Mod Support ended on PS4 before it even begins

It's just been announced that Sony and Bethesda have had a "disagreement" on how mods should work on PS4 and as a result there'll be no mods on PS4 for this and also for the upcoming Skyrim Special Edition.

PS4 Mod Update

After months of discussion with Sony, we regret to say that while we have long been ready to offer mod support on PlayStation 4, Sony has informed us they will not approve user mods the way they should work: where users can do anything they want for either Fallout 4 or Skyrim Special Edition.

Like you, we are disappointed by Sony’s decision given the considerable time and effort we have put into this project, and the amount of time our fans have waited for mod support to arrive. We consider this an important initiative and we hope to find other ways user mods can be available for our PlayStation audience. However, until Sony will allow us to offer proper mod support for PS4, that content for Fallout 4 and Skyrim on PlayStation 4 will not be available.

We will provide an update if and when this situation changes.

Bethesda

I don't think Sony have commented on it yet and I get the impression they probably won't. It's hard to say whose fault this is, the phrasing of "where uses can do anything they want" makes it sound rife for backdoor exploits but you'd have to imagine that the PS4 and Xbox One would both use mods in the same way right? But considering that MS will allow it, I guess that puts the blame on Sony.

Add this to the long history of bad relations between Sony and Bethesda. Next up - Doom will explode your PS4s

This statement comes off, to me at least, like Bethesda trying to strong arm Sony into changing the policy with public outrage. By specifically saying Sony is the reason for this, they're essentially pointing their fanbase towards Sony and saying "take it up with them."

Given that, and the fact that mods are already available on Xbox, I think there's probably a decent chance Sony will cave if the negative fan response is strong enough, though obviously that remains to be seen.

Seeing how Fallout 4 already runs poorly on console maybe they were unwilling to provide mods to their users that will likely degrade the experience further. That being said, mods are the most attractive part of playing Fallout/Skyrim/etc. in my opinion. Sony started out this console generation being the "good guy", and are quickly forgetting all of their lessons learned from last generation.

Bethesda is being a bit shitty, trying to throw Sony under the bus here because they won't let literally anyone put literally anything onto their console. "We require all our game developer partners to go through a rigorous certification process but the plebes? Yeah they can do whatever they want." Uh, no.

EDIT: And it certainly seems to be working judging by all the comments on Twitter and elsewhere. Everyone forgetting the fact that Bethesda games are basically a garbage-fire on a disc but no Sony's the bad guy here right?

@ll_exile_ll: To me it reads less like strong-arming and more just to make sure everyone knows this ain't up to Bethesda. I bet Bethesda doesn't really care one way or the other truly, they just don't want to deal with lots of fan hate. If Sony allows it, cool they implement it and people have it, if they don't, less work Bethesda has to do and I'm sure they are fine with that too.

Except mods are already available on Xbox. This is a case of Sony not allowing Bethesda to do something Microsoft is allowing them to do. I haven't heard anything about Xbox's blowing up because of Fallout mods, and that thing is less powerful than the PS4.

You can quote all the ToS agreements you want, but the fact is Microsoft has allowed this and it's been received well and Sony is choosing not to allow it.

I don't think it's as much a call to attack so much as it a straightforward explanation of what happened. Both sides were working towards putting mods on the PS4 version of Skyrim, but somewhere along the line Sony put a stop to it. I imagine a lot of time and effort went in to making it work, and Bethesda has to explain and apologize to the people who were looking forward to it because I doubt Sony ever would.

Allowing users to play games how they want to play them can only be a good thing. This seems like Bethesda is trying to strong arm Sony into allowing mods and Im ok with that.

Yes, Sony is the bad guy here. They have no problem with garbage-fire on disc being sold in their store and for their console. More than that they will promote garbage-fire games with inclusion of Pro model but now they have some "rigorous certification process " that gives players less freedom and makes the whole mods on console promise one big joke. Hard not to point at sony as the bad guy.

@ll_exile_ll: It going fine for Microsoft in no way means it would go the same for Sony, and in no way invalidates any concerns they might have over quality of experience, console stability, and security.

@danteveli: You're right. Better idea would be to stop selling Bethesda games on Sony platforms altogether imo.

They wouldn't have let you dress up as Batman anyway so whatever.

As someone who has only ever played Bethesda games on disks on consoles (though not on PS3, didn't own one but that sounded horrible) I gotta say this statement couldn't be more wrong. Also biased much?

