The Success of Starfield Mods Make Fans Question if Consumers Are Better Suited to Fix Games Than Developers

Bethesda has always fallen victim to a lot of hate with their recent releases and the same story played out with Starfield. Right after the release of the space RPG title, fans were disappointed with the product as it seemed boring, uninteresting, and lackluster. Furthermore, the game also didn’t fare well against No Man’s Sky which shares the same theme of space exploration.

While Starfield received fairly negative user reviews over a long period, it did manage to garner 13,000 concurrent players since its release which is great for a single-player title. This amount of players daily is again surprising for the space RPG as its user reviews state that it is not recommended.

However, modders have improved the title and has added a lot of exciting content to the barebones game. The modding community has been active in the creation of mods for Bestheda-developed games like Elder Scroll, and the Fallout series. Thus, the space exploration title received similar treatment from the expansive community even before the release of the Starfield Creation Kit.

As it stands now, there have been over 6500 mods released on Nexus Mods for Besthesda’s latest space title with over 33 million downloads. Most of these mods have been created to add fixes to the game which have been asked for by fans for a long time. During the early days after release, it was modders that took the challenge to improve the optimization as well as gameplay, and their mods had millions of downloads within days.

With modders taking on the challenge to fix Starfield instead of Bethesda, the gaming community is disappointed with the developers. Apart from game fixes, there have been additional mods to add better texture effects, faster animations, and an FOV slider. All these tops have over 100,000 downloads each, showing how much consumers needed it.

Are consumers better suited to fix games than developers, the case of Starfield proves the statement correct

Looking at the dedication that modders have given towards fixing Starfield, it is safe to say that consumers have always been more eager to fix released games. For instance, after the release of the game, there was no support for DLSS as Starfield only had FSR 2. However, it was modders that took on the task and worked on a version to allow the implementation of DLSS, a few days after its release.

It is even considered that the modding community technically saved Starfield from being a massive failure as it was unplayable in the early days. The performance issues of the title created a lot of fuss as Todd Howard stated that they have done their best to optimize the game and players require a better system to run it. Modder proved this statement wrong by releasing their fixes so that the community could enjoy the title.

Every time Bethesda releases a game, the modders take it upon themselves to create new content for it. Moreover, the community has been quick enough to dive into the issues before developers, despite not charging players a single penny. 

Nevertheless, developers cannot be solely blamed for creating an unoptimized game, as they have to face deadlines within which they have to complete their tasks. Moreover, they also take on multiple challenges themselves as they have to tweak a lot of things internally to give a permanent solution post-release. Still, even though the modding community has been active in taking on such issues to deliver a solution, some modders gave up on Starfield completely and called it unfixable in many instances. So, finding a proper solution is a task that is better suited for Besthesda and not the modding community.