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)
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.
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.
Capitalism created this expectation. That's how corpos operate. Capture the market then bleed it.
And I literately just started using them for Daggerfall. Really frustrating.
GOG's move into mod support seems pretty prescient now.
No mention of who it is even being sold to, so bizarre.
That's a big red flag. Good news would say something like "we're happy to announce a team of community ownership".
A big corpo comes in and offer you a life changing amount of money. Very few people can say no to that, myself included.
Oh this is sad news.
Let the enshitification begin.
sigh.
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.
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
Fuck em nexus has sucked for a while anyway, they started enshittification years ago.
Care to explain in what way? I've been a casual user of the side for a few years now and except the short waiting times for downloads and endorsement reminders there has been nothing to really frustrate me.
The constant pushes for their premium model, while understandable, sucked as a user. Same with the increasing push to do EVERYTHING through their mod managers which actually had a tendency to conflict with the community made installers for a lot of older games.
They also had weird stances as to what triggered a mod as NSFW. Nobody (sane) would complain about the straight up sex mods but it had the same youtube problem where mature/"mature" content would get age gated. Same with their very hit or miss rules on "politics". The reality being that it was just a way to blanket ban content for the moderators but it led to hilarity when Skyrim (the game that site basically was built on) has white supremacists in-game but you can't even acknowledge that because it would make the chuds angry out of game.
For what it was? I liked it. But it has been on the decline for... probably about half the time it has existed.
I'll also add on that there is a tin foil (but not THAT much) conspiracy that a lot of the pushback against Bethesda's premium mods came from the Nexus mods staff/team since it was a direct competition to them and they realized no modder would risk that smoke from... asking to get paid for their hard work.
Sounds like people need to start taking their mods off of there quick.
Might be too late. They changed the policy a few years ago when they introduced mod packs. They didn't want entire packs to fail if one person pulled their mod, so total deletion was disabled.
Folks can still hide their mods and make new individual downloads impossible, but it's still there in the background.
(All this is from memory. I hope I'm wrong)
I wouldn't advocate removing mods. Definitely put them on another site though.
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.
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
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.
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.
Wait, was it confirmed sold? The news post on Nexus fron this morning indicated that the existing head admin and CEO (of 24 years) was just stepping back (and not even away entirely), and had already put the year+ in of identifying two successors from his existing team.
I didn't see anything regarding a sale, and the existing admin said quite a bit about taking this seriously from a standpoint of what's best for mod makers and users and not best for business profits.
Edit: I'm not seeing any company name given because as far as I can tell, it wasn't sold. It's the same company, same employees, the person at the tip top is just shifting.
And since when is "comicbook dot com" a source for game modding news? Unless someone can show me something from a more direct or reputable source, I think this is just someone running with the most click bait interpretation of the nexusmods post.
Edit x2: Dormedas's resetera link has some convincing investigation that the two people named as taking over the reigns may work for a company that provides esports training, and also consulting services for user generated content focused companies.
Best I’ve got for you is this
Post in thread 'Nexus Mods site has been sold' https://www.resetera.com/threads/nexus-mods-site-has-been-sold.1219452/page-2#post-141554013
Thanks! That's damn good for "best effort"! A convincing lead on what company it may be.
Personally, I still don't think it's time for immediate red alert, but I'll have to keep an eye on things. Hopefully we'll see some competitors like GameBanana step up to the challenge.
They say ownership has changed hands but that it isn’t a corporate “exit”. The whole announcement is extremely vague on the details with the only names given are two people.
I’ll probably keep using it and see what happens. To be honest I’ll just go where the content is, and if the new people fuck it up it’ll likely go elsewhere.
I got a "lifetime membership" on discount right before they did away with that option entirely. I'll stick around for a bit, too, mostly.out of convenience, but I ain't contributing, and I'm leaving uBlock on at all times.
Well, there's still ModDB? (I don't use ModDB so I dunno if it's controversial or not)
They didn't say anything about a sale...?
This is shit but... if people weren't already concerned over the massive monopoly that Nexus had then they weren't paying attention.
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