Nexus Mods has been sold to new owners, causing many concerns and confusions within the PC modding community.
  • TheOakTree@lemm.eeEnglish
    31·
    2 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.

      • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        6·
        5 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

        • kiagam@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 hours ago

          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

          • Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            1·
            1 hour ago

            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.

    • MrQuallzin@lemmy.worldEnglish
      996·
      23 hours ago

      Guy worked on the site for 24 years. Think he deserves some nice things himself (like reclaiming his life)

      • Coelacanth@feddit.nuEnglish
        148·
        23 hours 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.

        • absquatulate@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2564·
          23 hours ago

          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.

          • Xenny@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            35 minutes ago

            Dude I’ve been premium for years. First sign of betrayal that will change though

          • Supervisor194@lemmy.worldEnglish
            722·
            21 hours ago

            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.

              • Zoot@reddthat.comEnglish
                161·
                19 hours ago

                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.

                • MouldyCat@feddit.ukEnglish
                  314·
                  18 hours ago

                  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?

    • Tony Bark@pawb.socialOPEnglish
      191·
      23 hours ago

      And I literately just started using them for Daggerfall. Really frustrating.

  • ZeroHora@lemmy.mlEnglish
    372·
    20 hours 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.

    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      5 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.mlEnglish
        1·
        4 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 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.

    • Crankenstein@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      12 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 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.

      • JustARaccoon@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        5 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, and GOG is adding mods now too. The community is more fragmented than you’d think

      • Crankenstein@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        12 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.todayEnglish
        3·
        11 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.

        • DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          21·
          4 hours ago

          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

      • pulsewidth@lemmy.worldEnglish
        31·
        11 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.

    • MouldyCat@feddit.ukEnglish
      32·
      19 hours 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.zoneEnglish
        12·
        14 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.

      • pulsewidth@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        11 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.nzEnglish
      13·
      17 hours 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.

    • Croquette@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      4·
      6 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.

    • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
      27·
      21 hours ago

      That’s a big red flag. Good news would say something like “we’re happy to announce a team of community ownership”.

    • Crankenstein@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      12 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, 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.