Todd Howard responds to Starfield paid mods backlash 

16X the greed

Every time I hear a company say "We hear you" it's code word for "We hear you, but we're just gonna wait for the heat to die down and them implement it in a patch"

It’s almost like we don’t want to pay money for low quality mods

Meanwhile, From Software is releasing a DLC the size of a full game

"Mod Authors deserve to be paid" That's what Patreon and donations exist for. There is no need for Bethesda to play middleman in this situation other than to siphon the income away from the people doing the actual work.

Bethesda hasn't changed after the horse armor dlc.

“We hear you, we ignore you and we will charge you for low quality”

They RERELEASE OLD GAMES AT FULL PRICE with the Exact Same BUGS THE ORIGINALS HAD AND WERE FIXED BY UNPAID MODS BY THE COMMUNITY. They are Greedy and Scummy Leaders in Charge of making these assinine BAD CHOICES! Nuff Said!

So his justification is "We heard you complain before but we did it anyway. And because we were able to ignore you before and just do it, we're going to ignore you again now and just do it again." This is why people pirate your games Todd.

Charging $7 for a quest sounds like John Riccitiello's charging a dollar to reload. Except here, Bethesda actually implemented it.

“We applied what we learned from Fallout 4/76 and Skyrim” translates to “Our consumers are stupid, love eating s**t, and will buy it anyway”.

Sadly this tactic is working. Bethesda is making millions off of just the "7 dollar" quest because there enough people out there that will buy first and ask questions never. That said, it's possible many of them bought the quest hoping it'd be good, realize it was barely anything, and won't buy similar again. but such people are probably a drop in the bucket to the horde that will buy whatever slop they're thrown. This is why these monetization practices will never go away. We're the vocal minority.

Plushies + Mission + Ship Part = HALF of the cost of Elden Ring Expansion. F**k off Bethesda.

This is the chance for the community to show a piece of their minds: reject paid quests and we will not see more of it in the future. Buy it, and Todd will keep releasing it for years to come...

_"If you guys have phones, I'm sure you have wallets too."_ Todd Howard Berlin, 1945

So basically "Our current greedy rip-off scheme pricing is based on our previous greedy rip-off scheme pricing. Capish?!"

Remember when games didn't have stores in them? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Bethesda is dead. I'm not buying Elder Scrolls 6.

I forgot Starfield even existed. 🤯

His response feels like a PR statement that was prepared before the paid mods were even released. Like, they knew there'd be backlash and prepared their "We're listening" statement based on what they thought the backlash would be coming from, which is what they addressed, the pricing, but they haven't actually seen any of the feedback so they haven't realized the actual backlash comes from paid mods existing at all.

I spoke with my wallet. I uninstalled and deleted my Bethesda account and gave the reason for the deletion as paid mods

The sad part of this is, you already know there will be enough people that pay for these that the practice will continue. The profit on low quality mods like this is insane so just selling a few of them will be enough of an incentive to continue making them.

They sell a noodle shop for 4 or 5 bucks. One single Fing noodle shop that does nothing but sells noodles. Absolute nonsense.

Reminder: Todd Howard was a piss poor programer. I do not understand how he got promoted to run Bethesda. When the two founders of the company created ZeniMax as a means to fund Bethesda's projects. As the moment Todd took over. Mostly, all Bethesda games started to go downhill. Even the balls to create a Horse Armor DLC before DLC were ever created............and my dumb ass bought the stupid CD with not only that Armor but also the quest for the Nine Divine...which was a pretty good quest. But still was one questline. And Bethesda set that trend. They are trying to do it again. Ugh....still hate myself....

They sold that $7 mini mission over 1.5m times, that's $10,500,000 from one small craptastic mod. No amount of negative reviews will outweigh that much money.

“Backlash” without financial repercussions is pointless. Corporations will only “listen” when their bottom line suffers.

Starfield was DOA. Now they are just trying to cash grab from their diehard fans lol

Probably Bethesda " Hey remember that thing we did that was horribly received by the players and caused serious backlash. Yeah, let's do that again "

A paid mod = A paid Todd.

The market is shaped by the complicity and condescension of consumers.

