So there's Bethesda's answer: in short, 'no.' The truth would seem to be somewhere in the middle. 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.' We’ve encountered many of those issues before. We’ve looked at many ways to do “paid mods”, and the problems outweigh the benefits. This also guarantees that all content works together. All the content is approved, curated, and taken through the full internal dev cycle including localization, polishing, and testing. Most of the Creation Club content is created internally, some with external partners who have worked on our games, and some by external Creators. Also, we won’t allow any existing mods to be retrofitted into Creation Club, it must all be original content.
Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they’d like. But here's the answer to the question: 'Is Creation Club paid mods?' which is at least an admirably straightforward question:
So yes, we are dealing with a real money storefront here, something the announcement video didn't make entirely clear.
