Quokk.auNexus Mods' new owners promise they won't monetise the site to death as users panic at the whiff of venture capital
www.pcgamer.com/games/nexus-mods-new-owners-pro…
19 Comments
Comments from other communities
MyDarkestTimeline01Translation: "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........
ElectricMachmanShortly after we introduce monetisation so terrible, everyone hates it - just to test your pain threshold
DiplomjodlerWon't monetize it "to death", just right up to the line of death.
Drasglaf„Trust me, bro, we won‘t enshitify, please don‘t leave and make something new elsewhere that’s out of our control.“
Mythra
chameleonThe 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.
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.
Nexus is dead, Start making a new one.
lechekaflanEasy 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.
clifPromise in one hand, shit in the other, let me know which one fills up first.
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/
Sorry, I probably should have included that.
I've been modding games and making mods for games since before Nexus or SteamWorkshop or anything even existed... I guess people just genuinely have never even heard of moddb these days, like how gamefaqs is an 'ancient relic' or w/e.
you belong in a museum!
Wait, that site isn't that old right? I used to use it for the battle of middle-earth mods.
Maybe I belong in a museum...
GoldenQuetzalI had never heard of it! Thanks for sharing
I also just found this:
https://github.com/loicreynier/awesome-modding
basically just a huge compendium of everywhere all kinds of mods for anything are hosted, that'll give you an idea of how the game modding scene is actually rather dispersed, not only monopolized by nexusmods.
not sure if its in this huge list but:
fpsbanana
is another one i am quite familiar with, been going strong with mostly source mods... possibly since the late 90s, at the least the early 2000's.
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
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.
NutWrenchI think the new owners will fark NexusMods to death and you should start looking for a backup site to host your mods.
xavier666
Deflated0neThis 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.
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.
𝔼𝕩𝕦𝕤𝕚𝕒Currently 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
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)
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
talIt 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.
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
Altima NEODon't they already do that?
I Cast FistI 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
ddash
MacN'CheezusTalk 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.
PikaNexus 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.
I wasn't aware there was a replacement that was suitable. I will have to look into that soley on the fact there seems to be a linux native release, thank you.
Yeah I have my worries in the sale of nexusmods.com. But everything i have read about the new app is really promising and the people working on it have worked on other major mod managers in the past as well. So they seem to know what they are doing. It's still in really early alpha so if you use it, make backups. Sometimes you have to completely uninstall and then reinstall to update which is annoying. But thats the cost of using alpha software.
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.
hazelHere's how it goes with half the games I mod these days.
- Game not manageable in Vortex out of the box
- Find the extension that makes the game manageable
- All popular mods are based on one single mod that acts as a framework or SDK for those other mods
- That prerequisite mod isn't well maintained on Nexus, and the author recommends using $otherModManager to manage this game
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.
poryThe 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
But social media is 95% turbocancer...
I mean things like Discord and Revolt, even Reddit is better for communities to discuss things about mods than the Nexus site
Thats what they all say when they get acquired. "Won't change our creative direction" type bs.
Maybe this is what it will finally take to get some of the bigger game communities off Nexus. It's a decade overdue.
Narri N. (they/them)sure buddy, unfortunately they done that already. I especially love the 3 mbps cap on downloads with free accounts.
File a lawsuit. Paying customers are supposed to do that if they were given an explanation but in bad-faith language.
RoseOk, 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
Vanilla_PuddinFudgePreferably 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.
_cryptagion [he/him]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.
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
DaeJesus 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!"
lime!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.
Do you know how easy it would be, if money was not transferred, for the new and old owners to both outright say so? Yes they could also lie but that's irrelevant. if this wasn't a capital driven transaction, they'd assuage many fears by telling us it wasn't. They haven't done that.
Hmm where have we heard that before? Any eta guesses?
5 months.
2 for the new owners to come up with a plan on how to extract the most value from their purchase.
1 to implement a shitty idea that will immediately get community backlash, then revert it.
2 to wait for people to forget about it before introducing the same idea but presented in a less shitty way.
If I was to place any bets on what they would do, it's either going to be: selling comments and mod descriptions to a corporation for LLM training; or adding time-tracking analytics to their modding client and selling that data to advertisers or research firms while making users require a subscription to use third-party clients.
On a lighter note, I’ve been looking for Nexus alternatives. I found this one site that advertised itself as like a censorship-resistant host.
I was like, “Oh, that’s pretty cool. I wonder if they host the mods that Nintendo kills off or things like that.” It was not that…
I go to the site, and all the posts on the front page are like, “Restoring the hard r in game Xenoblade.”
My personal favorite was:
More Racism in Windhelm -
Improved
The ways of the business idiot are well known by this point. People know what happens when sites get bought, they know it means things are about to get worse.
The modern internet is becoming absolutely over burdened by rent seeking and attempts at enclosure of the digital commons. No one hasn’t experienced it by this point. Even if they don’t have the words to describe it, they know it when they see it.
Cait
You can trust us! We use words! See, I'm saying things and that means it's set in stone and I'm totally not lying! We just spent the money out of charity, we're not looking to get an immediate return on investment and then increase profit from there on! No, never!
Generally when a corpo says they are not doing some thing what they are telling you it's that that thing is precisely the first thing they are going to do.
And yet we are surrounded by the bones of companies and projects that were killed by private equity.
This is the end of Nexus Mods. It might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but the cord will be cut the moment it's not suitable for the new overlords.
Guys, you can trust us! We absolutely won't do the thing we are known to specialize in! Honest! What? You think we would just go on the Internet and lie??? Nobody does that!
Not to death, but to near critical I bet
Time to move all your mods to loverslab
Fuck yeah now I can get ALL my mods from the same place
I'm willing to withhold judgement. But, Chosen's website reads like bog standard vulture capital trying to pretend they are not going to ride in and enshitify anything they touch. With lots of broad claims about being "community driven" and AI art. Maybe this will work out; but, I wouldn't be putting money on it.
That said, I don't blame Dark0ne for wanting to step back. He's be running this wonderful site for the community for a long time and deserves the opportunity to go do other things. I wish him the best of luck and I hope that NexusMods survives this transition.
Didn't use it much, but deleted my account anyways.
Someone should be spinning up the next alternative now because zero chance these tech bro 'tards manage not to fuck things up.
At least GOG is getting into mod management too.
Moddb still exists
DEG Mods is catching up pretty quickly.
Ah man, I'd been holding off on setting up another TES game on my PC since going to Linux. Now I'm going to have to go pre-emptive mod shopping for the essentials, and do it for so many games!
It's a real shame that between crypto currencies, federated servers, and bittorrent we still haven't come up with a fair and robust system for hosting large content archives.
The need for corporate-funded servers is killing video sites, mod sites, emulators, streaming, libraries, and so much more. Even the "self-hosted" crowd is like 90% dependent on cloud-hosting companies.
I've been talking about how ridiculous Nexusmods is for YEARS now. I'm just glad more people are turning on them.
Alternatives exist. While Nexus definitely has an edge in terms of features, there are some competitors rapidly catching up (eg DEG Mods). This announcement was just the motivation needed to get more people considering leaving that cesspit of a platform.
I have a lifetime membership. Let's hope that doesn't go down the drain if shit hits the fan.
lifetime means you or the company, whichever dies first
Not even close. Lifetime means until they figure the negative PR is worth axing lifetime memberships.
Can't you use r2modman instead? Or does an old source mod community exist?
Anti Commercial-AI license