I saw how many we have intelligent moders, who made a nice mode and very impressive. I still can't understand what dev team is dreaming? Why don't want to do competition for nice work and hire people work together. More people more futures, more ideas and more fast game they will make. I have 40 mods and all of them very useful. I can't take others mods, because my computer is to slow for some. People are doing a great job and I can say some jobs is better even that developers made. And this is where they should start to look.

There are a few modders who have gone on to work at Bethesda, and at least one now at Obsidian. As for an official competition, something like this is possible but judging the entries would likely be an extremely difficult task - chances are just playing through them all would be monumental unless the contest rules were very exclusive. I'm not sure if a contest would be worth while if only a few people, or only a few organized groups, could participate.

Note: moderators are not Bethesda employees and we do not speak for Bethesda. This is personal speculation, and shouldn't be considered official in any manner. I could be wrong, but I'm not sure if Bethesda has ever explicitly discussed the possibility of modding contests in public, which means we don't have much to go on in this regard besides the fact that it's something they haven't done in the past.

Why pay people when you can get the community to do it for free. Not even this, but you can do this and sell it to them that this is a GOOD thing. Having the ability to mod a game and use a CK to make drastic changes is great, the problem is that we HAVE to use it to begin with. It allows them to make great errors or flat out cut corners as players will "mod it in later." This really started to become a growing trend particularly with MMORPGs. The next DLC you have or next series of game, you take the best free mods, claim it as your own, and SELL it to people!

A number of game modders have been hired by game developers. This is common practice.

One thing you have to remember, modders live all over the world, game developers typically only have one office, so just because someone has skills, does not mean they are close enough to work for the company.

Or even they can nominate and give something for memories for good mod and ideas. Even You can make something like sculpture mod of the year and put some ideas in future realize. I don't that they have steal idea but at least they have to contact and give something for memories for great work. Small thing, but You it gives to You memories from that time.

Hate to be that guy but... To hire people costs money. I know there are alot of extremely talented modders out there but as has been pointed out the work, time, money and effort involved for any kind of competition wouldn't be worth it.

I don't think money would be an issue.

Wait wait. We are living in 21 century age, so not that time was medieval ages, like You send post by bird or guy. We are in technology ages and isn't necessary to work in office only. Also You can do online, You can make conferences and others things. Network is very fast growing technology so now you can do this thing and You will save money. No more spaces need in office and less money will cost and You can hire a lot people.

I think what he's trying to say is that the developers should give the modding community more recognition and reward them for a good job.

I mean they will give reward which they put in game developing. And it can be like trophy or have to able to work in company.

to work on the development of a game the company does not want to send their work across the internet to other employees to do a bit of work on it then send it back, not only does that make the work take longer but it also has a risk of the work being stolen or corrupted

It may not be an issue for some but, I dont think many people are rolling around in cash at the moment.

Yeah, I understand what you're saying, but the thing is, modders do that already. And for free, without any rewards. Their only incentive is to make the game better for themselves, and for others, and that's the only incentive they need, not some reward. Sure, a position as a developer would be nice, but only for a consistent stream of professional level mods.

But then again, why hire them when they're already doing it for free?

Yes was the person who made OOO hired by Bethesda, that is what I have read anyways.

Oscuro was hired by Obsidian actually, and worked on Fallout New Vegas.

Not really. Have you ever heard of a book called "The Mythical Man Hour"? Its a classic in the field of (computer) project management, and a central premise is that simply adding more people ("man hours") to a project can cause a loss of productivity (per person, and in quality, and in total).

Yeah, we read about something like that in economics. It's called the Law of Diminishing Returns, I think. One of the examples was that if you keep adding employees, at some point the output will start decreasing rather than increasing.

Now way! That's awesome...

I read about him being hired by Bethesda to work on Skyrim, and I thought that was great. But, I didn't really hear of it after, so I was kind of . But now I am kind of

From one point I can say, that Bethesda is lazy company, what they made modding tool, because they put less effort in game developing. From other point they don't have respects for modders. I am not modder, but I respect people who done right modds and they definitely need in game developing. Some of them done long time, even they didn't track mods and didn't put in this game. It's a really bad company. Does anyone remember when Bethesda announced for dev team, in one do do whatever You want with creation kit. When I saw results I was so surprised. What they are doing in 4 years developing?

Thats great, I know I read somewhere he was hired by Bethesda, but that is an interesting bit of news to be sure.

Pretty much. Same rule is also known as the "Law of Increasing Costs", which is more applicable in software development. Big development teams have a hard time collaborating fully; for some software, the ideal team size is one.
However, its even worse than that because, as a project advances, it costs more to bring people in because they need to learn more about the project to be able to do anything useful (or even just to no break things). So wehn an advanced project is behind schedule / has problems, the LAST thing you want to do is bring in more people.

Point being, I don't see Bethesda doing any hiring until they get patches and DLC out the door and are ready to start on something new.

Bethesda have a lot huge projects, they should think something about. They made Creation Kit, so they should create another team, which developer and test mods, collect them and put in big DLC for all platforms. But things they have test and make DLC from ten mods or more, which doesn't affect game development progress. They have to think that console players also paying same amount money or more for Skyrim, and they deserve to get futures more often.