Up until now Bethesda have been vague on why PS4 mods were being delayed but did allude to it being down to Sony. So this confirms that to be the case.

It does make you wonder what Sony's concern is. They obviously aren't doing it just to be jerks. I guess they have concerns about either people using it to backdoor the PS4 system. Or maybe it's something to do with intellectual property concerns. I know previously Bethesda mentioned something about PS4 mods not being able to use custom audio because of how the PS4 audio system works.

Also every recent comment and chat feed from Bethesda has been spammed with users demanding PS4 mods, so at least this puts that to rest. Bethesda have been relatively quiet on the status of mods before now, so it's kind of nice to see them being direct with their fans. They also had to get this out of the way before marketing kicks on for Skyrim: Special Edition.

@starvinggamer: How else do you want them to say 'Sony won't let us offer these mods, sorry'? They had to say something right?

@takayamasama: Depends on if you're talking about Bethedsa published games (Doom) vs Bethesda developed games (TES/Fallout). I've played Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim and Fallout 4 on both consoles and PC and calling them a garbage fire on consoles isn't that unreasonable. I accept their jank and I enjoy their games, but they run very shitty on consoles and in particular on Sony ones.

@jesus_phish: I mean, I've played thousands of hours of Elder Scrolls games on my various consoles and never had issues. Random crashing here and there but they are far from the only games where that happened. I don't have a "PC mindset" though so I'm sure what I find acceptable would make some other people scoff is disbelief and drop their monocle, but what can I say? I'm a simple person who enjoys his games, but I still think "garbage fire" is way too far for anything but the PS3 Skyrim.

And you think Microsoft didn't have concerns? The fact is one console maker was willing to work this out and the other wasn't.

granted MS seems to be playing it real fast and loose lately, most likely in the interest of catching up, so it's not surprising they'd be lax enough to let this through.

Didn't they promise mod support at E3? This is kinda lame. Kinda REAL lame

Ehh...Whatever. Very few things can make me play Fallout 4 again.

I totally get both sides here Bethesda isn't gonna change there mod system for Sony playstation. And Sony is afraid of somebody finding a backdoor to make there closed system more "open". Also smart move of Bethesda Calling Sony out now the hivemind is gonna shit all over Sony making them rethink this deal ???

Sony is known to have a pretty shitty overly restrictive cert policy for patches, which is probably the issue. Its taken some actual developers months to get patches through for games so i was surprised mods existed on ps4 to begin with. Microsoft used to be the same way but it seems they've laxed on that a lot.

Can't believe some people are making apologies for Sony here. They seem to be getting out of touch lately with gamers. The kind of complacency that happens when you're in the lead. The bottom line is, mods are on Xbox One and not on PS4. If you're a console gamer and a fan of Fallout 4, who you going to go with? This sucks, and this all comes down to Sony.

Tsk, damn shame. I was hoping that greater proliferation of mods would incentivize more developers to include mod support for their games. I think Sony ultimately will not be in the win here.

I think the key takeaway is that Sony didn't want mods to be able to do anything (everything) a user might want, e.g. copyright and trademark infringement, and wanted some type of curation, which would have increased work for Bethesda. The latter just gave up because they don't want to do that and blame Sony.

Bethesda should worry more about putting out functional games that don't have memory leaks instead of "whining" that, 'Daddy Sony won't let them play with their toys in the living.' room.

@omgfather: The fanboy extremism that Sony has had this generation continues to boggle my mind. Don't get me wrong I enjoy my PS4 and got it at launch, but as a consumer I'm not gonna blindly trust a company and I am going to judge their actions as time goes on, and so many of Sony's have been poor.

It's also sad that so many that throw themselves on the sword for Sony and disown Microsoft...were doing that exact opposite last generation when most of them played on 360. It's insane, people are insane, the internet is insane.

So who pays out when the inevitable class action lawsuit is filed?

From the last update about PS4 mod support...

• PC textures are used. Memory and performance issues may occur. We are working with Sony on optimal texture exporting support in a future update.
• Sound files are currently not supported. PS4 sound format is a proprietary format. We are working with Sony on sound file processing support in a future update.
• PS4 Mod Storage limit is approximately 900 MB at present. Please do not upload mods larger than 900 MB. We are working with Sony to increase this limit.

It looks like the proprietary sound format might have been the big sticking point.

