The launch of the Starfield Creation Club where players can purchase both fan- and Bethesda-made content for the game has drawn a ton of backlash from players. So much backlash, in fact, that Todd Howard himself weighed in on the situation and promised a solution.
Howard spoke on the issue in a June 16 interview with gaming YouTuber MrMattyPlays and claimed pricing in the Creation Club was based on Bethesda’s previous experiences with the model in other games, including the live-service Fallout 76. Howard said Bethesda is always looking to “give value to everybody,” and that adjustments will be made in those segments where the value is off. Regarding the paid Starfield mission “The Vulture,” Bethesda’s director said it was the product of several ideas that the company wanted to “wrap around a quest,” and that it is “seeing the feedback.”
Howard acknowledged that neither he nor Bethesda wish players to think the company is “chopping up a faction” and selling it partially for Creation Credits. “That’s not what we want at all,” he said, adding Bethesda is certainly “gonna take a look” at the whole ordeal and see what the right move forward is.
Bethesda’s re-introduction of paid content in the Creation Club was met with a fiercely negative response from players, both due to the paid Vulture mission and the paid “curated” mods. Thousands of players banded together to review-bomb the game on Steam and other platforms, earning it the “Mostly Negative” tag on Valve’s storefront. Creation Club content can also only be purchased with so-called Creation Credits, an in-house currency for Starfield, making refunds and chargebacks much more difficult in case a mod breaks and becomes unusable.