From the company that brought us horse armour DLC…

Everyone says it's common knowledge that people hate microtransactions, but people buy them. Why do you think they exist in the first place?

So glad I never picked up Starfeild

Gamers can whine all day. They won't stop until enough gamers just stop paying.

Bethesda is not known for goodwill towards their fans.

Hey remember when someone mailed Todd a box of bobby pins with a note that said "weigh these" and soon after the weight of bobby pins in fallout 76 was reduced so it wasn't something like 60x the weight they are in real life? Someone needs to do something similar to re-teach Todd the value of a dollar, because he clearly has a very skewed view on what things should be worth. Makes me think Todd when he's out in public walks by a McDonalds or something and is like ONLY 10 BUCKS FOR A BIG MAC? THEY'RE JUST GIVING THESE THINGS AWAY NOW! WHAT FOOLS!

Bethesda learned to milk gullible customers from Fallout ‘76.

"The intention previously was to have more content on each package but we said nah" No way this wasn't said on purpose to piss people off

As I said before, Bethesda released a subpar game, fully expecting the modders to save it. This company has lost so much touch with reality and gamers, not only is it disappointing, but I feel this will be the final nail in the coffin for this company. They've lost touch with the gaming community, and they expect easy payouts.

EASports did the same thing first. battlefield bad company no longer allowed players to make maps. they promised the give out the map editor after launch, and never did. instead, they only released 4 maps, and forced you to pay each 6 months for 4 maps that they made at the same time the game was released.

Todd wants to upgrade his yacht.

"We hear that feedback, too. Blow me." ~ Todd Howard

I was there when they said their "horse armor" wasn't a big deal. Look where gaming is today. Don't give them an inch...they will take far more than a mile. Also, thank you Todd for not letting us forget. My Bethesda ban remains in place. It'd take a LOT for me to ever consider removing it.

Starfield costs 89$ plus tax in Canada, paying extra to Todd for this garbage is a joke. If this is considered acceptable, It'll become the new norm.

Todd, buddy, have I ever told you the definition of insanity?

I personally dont think bethesda studios have EVER made a game of even decent quality. The ONLY games that are good that fall under their jurisdiction are ALL from outside studios who've shown the world what it REALLY means to make good games. Even skyrim, the game that was touted as game of the year, is a puddle of a game, with shallow, barely surface level gameplay, exploration, story, and depth, ESPECIALLY in comparison to prior entries in the series made by others. It had outdated gameplay the year it was released, and now we're over a decade later and they're still desperately trying to jam it into all of their games they make because they simply DONT UNDERSTAND HOW TO MAKE VIDEOGAMES. They're a greedy leech, sitting on the back of the videogame industry and trying to suck dry all of the fans they've developed over the years by using existing, fantastic franchises as bait. If anyone is still excited for TES6, prepare for disappointment. It will, at best, be a financial success, but that is SOLELY because of the hype and built in marketing it has had from over a decade of expectations.

What Todd meant to say was, “We based it on older models because even though those got bad press too, we still suckered enough people to make millions of profit.”

Honestly, given how much their games' success ride on mods, they should just adopt a version of the Fortnite model and set aside a percentage of the games' revenue and split that pool between the modders based on the mods' downloads/ratings/etc. Bethesda should be the ones paying the modders - not the players. Just imagine the increase in mod quality they'd see if they set aside even something like 5-10% of their games' revenue for modders, and then imagine how many more sales the game would get in the long term due to the great mods they'd be consistently getting. There's a reason Skyrim has sold so well for so long, after all. It seems like such a no-brainer, but Bethesda's greed just keeps leading them down this same path every single time, even though it's almost certainly not actually the most profitable one for them

Leave it to Todd and Bethesda to take years and years and years to deliver boring buggy s**t, and then expect others to fix it

"Modders deserve to be paid" Wow! just like how gaming was. Started as a passion project, ended in monetization to the max.

Gross, you would think bethesda would've learned at this point.

He really said that adding findable readable items like a note or holotape with no actual game dialogue or animations in addition to an outfit & weapon is GOING THE EXTRA MILE…. Bethesda is finished.

"We're sorry, thats not what we intended" definitely loses any meaning after the 100th time. Like "thoughts & prayers".