As a longtime Sony fan, I gotta say, this in addition to all the other missteps is gonna get me to switch to Xbox

• recent price increase of ps plus
• PSN being down at some very inconvenient moments, and far more frequently than Xbox...
• DLC for games being late on PS4.
• a lackluster free game lineup each month
• the one exclusive i cared about turned out to be pretty medicore (NMS)

@drekly: I did this exact thing about a week after NMS was out and I realized I was done with it, and I've had way more of a blast. The backwards compatibility meaning that all 4 Games with Gold are things I can play is amazing, and I've been really enjoying myself. I want Sony to step up their game and fix themselves, as I do really love my PS4, but right now there is nothing on it I want to play I can't play on Xbox, and MS has been doing more consumer friendly things the past 2 years, and that resonates with me as a customer.

Also I was 360 only during last gen and well....let's just say it's nice to be working on my achievement score again. Those little things are still mighty addictive.

Well this is certainly a bigger PR problem than UHD drives...

Pretty big bummer for me, since I was looking forward to Skyrim HD on PS4, but without mods it really does become far less interesting. Not a huge loss I suppose, considering how many other games I could buy (that I haven't already played), but a bummer nonetheless.

It would be interesting to know what the real debate was about between Sony and Bethesda, and if the former will say anything about this.

Are mods on the Xbox not being policed at all? Actually? No way right... Or is MS doing the policing there instead of Bethesda?

Bethesda rallying the troops. Now we'll see if Twitter can accomplish what they could not.

Doesn't mod support on XBO cause a bunch of crashing issues? I'm assuming QAing mods must be the biggest issue at hand here.

@drekly: I am right there with you. It may not matter to some but I believed the E3 pitch about mods and it was one of the few "next gen" selling points for me. I can't believe Sony would be this foolish. We were a ps3 household despite having both, and financially we had to make a choice this time and I feel like ps4 is looking more and more like the wrong one. I've been trying for 2 hours to get the ps store to work to download Overwatch and I can't get past the initial store screen before an error kicks me out. We just recently subscribed to ps+ for online multiplayer and I fail to see where I'm getting value for anything right now. I'm frustrated, my spouse and I only have so much free time and I don't expect to have to fight with my console to get to the entertainment part.

Bethesda says they want to implement mods "where users can do anything they want for either Fallout 4 or Skyrim Special Edition". We don't know what Sony wants, but we assume it's something less than that. How much less? We don't know. There's a lot of space between "anything you want" and "nothing at all". But Bethesda's response is that if Sony won't implement mods exactly the way they want, Bethesda is going to take their ball and go home. Do we really believe there isn't a point of compromise where both parties would be happy? Even if Bethesda is forced to concede entirely to Sony's limits, is it any better for the consumer to have no mods at all, instead of the mods Sony was willing to allow? Bethesda is rather blatantly playing the PR game here, and it just strikes me as incredibly petty.

@churrific: I've had few issues with crashes and when I did it was because a mod wasn't updated and removing it solved the problem.

Sony should hit back with a "You can't polish a turd." response. Just to see the anger. Andrew House can deliver it in full Welsh smugness.

Bethesda and Sony have always had a bad relationship. This makes Bethesda look bad to me though. They've always been real shitty towards their Sony consumers and this PR is very much them trying to strongarm so Sony will just agree with whatever they want. It doesn't really matter to me in the end since Bethesda games have been shit for the past decade.

Something about that statement just feels poorly worded; like they're trying to shame Sony.

Not a great past 10 days for Sony's PR......

Not sure Sony is in a position to say that considering they are the kings of trying to polish turds.

Has Sony switched back over to Evil Mode already? That didn't require as much success on their part as I expected.

Not saying this as some kind of fan boy, because I have and enjoy playing both PS4 and Xbox One but... More power to Xbox One I guess.

@mems1224: Apple might have something to say about that. We're only seeing one side of this and, if they've been trying that long, there could be a system-level issue that can't be resolved, Bethesda could simply not have the software in step to pull modding off.

It can't just be some negotiation stand-off.

That's a badass statement for Bethesda to make

This is a bummer. I'm primarily a Sony platform player this generation and I was really looking forward to getting to mess around with mods on the PS4.

Sony is making a mistake here. I'll be buying SkyrimHD on my Xbox 1 instead - I'll probably get a new copy of Fallout 4 for that system too.

Why can't it be?