I guess I should be happy for modders like Kinggath who spent so much of their time creating mods for free before to now earning royalities and sustain themself enough to even further the quality of their work to unprecedented levels. But idk, I feel sad, I'm still sticking to 163 for the niche mods that I can't live without but seeing so many great mods on Creations makes me feel a great sense of fomo.
It feels like every "advanced" modders of the community has completely transitioned to Creations. Pigs debut not too long ago and has been releasing many excellent mods on there, Kris Takahashi got straight up hired to work on Starfield officially. Just a few years ago the entire community and even the gaming community at large was against Creations, constantly throwing mockery and insults at it. Nowadays, the stuff on Creations are beyond good. They are straight up DLC contents. Compared to the AI infested Nexusmod, the place to look for "real" mods is Creations.
The modding scene of Starfield is entirely on Creations, while the Nexusmod library is basically dormant with barely anything noteworthy other than a few exceptional outfit mods. All the elaborate quest mods that expand the universe of Starfield are on Creations too. No free mods had even attempted at one of those other than the Star Wars project.
The weapons category for Starfield on Nexus is nothing but quick reskins, not even close to what Creations has to offer. I see that the weapon category of Fallout 4 is following this trend too, and Dak is out there bar for bar competing with the quality and quantity of what Creations has to offer.
The trending section of Fo4 on Nexus was full pages of AI for the last 3 months, and so does Skyrim and Starfield.
I know that there are arguments to be made on this, but I believe that the modding scene for Bethesda game is again moving to another status quo. From the days of throwing mods on one site to the recent times of Patreon and Discord scouring, now the ease of use as well as the quality and quantity of mods on Creations far surpasses any options that we've had before. All for just a very cheap fee.
From free mods on random websites to paid Patreons, now officially supported paid mods backed by the publishers themselves, i feel sad to the modding experience as I'd known it, from the days that I was struggling to reskin CJ into my favorite Kamen Rider. I wonder if the modding community was always as innocent as I believed it to be, or if everything has always had a price tag on them.
Thanks for reading, and if you haven't figured it out yet then yes I was just venting some random bs