Nexus Mods' new owners promise they won't monetise the site to death as users panic at the whiff of venture capital
Nexus Mods' new owners promise they won't monetise the site to death as users panic at the whiff of venture capital: 'The new owners are here… not sitting in a distant tower, remotely directing us all towards some nefarious goals'
Translation: "Once all the hub-bub dies down we intend to as slowly as you'll allow, slip in monetization."
Yup we've never seen this happen before, not ever. Not once!
/s
Exactly! No venture capitalist has ever taken something that could be monetized but wasn't, bought it out, and then proceeded to monetize it into irrelevancy before........
Just the tip, you won't even feel it.
Shortly after we introduce monetisation so terrible, everyone hates it - just to test your pain threshold
Narrator: they monetised the site to death.
... and beyond!
Won't monetize it "to death", just right up to the line of death.
Define "death."
'E's only mostly dead.
It'll always be at 1HP from now on.
Mod hosting seems to be a great usecase for torrent. It only need a suitable frontend and we are golden.
Someone mentioned this in another thread and I found it interesting:
Ckan kerbal space program mods
Apparently its a frontend for mods that's hosted on github
Github, that's limiting API calls, hmm...
Would a federated discovery frontend work? Peertube's back end of the service would probably work great as a starting point since it uses torrents to ease up on traffic for individual servers
Seems like a good idea. I wonder if there's anything already similar. It'd be a real treat to see a VC company get shafted.
Hit me up with an addy when you're on it!
Ooh I'll take some addy too. Been too long and I need to clean my fuckin house.
Reminder that ModDB still exists, and works.
EDIT:
Seeing as this is fairly decently upvoted now:
and also, I found this
https://github.com/loicreynier/awesome-modding
absolutely gigantic compendium of tons of mods, websites that have tons of mods for various games that are not nexusmods.
link for lazy folks like myself https://www.moddb.com/
The new owners are so trustworthy that they weren't even transparent about who they are. In the comments of the original announcement they defend that with:
This post wasn’t about Chosen — it was about Robin and the legacy he built over 24 years. We’re the new owners and ultimate decision-makers at Nexus Mods. We’ll share more about ourselves when we’ve earned that right. For now, we’re focused on listening, learning, and making modding even easier, and yes, you’ll see us around in the community being active.
I can't say I find that statement to be particularly trustworthy given it's coming from an NFT bro.
Yeah, you don't start out as a folk hero by hiding behind a black screen and waiting for the right moment to pounce. Sorry NFT dude.
„Trust me, bro, we won‘t enshitify, please don‘t leave and make something new elsewhere that’s out of our control.“
If there was one god damned example of any company saying this and sticking to it I might believe them. But I have yet to be proven wrong. Sucks too as they were my go to for mods.
All the examples I could think of have been recent acquisitions... which means they just haven't soured... yet. Sadly its inevitable.
Oh so they'll do it subtly enough to think people won't notice.
Ah, so basically Nexus Mods is dead to me now. Whenever venture capital is injected to anything, it's a bad sign. Ugh, great these particular Capitalists are from the crypto community...
They've been souring a lot of potentially cool projects with blockchain/web3 nonsense, like Playtron, for example. Lutris is now dead in the water and hasn't been updated for months now; the former dev is working on Playtron. There is a huge issue log that doesn't seem to be addressed at the moment.
Nexus is dead, Start making a new one.
Easy to say, yet so far most of the other modding sites seem to be content sitting on their butts right now.
Building an alternative would take time. And some money.
Maaaaaan. Fuck. I really like Nexus Mods. Get ready for another enshittifying ride to the bottom.
See all these free mods!? They're just for you to use however you want to!! Pretty awesome right. Just enjoy this .5mbs download. Oh you want faster download speeds? Well... Sir. That will be $12 a month. Evil laugh
Don't they already do that?
That's the joke
Tbh, unless you're downloading a DLC size mod or a big 4K textures pack the installs are nearly instant at the moment
venture capital
Aaaand it's gone.
Promise in one hand, shit in the other, let me know which one fills up first.
As a software engineer i always found nexus simply archaic. Hot take but the molding industry might be better off with a new mod index.
Here's how it goes with half the games I mod these days.
Funny how all of that is straight up solved with any package manager or even git itself (with submodules) for free and yet gaming community is protecting some proprietary burning heap of garbage.
The main problem in your setup is you installed Vortex. It and its prior incarnation Nexus Mod Manager have always been a thorn in actual mod developers' sides. Mod devs can easily tell you where to extract the zip to, and what dependencies you need. Any load order manager type thing will always be better when designed specifically for the game you're running. Having an "easy one click GUI!!!" doesn't actually help anybody because modding different games isn't a universally systematic process.
It should all be open source.
First thing is mods should just exist on free hosting providers for source code like GitHub/Lab etc.
Then an optional mod manager software that can import mods from these sources.
Non of this really needs a centralised community, these places already exist thanks to other better suited services like social media
asdf
pinky-promise
I miss Filefront.
They're definitely gonna monetize it to death.
This is tragic. I have been on NexusMods since the 2000s. I learned how to mod games because of that site. I will be pouring one out for this landmark of a website after work today. Paid for Lifetime and everything, because the website made it easy to find, install, and update mods for any given game that supported mods. Damn, man. Damn.
Same... this is the swiftest of kicks to the nads...
I think the new owners will fark NexusMods to death and you should start looking for a backup site to host your mods.
