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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
Ouch. Even selling it to Fandom would have been better than this.
Can’t even view r*ddit links anymore because they hate VPNs…
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
Welp, abandon ship.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So are they going to stop banning mods? Also we need more modding sites.
There are plenty, they just aren’t as big or as well designed because they are just small forums, and most are usually game specific.
Nexus was unique in that it was a hub for the modding community, made specifically because people didn’t want to have to browse hundreds of different forums to get their mods that may or may not be compatible with each other. It was a nice convenience while it lasted.
Would it be possible to build a fediverse modding platform? What would that look like?
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.
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
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!
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
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.
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”.
Oh this is sad news.
Let the enshitification begin.
sigh.
I’ve seen too many services go through enshittification, which is why I’ve always made backups of the mods I installed.
That said, that obviously scales poorly if you download a lot of mods or really massive mods.
Oh no, this is never good. How long before they implement a required pay system?
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.
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.
