80lv (3D industry news media) reports some digging on the company bought Nexus Mod. 80.lv/…/exclusive-nexus-mods-was-apparently-bough…
Not exaxtly new info there though, just some no name, zero transparency, likely VC-funded company, as expected.
Nexus Mods Sale Sparks Concern in Modding Community
Submitted 1 day ago by tonytins@pawb.social to games@lemmy.world
https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/nexus-mods-sale-concern/
Comments
inconel@lemmy.ca 9 hours ago
JustARaccoon@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
To add to the conversation, one of the two new owners has replied to some questions: www.nexusmods.com/news/15301?comment_id=155643499
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 hours ago
SeventySeven@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
Can’t even view r*ddit links anymore because they hate VPNs…
Elevator7009@lemmy.zip 19 hours ago
See the original post here. reddit.com/…/nexus_mods_was_acquired_by_chosen_a_…
People on Restera did some digging: www.resetera.com/threads/…/post-141554013
Site of the company itself: 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: 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
AugustEast@lemmy.zip 6 hours ago
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.
Ashtear@lemmy.zip 20 hours ago
Ouch. Even selling it to Fandom would have been better than this.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 12 hours ago
Yeah that’s about what I expected. Fucking hell.
Crankenstein@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Welp, abandon ship.
TheOakTree@lemm.ee 9 hours ago
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.
ipitco@lemmy.super.ynh.fr 7 hours ago
Pretty much all platforms do this. It’s not a bad thing to want a big and established uncensored platform
Soggy@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Nobody should be obliged to host bigotry. That’s not “censorship” in a way that matters.
TheOakTree@lemm.ee 4 hours ago
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.
ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
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.
Crankenstein@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
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.
JustARaccoon@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
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. The community is more fragmented than you’d think
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 12 hours ago
People make mods to be played surely, why bother using a platform if no one can play your mod from it.
ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 12 hours ago
? Same reason people use shit platforms? I can’t barely watch Twitch with 3 ads in a row every 30min and they still is 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.
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 1 day ago
No mention of who it is even being sold to, so bizarre.
catloaf@lemm.ee 1 day ago
That’s a big red flag. Good news would say something like “we’re happy to announce a team of community ownership”.
Croquette@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
A big corpo comes in and offer you a life changing amount of money. Very few people can say no to that, myself included.
mintiefresh@piefed.ca 1 day ago
Oh this is sad news.
Let the enshitification begin.
sigh.
MetalMachine@feddit.nl 18 hours ago
Ooof. We need a new place now.
unit327@lemmy.zip 16 hours ago
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.
Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de 12 hours ago
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
rodneyck@piefed.social 1 day ago
Oh no, this is never good. How long before they implement a required pay system?
Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Instant death of nexus if that happens
JustARaccoon@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
They claimed they won’t, but we’ll have to see their actions www.nexusmods.com/news/15301?comment_id=155643499
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 day ago
If they make it $1 a month and it doesn’t charge you for .months you don’t download anything I’d be fine.
iamtherealwalrus@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
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.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
It’s was a lateral move from one person inside Nexus to another moderator. It wasn’t sold to some faceless corporation
etchinghillside@reddthat.com 1 day ago
That’s a good chunk of money for some internal moderator to have on hand. (Not that it was an all cash deal.)
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 hours ago
Yep I was wrong. I edited
Elevator7009@lemmy.zip 19 hours ago
Thank you for editing with corrected information when wrong!
witty_username@feddit.nl 1 day ago
Would it be possible to build a fediverse modding platform? What would that look like?
MouldyCat@feddit.uk 1 day ago
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?
The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 21 hours ago
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.
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Can things be fedirated and monetized so long as the monetization is put into maintenance & upkeep?
pulsewidth@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
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.
Fizz@lemmy.nz 1 day ago
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.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 hours ago
Good luck hosting the terabytes of data that mods have.
Crankenstein@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
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.
Allero@lemmy.today 17 hours ago
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.
pulsewidth@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
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.
the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Fuck em nexus has sucked for a while anyway, they started enshittification years ago.
massi1008@lemmy.world 1 day 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.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
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 mods 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.
the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
The folks who responded explained it better than I could have so I will deffer to them.
Limonene@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I haven’t used it in the last several years, but from about 2014-2018 any time I tried to download, it required registration, and any time I tried to register, it just didn’t work. It was some problem with the javascript in their site. Probably related to captcha or something. Yes, I tried multiple computers, multiple browsers, even tried registering on a library’s computer.
Looks like their site is less shit now, but it’s still awful.
njm1314@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Sounds like people need to start taking their mods off of there quick.
radix@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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)
Harvey656@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I think there’s a process for removing mods. The page disappears but if it was in a pack thay version will remain up until the pack author removes it.
It was not a welcomed change, people lost it.
TachyonTele@piefed.social 1 day ago
I would advocate removing mods. Definitely put them on another site though.
Crankenstein@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
If they start any nefarious monetization practices, absolutely pull mods. Until then though, I agree. No reason to pull ones that are already there, but definitely be prudent and start casting a wider net.
ChickenAndRice@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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.
Ulrich@feddit.org 1 day ago
They didn’t say anything about a sale…?
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Well, there’s still ModDB? (I don’t use ModDB so I dunno if it’s controversial or not)
Kolanaki@pawb.social 1 day ago
Idk if it’s controversial, but I’ve always hated the layout of that site. It seemingly has not changed in decades, looking at it now.
hal_5700X@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
So are they going to stop banning mods? Also We need more modding sites.
Crankenstein@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
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. It was a nice convenience while it lasted.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
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 “best for mod makers and users” to the exclusion of focusing on “best for business profits”.
dormedas@lemmy.dormedas.com 1 day ago
Best I’ve got for you is this
Post in thread ‘Nexus Mods site has been sold’ www.resetera.com/threads/…/page-2#post-141554013
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
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.
tonytins@pawb.social 1 day ago
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.
twinnie@feddit.uk 1 day ago
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.
FinalRemix@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 1 day ago
They had a good run. It was fun while it lasted.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
This is shit but… if people weren’t already concerned over the massive monopoly that Nexus had then they weren’t paying attention.
MemmingenFan923@feddit.org 1 day ago
I uninstalled Nexus Mods. Thank you.
Agrivar@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
You “uninstalled” a website? Are you trolling or a complete noob?
Justdaveisfine@midwest.social 6 hours ago
Maybe they meant the installable mod manager, Vortex.
SplashJackson@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I remember getting my Morrowind mods off there. Peanut Gallery edition for me!
who@feddit.org 1 day ago
I wonder if someone could upload a snapshot of it to the Internet Archive.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 day ago
God damnit we just can’t have nice things.
MrQuallzin@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Guy worked on the site for 24 years. Think he deserves some nice things himself (like reclaiming his life)
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 day ago
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.
Walican132@lemmy.today 6 hours ago
Yeah he could have reached out to the community to find someone to run it who would act ethically.
tonytins@pawb.social 1 day ago
And I literately just started using for Daggerfall. Really frustrating.