The modding community has been getting it rough. While the general consensus agrees that talented modders should get paid for their work, the grey area nature of mods make it hard to figure out a good mechanism. Selling them on Steam as paid mods had not only negative repercussions, but also the problem with unauthorised mods being uploaded and monitesed by someone else without the blessings of the original creators.
Bethesda give paid mods another go with the Creation Club, bringing modders in as third-party contractors making small DLCs, though the issue here is that the content is not worth paying money for, free mods have more features in some cases.
As such, the biggest haven for mod resources, Nexus Mods, will introduce its own way to pay for modders. Mods will remain free on the site, but mod creators can opt into the mod author donation system and earn some money.
Nexus Mods will give around $5,000-$10,000 a month to be distributed for modders that opted into the system. Users can also opt to donate money into the pool. How much money a modder earned is depending on how much Donation Points they have acquired, which is based on the number of unique downloads for each month. Modders can split how much percentage of Donation Points they can gain from a mod, donate the points to other mods or redeem them to get cash or in the future, game codes and hardware.
The full statement on Nexus Mods have an FAQ answering all the issues the system might find including fraudulent mods that opted into the the donation system, if Bethesda agrees on this system or why they went for unique downloads as the main metric to accrue Donation Points.
The system will start by the end of January or early February next year. It remains to be seen if the system can finally solve the problem of getting modders paid (without making paid mods), but an interesting move nevertheless.
Source: Nexus Mods (via PC Gamer)