Currently downloading everything to MO2 and setting to not check for updates huehuehue
People gonna see torrents for a "preset packages" of Skyrim mods
As an outsider to Bethesda modding, given how difficult it looks, I'm surprised to hear this isn't already a thing.
well wabbajack works with nexus (You just buy one month for autodownloads) but I guess that'll have to change
I found a couple recommendation lists to "make the game look good" because I dont need all the fancy extras like body mods and weapons and grouped them together in load order, because I knew at some stage I could just package them nicely into a ZIP if I need to uninstall Skyrim for some reason. Glad to see I was ahead of the game
It really depends on how one is applyng mods. Bethesda does have their own mod site and in-game support for modding, and that's pretty straightforward (and the only option on consoles). That will limit what mods are available.
I do kind of wish that there were one cross-platform open-source universal "game mod" program that could support multiple online services. Would like to have Wabbajack-like functionality (apply a whole set of curated, tested-together mods) as a base too, as that'd lower the bar.
Modding community will never allow it, when Nexus allowed people to keep downloading old mods a bunch of authors decried it since they wanted the ability to remove a mod from the internet forever. It was 'theirs' (even though it's just modified Bethesda data)
Fuck Nexus Mods. You already need an account to download anything.
Well, unless someone makes an alternative, people are going to use it.
They do need to provide a lot of bandwidth, which isn't free, though I wonder how viable it'd be for someone to create a Nexus-like Website using magnet URLs and BitTorrent as a backend.
Maybe too much of a technical bar to attract users.
The issue with using torrents is longevity. You'd still want/need traditional storage backing it all. Don't want some mod to become lost media because nobody is actively seeding it.
There are JS based torrent downloaders. That would work for the normies to get files, but you'd still have to find a way to convince people to host files on the backend. It'd probably take a full-on desktop client wrapper with an embedded torrent client but that's a pretty hard sell for the average nerd if you're upfront, and probably a harder sell if you're dishonest about it.
Make it a legally binding contract, otherwise don't bother promising.
I miss FilePlanet. That's where I got my first Morrowind mods many years ago
At least GameBanana still exists, though there aren't as many uploads there as Nexus. Still good that there's an alternative
Fileplanet content is back but not how it looks right now.
Does anybody remember Cheat Planet or is that just me
Talk about putting part of your life's work completely out to pasture.
I give it a year. What a shame.
No kidding. And his post saying it was in good hands knowing full well it's venture capitalists. Fuck him.
Obviously they will. Years down the road. 🤗
Nexus Mods is far too late on the monetization aspect. The restrictions placed on mod downloading sucks, and it hard pushes buying a membership. Not to mention they basically gave up on vortex and its a buggy mess even if you run it native.
They gave up on vortex to make the nexus mods app. Which is pretty impressive so far. I would recommend reading the articles from the makers of it that discuss how they are making it and why. It's really interesting.
I have been using the nexus mods app for cyberpunk and it's really slick and easy.
Thats what they all say when they get acquired. "Won't change our creative direction" type bs.
Ok, so what is the current alternative nice option for SkyrimSE mods?
Preferably one with a mod manager/download client. Vortex is kind of janky but it did the job. I'd prefer not to manage any of this stuff manually, like cavemen. it's been decades you shouldn't need to do that
Preferably one with a mod manager/download client. Vortex is kind of janky but it did the job. I’d prefer not to manage any of this stuff manually, like cavemen. it’s been decades you shouldn’t need to do that
MO2 can do anything Vortex can, and in fact, Stalker and Stalker 2 modders prefer it. The files just need to be hosted elsewhere. A lot of modmakers advise against using Vortex to begin with.
Oh, thank you! MO2 seems a lot more clean and simple than Vortex.
...and in related news, now that I'm redownloading everything for funsies anyway, I have graduated from trying to keep my mod lists on a website to scribbling a list down in Joplin. With links and everything. In case these mods I'm using decide to move from Nexus or something.
I have a bridge to sell anyone who believes that.
Time to cancel the paid subscription for fast download i guess.
So, just half to death then?
Just crippling pain.
sure buddy, unfortunately they done that already. I especially love the 3 mbps cap on downloads with free accounts.
Maybe this is what it will finally take to get some of the bigger game communities off Nexus. It's a decade overdue.
Hahaha yea right… give it 6-12 months and that will change
File a lawsuit. Paying customers are supposed to do that if they were given an explanation but in bad-faith language.
As if it wasn't already.
I wish I could say this surprised me, but I’ve kind of been expecting this for awhile. They’ve been slowly getting worse for years, it went from just a hobby project to a corporation.
No they will sell it to someone that will though
When is Nexus Mods 2: Electric Boogaloo?
You're in luck, it's already in the works.
We all know how these things go, so I understand everybody’s fears but please wait to react until they make actual moves toward crossing the line. I remain optimistic about the site’s future, and the recent ways they handled user feedback as it has been changing in the last few years is evidence I should be
I won't stop using them because I (seemingly now foolishly) bought the lifetime membership, but I'll be continuing to look for alternatives.
I'm not going to continue to invest my time into an inevitable wreck.
Jesus fucking Christ, they didn't sell out to a fucking company! He transferred ownership to two long-time users of the site! There wasn't even a deal struck, he just said "you're the owners now!"
how do we know no money was involved? both the new owners apparently work at the same company, which was recently created and is a subsidiary of a vc firm.
How do we know there was? How, exactly is one to prove that a transaction didn't take place? Sure, he, the former owner, could say there wasn't, but that doesn't mean any more or less than what he already has, which is that he believes the new owners share his vision for the site! And at least he picked two people who, to my understanding, have been around Nexus for awhile!
I'm not saying it's impossible that Nexus enshittifies, and I understand that it's been a trend lately, but this, as of this moment right now, feels like senseless panic that ought to be saved for when they actually do something wrong! I'll join the hate wagon when they start brutally monatizing the site or taking IPOs.
