80lv (3D industry news media) reports some digging on the company bought Nexus Mod. https://80.lv/articles/exclusive-nexus-mods-was-apparently-bought-by-a-shady-corporate-entity
Not exaxtly noteworthy info there though, it’s just some no name, 6 month old, likely VC-funded company with zero transparency.
To add to the conversation, one of the two new owners has replied to some questions: https://www.nexusmods.com/news/15301?comment_id=155643499
Welp. Almost all of the conversations I’ve read about this change have devolved into “hopefully the new owners don’t enforce their political views.”
They always say shit like “if you don’t like a mod, don’t use it,” but they can’t wrap their heads around the idea that if they can’t tolerate the (ex-)site owner exercising his own moral beliefs, they can find a different platform.
Fun.
Pretty much all platforms do this. It’s not a bad thing to want a big and established uncensored platform
Nobody should be obliged to host bigotry. That’s not “censorship” in a way that matters.
But if their argument is that you can simply ignore mods you disagree with, then those individuals should stop brigading against and whining about, say, a mod that enables queer relationships. As their own arguments imply, they can simply ignore those mods.
They should really pick a side instead of cherrypicking what’s convenient for them.
Ooof. We need a new place now.
A new website will suffer the same fate eventually. The best solution I’ve seen is CKAN for kerbal space program mods. Each mod just hosts its own releases for free on github or wherever they like, and the whole mod index is just another github repo.
https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/CKAN?tab=readme-ov-file#whats-the-ckan
The problem with that it’s not “wherever they like”, it is github 99% of the time. It is easier to fix when github enshitifies completely, but it will still require fixing
If it works with any git platform, you have several alternatives + self hosting.
The chokepoint is the index, but if the mod repo is up and you have the url by some other way, it should work
It does but it does so far as someone updates indices. It’s easier with git, but someone still needs to do all of it.
Yeah that’s about what I expected. Fucking hell.
Ouch. Even selling it to Fandom would have been better than this.
Can’t even view r*ddit links anymore because they hate VPNs…
Really? I onyl use VPN for reddit and don’t have an issue. But then again there is a lot of VPN’s out there, they would have to find each endpoint to block.
Content of the Reddit post follows:
See the original post here. https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1lcyjl6/nexus_mods_was_acquired_by_chosen_a_company/
People on Restera did some digging: https://www.resetera.com/threads/nexus-mods-site-has-been-sold.1219452/post-141554013
Site of the company itself: https://wearechosen.io/
Here is a monetization “cheat sheet” that the CEO posted on LinkedIn which is linked on Chosen’s main page if you scroll down: https://i.imgur.com/ztjS4K7.jpeg
In the CEO’s LinkedIn profile it says this:
Working closely with teams at NexusMods and beyond to build meaningful, sustainable experiences
If I had to guess the acquisition details are under some sort of NDA right now
That cheat sheet is weirdly coherent. Human, almost. Weird.
Welp, abandon ship.
God damnit we just can’t have nice things.
Guy worked on the site for 24 years. Think he deserves some nice things himself (like reclaiming his life)
Yeah he could have reached out to the community to find someone to run it who would act ethically.
You make it sound like the site has been destroyed and enshitefied. Do we have any proof of such so far? Or can we put our trust in the guy who made it to hand it off to someone he trusts to do good by it? Everyone is freaking out about a possibility, which isn’t without cause since we’ve seen what can happen with other companies, but so far there is no need to pull out pitchforks.
Oh I agree. I’m just bitching that it was all done secretly.
The fact that it’s secret implies to me the community won’t be happy. Idk.
Yeah, the doing it in secret can definitely be worrying and flame rumors, I agree. I’m being optimistic that the new owner is someone close to them and they’re still working out details before announcing who they are
He does deserve that, but I wish the single biggest modding hub on the internet and a load bearing pillar of an entire gaming culture wasn’t sold off to an unnamed party with no transparency and only vague reassurances that “nothing will change”.
What with the late stage capitalist society we’re living in, I’ve been conditioned to think that good things being sold off rarely amounts to good things.
Let’s hope this is one of the few exceptions.
Narrator: It wasn’t.
At the very least the entity that bought it will not rely on donations and revenue from upgraded download speeds, so it will definitely enshittify further to some degree.
The problem is not capitalism, it’s really us expecting shit to be free and rewarding good development and maintenance effort with thoughts and prayers.
Dude I’ve been premium for years. First sign of betrayal that will change though
Capitalism created this expectation. That’s how corpos operate. Capture the market then bleed it.
The problem is not capitalism […] it’s really us expecting shit to be free
No, “we” are not the problem. “We” donated and participated (by making mods) and “we” are responsible for giving the site what value it had. If it had no value, then it couldn’t have been sold.
Quit trying to blame the users for fuck’s sake.
The problem is capitalism, plain and simple.
How would this specific problem be better under another system?
In a system where money is not a thing it would just be a creative passion project and run endlessly until it was no longer needed.
Great. Yes. Under some kind of egalitarian free-energy tech utopia such as you’re describing, websites like Nexus mods would be even better. Sadly there are no such systems already operating for us to move to, and we do not yet have the technology to try creating a new one.
