold a a handful of thousands of copies of this and that's because these types of microtransactions and things that are built around appealing to whales they are not designed for the average consumer that's that is looking at this these are designed to get the whales to buy them Brendan Lucas donated 5 PS through Super Chat why shouldn't moders get paid would you be a YouTuber if you weren't getting paid no so here's the thing I'm fine with modders getting paid that's why platforms like Nexus mods have uh people put up like tip links or buy me a coffee I think is one of the websites um that that they use a lot patreon is another thing there's there's a guy uh I don't remember his full name it's Otis something but he makes a mod that unlocks a free cam in Unreal Engine games like you remember the intro to my hogwart's legacy critique video I was only able to film this because of a mod by that guy and so I unlocked the camera and I could do all of this but in order to get access to those tools you sign up for the patreon so I'm a patron subscriber of his and uh I support him in that way so I I am all for supporting modders who do do great work to enable really cool things like this that wouldn't be possible uh otherwise I'm I'm all in for that but again talking about like treating people like they're stupid the creation Club is probably the most inefficient way to get modders paid and the featured mods are all from Bethesda not all of them most of them are from Bethesda game studios and they've been put together and they are quest lines exclusive to the creation club that you can't get anywhere else it's stuff that's been cut out of the base game or future expansions and put into this this microtransaction platform I'm down for paying modders I'm I'm down for that there's Todd I forgot he was in this too um I'm all in for that but I don't want um I think there are good ways to do it and bad ways to do it and I think the creation Club is is sort of laughable in its approach because they're trying to convince you that it's this really Pro little guy way of doing it and it's just frankly not it's a platform that's been designed to boost bethesda's revenues they don't even State I mean correct me if I'm wrong where's have they said how much uh what the the cut is for the modders on this yeah so previously for fallouts creation Club it seems like it was 25% and now it is now uh it's probably about the same so that feels worse you know you buy a $5 mod the modder might be getting a little over a dollar empathe just is just pocketing 375 or whatever that feels that feels rough man that doesn't feel good huh um so anyway with all this I guess to just wrap up my overall thoughts to summarize it I absolutely understand why people are frustrated by it the creation Club was initially initially pitched as this way for players to support the modding Community more directly financially and then we come to find out that it was actually that was just the cover for Bethesda selling uh a bunch of microtransactions to you directly and to also get a cut on the sale of mods that they didn't create but they still get if some of these reports are to be believed if they're taking 75% and only 25% goes to the modder like they just they're they're printing money without having to do anything like if if somebody goes in and buys a $5 mod that Bethesda didn't really do anything for cool awesome they just made a ton of money and they didn't have to do anything for it that's the ultimate dream for bgs so when Todd says yeah we're going to reevaluate we're going to look at it again yeah he he might look at it and then just hop back on his phone you know like I don't I don't believe for a second that they're going to make any substantial change because again these these systems are not for Joe shal they're not made for the average game gamer they're made for the whales you might not ever pay any money for microtransactions for games like this but there are a lot of people out there still only like you know half of a percentage point of total players but there's a lot of people that will spend hundreds of dollars on microtransactions in these types of games like they will buy all of the little swag they'll buy all of the optional skins they they just can't help themselves and they justify it as like well I'm supporting a game I really like cool that's awesome but uh I mean it it I think it's easy for us to be like yeah nobody's buying this it's like no there's 9,000 people that bookmarked that one and there's a lot of people that probably bought it and didn't even bookmark it so there's still probably you know they might have sell sold 10 20,000 copies of that little DLC that was like a room you know it's it's just wild he took my thing flag red flag 16 times the detail [Music]

Channel: Luke Stephens LIVE

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Id: Ao090vizvBk

Length: 25min 9sec (1509 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 24 2024