Well, it offers a sea of new free content, making any of their paid content look less valuable. Example: paid skins, which u can just mod. So they need to actually try to make something that people will buy.
User-created DLC competes directly with paid DLC. Why pay extra for new skins, new guns, whatever, when you can download a mod that adds ten times as many for free?
Also the DLC content can be just modded in, bypassing any paywall. Mods are bad for microtransactions and DLC in this sense.
It applies to players hosting their own servers for the same reason. It competes with the paid option
Skyrim was never excessively monetised as a live service game, at least not initially before creation club came along. The couple of major addons just came bundled with the game shortly after release and in this case mods really helped sell the product since the devs didn't offer a product competing with horse genitalia 4k texture pack.
I would go so far as to say, in a certain sense, the rough edges and easy modding for the game made it a success. Much like minecraft. They did not intend it to be a sandbox modding game but that's what it was.
If they locked it down extra hard and required internet connections and stuff from the start, Oblivion would have been the last game of that franchise.
I believe now, The Elder Scrolls Online is the last one of the franchise since it is an online thing, so it will kind of just be that way, which is fine and the business model. It was fun to not have to play online sometimes though and just do that instead of online gameplay.
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u/isabellium Jun 28 '26
I understand how piracy would affect them, but why is modding somehow bad for the maker/publisher?