So any other political systems that are more real-world?
Removed by mod
And I literately just started using them for Daggerfall. Really frustrating.
GOG’s move into mod support seems pretty prescient now.
They’ll probably implement a daily/hourly download limit like MEGA does. So, for example, you can download 1000000000 small mods of some kbs, but the limit is 5 GB, so the mod bundle for big games is virtually limited to premium users.
They’ll probably try to change the lifetime subscription(the biggest sin in capitalism, how do you make infinite money without doing nothing if people can buy subscription once?), making it useless compared to the premium premium subscription.
Paid mods I think are unlikely, why bother to make a change so unpopular? Milk this shit for a decade and press this button only when shit hits the fan.
Is a enshification process not so painful so the vast majority will not bother to look for alternatives.
In other words: We’re doomed.
People make mods to be played surely, why bother using a platform if no one can play your mod from it.
? Same reason people use shit platforms? I can’t barely watch Twitch with 3 ads in a row every 30min and they still are the biggest streaming platform even when is shitty to the users and streamers. It’s a community based platform unless the community move to other place they still be big because people is there.
I was going to ask if twitch was still relevant but then realised I genuinely don’t give a shit.
Paid mods I think are unlikely, why bother to make a change so unpopular? Milk this shit for a decade and press this button only when shit hits the fan.
Unfortunately, I think this will be likely because Nexus has almost entirely cornered the market on mods. It is the place people get their mods from if not the Steam Workshop.
People would have to actually abandon the convenience and go back to scrolling a bunch of games specific forums for their mods. I don’t see that happening unfortunately and I’m pretty sure the executives at the new company know this. It’s a common marketing tactic to exploit the sunk cost fallacy.
Nah there’s some games that still only have stuff on moddb, thunderstore is the main place for v rising and a few other popular titles, and for Minecraft there’s curseforge and modrinth, and GOG is adding mods now too. The community is more fragmented than you’d think
It’s was a lateral move from one person inside Nexus to another moderator. It wasn’t sold to some faceless corporation
Edit: fuck me I was was wrong:
https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/1lcyzxz/nexus_mods_was_acquired_by_chosen_a_company/
Thank you for editing with corrected information when wrong!
That’s a good chunk of money for some internal moderator to have on hand. (Not that it was an all cash deal.)
Yep I was wrong. I edited
No mention of who it is even being sold to, so bizarre.
A big corpo comes in and offer you a life changing amount of money. Very few people can say no to that, myself included.
That’s a big red flag. Good news would say something like “we’re happy to announce a team of community ownership”.
Oh this is sad news.
Let the enshitification begin.
sigh.
Would it be possible to build a fediverse modding platform? What would that look like?
I guess you still have the issue of someone needing to pay for the huge number of downloads, most of which are going to come from users who make no other contributions to the site. Maybe you could combine a fedi site with torrents or something?
Yeah this is a perfect use case for torrents, could go a step further and keep track of a downloader’s ratio to stop people leaching.
The Internet Archive. No need to reinvent the wheel. Have a discussion with them - set up a new project. Boom - everyone’s mods hosted in perpetuity by a free digital library.
Can things be fedirated and monetized so long as the monetization is put into maintenance & upkeep?
Nothing stopping you trying!
Good luck hosting the terabytes of data that mods have.
Let me introduce you to torrenting and community distribution of data.
It could be implemented this way so that no one individual would need to fully shoulder the burden of hosting everything.
Federation would allow you to only host mods not hosted at other servers, with some level of redundancy.
Also, it could use a modding app with BitTorrent-like functionality, so that downloaders could share their copies as well.
So…old mods or mods for uninteresting and obscure games would eventually die because of zero seeders.
I know there’s no easy answer for this question but this would happen. Just try looking on the p2P scene for an unpopular or extremely niche tv show. There’s usually zero or sometimes in a rare occasion less than 3 seeders
I wonder if this could be solved on protocol level, i.e. automatically preserve objects with least redundancy, as known to the server.
Like if federated servers hold 50 copies of a file, it’s likely not worthy of saving, but if there is only 1 or 2, it must be stored.
Since mods are almost exclusively unable to be copyrighted nowadays, there is a very good chance the Internet Archive would be more than happy to host the mod data - as they have with many community projects.
What would you federate? Would you federate posts of each mod with a link back to the home instance. Would you federate the entire modfile.
I’m not sure activity pub is the right fit here. We would lose so many mods and it would make it much harder to find mods.
deleted by creator
Oh no, this is never good. How long before they implement a required pay system?
They claimed they won’t, but we’ll have to see their actions https://www.nexusmods.com/news/15301?comment_id=155643499
Instant death of nexus if that happens
If they make it $1 a month and it doesn’t charge you for .months you don’t download anything I’d be fine.
Unfortunately there are still bills to pay even if you don’t visit the site for months. Keeping the lights on is not free. So that is a very unlikely subscription model you’re describing.
They have bills to pay even if I’m not a customer.
They didn’t say anything about a sale…?
Well, there’s still ModDB? (I don’t use ModDB so I dunno if it’s controversial or not)
Idk if it’s controversial, but I’ve always hated the layout of that site. It seemingly has not changed in decades, either, looking at it now.
