It seems like a cautious move, which is probably wise considering the company's history here. The program seems to want to sit somewhere between the Wild West of open mods and the rigidity of formal DLC, and so I both understand why the company is giving us that 'no,' and also understand why it would be pretty easy to call this thing paid mods if you were so inclined. Creation Club content is different than that system: it's all thoroughly vetted and entirely new, created in partnership with Bethesda itself. Creation Club is a storefront where you pay money for game modifications, which you could just go ahead and shorten to 'mods.' However, Bethesda appears to be arriving at that 'no' by defining mods as something broader, more open and, importantly, wholly separate from what's going on here.

So there's Bethesda's answer: in short, 'no.' The truth would seem to be somewhere in the middle. But, there’s a constant demand from our fans to add more official high quality content to our games, and while we are able to create a lot of it, we think many in our community have the talent to work directly with us and create some amazing new things.' We’ve encountered many of those issues before.

We’ve looked at many ways to do “paid mods”, and the problems outweigh the benefits. This also guarantees that all content works together. Its an overwhelming number to sort through, which is why were here to. All the content is approved, curated, and taken through the full internal dev cycle including localization, polishing, and testing. Even with the Special Edition released, modding Skyrims original release is still getting plenty of new mods all the time. Most of the Creation Club content is created internally, some with external partners who have worked on our games, and some by external Creators. Also, we won’t allow any existing mods to be retrofitted into Creation Club, it must all be original content. Mods will remain a free and open system where anyone can create and share what they’d like. But here's the answer to the question: 'Is Creation Club paid mods?' which is at least an admirably straightforward question: So yes, we are dealing with a real money storefront here, something the announcement video didn't make entirely clear.

Skyrim new content mods