Skyrim's latest update brings back paid mods with an easier way for creators to sell their work

rockpapershotgun.com:

A new update for Skyrim Special Edition has introduced "Creations", a method through which community modders can sign up to the "Bethesda Game Studios Verified Creator Program" and then sell their work through the platform to receive royalties.

It's "paid mods", in other words, and a revival of an idea Bethesda launched and abandoned in 2015. The same update also broke existing mods dependent on Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE), a commonly used community-made modding toolkit.

Skyrim Special Edition already had a "Creations" menu through which players could access Creation Club items. These were DLC by any other name, bought using credits which in turn cost real money. Creation Club items were often developed by Bethesda themselves, but could also be made by modders in explicit partnership with Bethesda. It was Skyrim's equivalent to Paradox selling Cities: Skylines DLC packs of community-made buildings.

This new update combines the Creations menu together with a previously separate "Mods" menu. Anyone can upload free Creations (eg. mods), and anyone can now apply to become a Verified Creator Program for the ability to charge money. This substantially reduces the barrier to modders selling their work, and has fewer limitations on the type of content that can be sold, as Bethesda explained in the announcement.

Back in 2015, Bethesda partnered with Valve to add paid mods to Skyrim through Steam. The results were so disastrous that they were gone within the week and Valve backed off the idea of supporting paid mods entirely.

Bethesda never gave up on the idea of paid mods however and 2017's Creation Club launch was seen as a slower way of boiling the frog. Players accepted it, or at least ignored it, because it was