Never ever ever trust that they'll try to do right by you. If it's a company that has to worry about shareholders, no matter how high up that chain goes, they will ALWAYS try to nickel and dime you. They will always try to get you to spend more for anything they can get away with. They do not care about the product. They care about you spending on the product. That is a night and day difference. If they cared about the product, it'd have been mostly available at launch. It's about making the product good, especially after negative sentiment (e.g. No Man's Sky).

The games industry these days is daylight robbery.

Ah yes, we loved horse armor. The patient zero of microtransactions for single player experiences.

Tell me lies tell me sweet little lies

"Give me all your money and i promise to exploit you"

It just works

Todd Howard is hastily becoming the next Bobby Kotick.

You can buy the entire game for the price of three shitty CC mods😂

I don't want to play a mod that was made to make money. I want to play a mod that was made because someone had an idea they thought were cool, and felt strongly enough about it that they put their time and resources into making it a reality even with no expectation of payment. Creativity and passion are not inspired by money. Not saying that only free things are good, just that if money is the #1 driving force behind a project (as with most AAA games), I rarely enjoy the result.

Those suits are so stupid. They never think long term. Their thought process: number must go up, no matter what.

The problem is that, it isnt about the price, but the model of it. Mod should always be free, and you can donate to the modder. Bethesda doesn’t need to take 75% of the sells for something they didn’t do. Also Bethesda will start to put less effort and stuff in-game to push people buying mods to have a more complete game for 80$

Let me apply my Todd-GPT translator device to the corporate speak "Hello meatbags, the Corporate lords dictate that we will do this with every release moving forward for all times until you give us ALL of the money. No we will not write better scripts or give our IP to people more coherent than our writing teams. ALL THE MONEY. GIVE."

Saying mod creators "Deserve to be paid" is wild when I bet Bethesda is probably taking at least a 60% cut if not more than if a modder just set up a patron or even a direct pay pal donation not like Bethesda has done anything ot deserve a cut of the money at all except host the mods on an infinitely worse server than something like Nexus

2:45 To skip to Todd Howard's response.

Todd, Repair the repetitiveness of planetary bases. Make the ship's prison cells actually usable by adding capture missions. Release a few big expansions that add new large cities, with quests etc..

So, not only starfield was bad, but they want to hide the small chance at making it decent behind a paywall? Is there an adult in control?

The fact that ANYONE is actually playing that shyte game and enjoying it, is fkn wild.

Mobile gaming was the ultimate grooming tool.

You can get for 29,99 USD Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty DLC.🤔

"we're listening" = we're still going to do it if we can; this approach feels like something they will apply across all titles that have this new CC and i recall that statement somewhere

Even more reasons to just enjoy indie games more nowadays.

Todd Howard "we are broke.. all our new games suck.. Fallout 4 was the last ok game we made and that was 2015"

The largest issue with paid mods is that if you're paying for content then it needs to be under the same scrutiny as any other paid content but mod authors can't/don't want to provide that. It should have the exact same expectations as any DLC, that it doesn't harm performance, seamlessly integrates with the game, works as expected with rest of my paid content, is kept up to date, bugs are fixed...etc. But Bethesda is just trying to use modders as unofficial contractors in order to get paid for content without supporting any of it. Mod broken? Not our fault. Mod has problems? Not our fault. Mod you paid for is abandoned? Too bad.

Haven’t heard about his response bet it’ll be dogshit

I love how it’s always the standard “We hear you. Blah blah blah” but proceed to explain why they didn’t hear us and will continue to do what they want. 😂

Bethesda is hell bent on starfield being remembered as an absolute failed opportunity and a text book case of what customers dont want in a "Bethesda game".

Hmmm hmm, So Bethesda can't or won't hire a live team to support the game for a contractual period to develop paid dlc support? why? Like what's the split for the modders and how are you guaranteeing quality and compatibility, what if they can't maintain their mod patch to patch, is that handled in house now that Bethesda technically owns it what is the actual deal?

Que the Naked Gun group facepalm meme.

Yeah these same people bitching about these paid mods are the same ones running around with the black cell battle pass vault editions of crap of duty acting like that some kind of premium experience imagine complaining for more content in your single player RPG game from 8 to 10 years ago

The way i value DLCs is based on a full game "is a $7 dlc 12% of a full games content" more often then not its no.

