Bethesda hosting stolen mods

• about 2 years ago by Jason Magee

Not long ago Bethesda launched a way to play mods on consoles and it’s taken a short period of time for people to start stealing other peoples work and uploading it to Bethesda’s servers for use on consoles. In the limelight right now is one particular thief who had this to say about the mod and creator of said mod he stole from…

Sadly, Bethesda aren’t planning to do anything meaningful and have responded with a forum post informing modders about how to make a DMCA request. A DMCA request is pretty much a proper legal process that needs to be sent to their parent company, ZeniMax, for processing. Basically – modders aren’t going to be able to go to the effort of doing a DMCA request. I would go so far as to suggest Bethesda are aware of this and have gone about it this way deliberately in order to build up their own modding website.

I think this is very sad state of affairs for a number of reasons…

• Bethesda would flip shit if someone stole their work.
• Bethesda’s success on the PC has been positively impacted from the support of the PC modding community and this is a massive middle finger to all those people.
• Having someone steal or claim ownership of something you’ve worked hard on is incredibly disheartening.
• Modders have been submitted to abuse from console gamers for not supporting the console version. Modders who do this for free… in their spare time. What is wrong with people?

On a side note, Bethesda have said that the Xbox One mod traffic was 50 times that of the PC crowd. This is misleading because the PC crowd aren’t using Bethesda’s website, they use nexusmods.com which is the most likely place the mods are being stolen from.

If you’re interesting in reading more into the issues surround this I recommend checking out this and this posts on Reddit.