Nexus Mods' new owners promise they won't monetise the site to death as users panic at the whiff of venture capital
1y 5d ago by lemmy.world/u/inclementimmigrant in games from www.pcgamer.com
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.
Won't monetize it "to death", just right up to the line of death.
Define "death."
- Some lawyer, probably.
'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
@daniskarma
just use magnet:// links, and optionally ZeroNet if you really require html site.
Gnutella2, e2dk:// had network wide plain text search function.
@mnemonicmonkeys
unfortunately WebTorrent is not feasible due inability of web browsers to participate in current DHT network.
Find freedom by abandoning https web. In real p2p there is no distinction between fronend or backend, all peer equal.
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.
Oh so they'll do it subtly enough to think people won't notice.
„Trust me, bro, we won‘t enshitify, please don‘t leave and make something new elsewhere that’s out of our control.“
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.
I 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.
Up until now I thought moddb was all that existed.
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...
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.
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.
Read the article. They are.
I did, and my worries were confirmed! I haven't updated my comment.
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.
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.
Promise in one hand, shit in the other, let me know which one fills up first.
Let me just use this promise hand to send you a pic.
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.
- 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.
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
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
I didn't down vote you, but Discord is a huge offender regarding enshittification of the internet. Reddit might even be worse.
That's not my point though, they're much better at holding discussion and keeping people updated than the Nexus mods site was
venture capital
Aaaand it's gone.
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
I think the new owners will fark NexusMods to death and you should start looking for a backup site to host your mods.
asdf
pinky-promise
They're definitely gonna monetize it to death.
I miss Filefront.
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...
Make it a legally binding contract, otherwise don't bother promising.
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
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
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.
Fuck Nexus Mods. You already need an account to download anything.
A free account.
It's still an extra barrier. There's zero point other than tracking what people do.
News flash running the servers isn't free.
Yes they are tracking us. That's how they pay to keep the servers running.
If your not paying you are the product.
If you're paying they're also tracking you.
But somehow eg. rdr2mods.com is free, and without account. Oh wonder.
Mods for one game vs basically every game
I could probably host the entirety of the mods on that site on my homelab, Nexus is exponentially larger and more complex
Mods for one game vs basically every game
As it should be. Or are we pretending that centralization is suddenly good now?
It has always had its perks.
You mean cash for shareholders/owners? And a hassle to move to the next platform once it destroys itself?
Do you consider those perks? I certainly don't.
Cool hope they do a decent job moderating the servers they run and limiting malware exposure. I also hope they've taken steps to prevent themselves being used as a host for malicious entities to distribute malware to third parties
Ah, like the sites of the 90s.
Yes I know.
Since we're necrosing the thread
The reason that they require an account is because if they did not require user side authentication then it would be trivial to upload obfuscated malware and then use Nexus as a host to distribute it. If someone uploads malware to a random S3 bucket or random VPS or random shared server and tries to use it as a malicious host, the owner and operator will notice a massive bandwidth spike Nexus won't notice 30,000 downloads.
We're talking about for downloading not uploading.
It also tracks what you've downloaded to provide update notifications and encourage you to participate in the mod quality ratings system.
It's not 100% without reason beyond tracking users.
And to limit scrapers.
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.
Wouldn't the average nerd only need a good ol' regular torrent client?
The slightly-more-than-average nerd could be incentivized through a specialized client that also acts as a mod manager (iirc Nexus Mods does this, minus the torrent protocol), and the bigger nerd would write themselves a Linux client without using glib nor GTK while evading bioluminescent three-letter org agents of specific ethnicity and sexual orientation.
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
I have a bridge to sell anyone who believes that.
Pinky promise?
Obviously they will. Years down the road. 🤗
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.
So, just half to death then?
Just crippling pain.
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.
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.
Thats what they all say when they get acquired. "Won't change our creative direction" type bs.
Time to cancel the paid subscription for fast download i guess.
Maybe this is what it will finally take to get some of the bigger game communities off Nexus. It's a decade overdue.
sure buddy, unfortunately they done that already. I especially love the 3 mbps cap on downloads with free accounts.
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.
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.
When is Nexus Mods 2: Electric Boogaloo?
You're in luck, it's already in the works.
No they will sell it to someone that will though
As if it wasn't already.
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.
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.