"We hear you" God, I hate that fking bs corpo line

I can see the future of gaming. - Pay $100 for a game... - Start the game. Popup, "Would you like to go through the tutorial? It's a one time fee of only $14." - Click "Skip". - "Sorry, you can't skip the tutorial. A fee of $18 have been charge on your credit card!" - Wait, wasn't it $14? "Sorry sir, you clicked 'Skip', therefore some management cost of the button clicking and message boxes was added." - Go to close the game. - "To close the game, please click here, a fee of $2 will be charged on your credit card." - Pull the plug on the computer!

So they based their prices for this single player games mods on previous attempts to get a cut of the modding community and a price gouging live service multiplayer game? Yeah that checks out.

The real reason they want paid mods is so bethesda can take a portion of the donations a modder could get.

"We hear you but we don't care. Screw you, give us money!"

big daddy microsoft wants its number to go UP.

We've come a long way from horse armor, gents. And I fucking hate it.

the dictionary definition of "paid mods" should read "a failed attempt by video game publishers to allow third parties to fix their games for them and make the consumer pay for the work." The community's answer: fix your own game and since we already paid for it we aren't giving you, or anyone else any more money for it.

Todd Howard presents - Sweet little lies; you want the additional content so pay us the extra price.

“Previous mistake” must’ve been a financial success.

There are two kinds of "We're listening." 1) "We're listening" said before doing anything in response to feedback (and then they never do anything) 2) "We're listening" said AFTER doing something in response to feedback (such as hotfixing a hated feature out and then saying "We're listening" after) One of the two makes a good game company.

Imagine wasting time building mods to a dead game...

In a way I feel kinda bad for Todd, because he has to answer for everything, even though you know that the paid mods stuff is most likely a "from the top" type decision and he probably doesn't have much say in it...

We originally were going to charge $900 for a rake and a yo-yo, but we've decided to add a picture of a horse.

Starfield is currently near unplayable due to constant crashing (Never Loading Screen, freezes, full crash to dashboard).. By currently, I mean I encountered the Never Loading -Story- Screen within 5 minutes of my attempt at playing this morning (June 21, 2024) and a second Never Loading Screen 3 minutes after that (starting from the moment I finished reloading previous save).. Did I mention I was trying to go to a planet that THE MAIN STORY is on? The planet is unavoidable if you want to follow the main story.. It is the "Pilgrim's Planet" for those wondering.. I forget the exact planet name, but if you done the main story, then you should know which one I am talking about.. By "Never Loading Screen", I mean the black screen with the loading circle in the bottom right corner endlessly looping for 10+ minutes.. Only reason I waited that 10+ minutes was because I got up and went AFK right after I triggered the loading screen only to be greeted with the same loading screen after I got back some time later (due to unforeseen delays).. So, Bugthesda, instead of spending time trying to figure out ways to nickel and dime your customers, how about you spend it on making your game actually playable? You'll be surprised how much more money you could rake in when you actually make a fully functional and fun game instead of a glitchy barren wasteland void of anything interesting going on.. No one wants to spend 10+ minutes searching for the random mole hill you arbitrarily designated as "ENEMY SPAWN HERE ONLY" just to get maybe 1 minute of combat before spending another 10+ minutes searching for the next enemy spawner..

0:15 How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man!?

The thing is - and this doesn't help Bethesda's case - the Trackers Alliance quest is actually free. They don't show you the free one. They added the faction and the first quest, Shipjacker, for free. The quest has a bad ending where nothing is accomplished. Vulture is the second quest. So my question is, when do we get the third quest, and what will that cost? Because after Shipjacker (if you don't buy Vulture), you still have the faction, and the people... but there's nothing to do. What adds insult to injury is, the guy you work with in Shipjacker, tells you he's done over 300 quests, and you can compare your completed quests with him. Even if you do the radiant quests, they still don't count. Only your failed quest counts (still zero). I'm guessing Vulture counts as 1... so are they gonna sell us 300+ quests at $7 each? It's just not a good look for them. The game, and the 240 temple grind, is a huge time sink... I think Trackers Alliance is going to be a money sink, for those with more dollars than sense to throw at the game.