NexusMods Changes Hands
nexusmods.comHopefully this inspires more developers to either build-in their own mod browsers ( e.g. Factorio ), or for communities to build their own open source mod platforms ( e.g. KSP's CKAN ).
Both of those are preferable to the relative hell that is dealing with nexus mods.
I consider Nexus Mod the Fandom of modding sites.
It's used because it has the most existing content, not because it does anything especially well (download speed limits are irritating and to me make no sense).
Bandwidth contracts can be defined as fixed-cost billing for 95th +/- percentile of usage per period with charges of peak bursts exceed x% of period, without charging for bytes transferred at all; before S3, this was typical, and it’s still available from providers today. Under that model, free user rate limits ensure that their peak possible bandwidth bill from concurrent unpaid users fits within their (cheap and fixed) contractual limits, while paid users pay for a different endpoint whose bandwidth contract is usage-billed and/or has a higher 95th percentile rate and/or has a higher peak burst cap so that rate limits aren’t necessary. This hybrid approach lets them provide both {cheap, reliable, slow} free service, and {costly, reliable, fast} paid service at a much lower total cost than if they went with one or the other approach exclusively. (Elsethread, a suggestion that they switch to torrents would provide {cheap, unreliable, fast} service, completing the “pick two” trifecta.)
Why aren't they just using torrent?
I'll never understand why Steam Workshop didn't take off as the de facto mod delivery platform over NexusMods or other random sites. It seemed perfectly positioned to do so.
Because Steam Workshop is only for games on Steam's shop, distributed by valve. That locks out huge chunks of your audience. If anything its good thats not taken off otherwise we'd have EpicMods, GogMods, etc and even more fragmentation.
Sure it makes it easy for people who own the game on Steam, but what about everyone else?
Also, as popular as Steam is, their workshop section is pretty awful. The search seems to have been cobbled together and has awful matching, the discoverability of mods is dire, and they're still using the same antiquated poor UX for discussions as they were over a decade ago.
The only game that I know that uses steam workshop for mods is Rimworld.
It works okay, but it's a little clunky. Discoverability is weird. It's concept of "recently trending" etc produces some dubious recommendations.
Actually installing mods is kind of okay, but it doesn't handle pre-requisites very well. It'll tell you that you're missing pre-reqs, but it doesn't offer to install them.
It's a positive feedback issue, where because games don't tend to use workshop, it doesn't get much love from valve, and therefore games avoid it.
I don't know how much workshop allows developers to do curation either, so perhaps games would rather partner with a platform they can better influence mod curation.
It's definitely preferable as a user compared to the worst-of-all-worlds that is Stardew Valley modding. There you have a combination of "Here, download this exe, it's fine we promise" (SMAPI), and nexus mods for the discoverability / install / updates of the mods themselves.
There was some Hungarian? developer that runs https://rimworldbase.com/. I used to use it before I switched to Steam Workshop since it usually unfortunately falls behind (or at least did when I used it several years ago). That one is better for discoverability at least. The auto-update package management functionality of Steam Workshop is its killer feature. I can click a single button and get the latest updated versions of all my mods.
I'm usually opposed to Steam on principle, opting instead for DRM free options for my games, but it's basically impossible to maintain any decent amount of mods without a manager like what Steam Workshop offers
Workshop has taken off a bit here and there, but it's worth remembering that basically when Steam Workshop was primed to take off was when Skyrim modding was becoming mainstream. I don't know the specifics of it, but I think the Steam Workshop had some "paid mods" and that rubbed everyone the wrong way during a time when modding was not monetized.
There is a bigger question that is unsolved, both ethically and legally. If someone makes a Skyrim mod: (a) should the creator of the mod be allowed compensation and (b) should the game developer be entitled to garnish some amount?
I have my own opinions, but I think the community doesn't really trust that a mod put on Steam will be available tomorrow for the price and under the conditions the mod creator envisioned.
Paid mods are problematic because what happens if a game update breaks the API the mod uses? This frequently occurs in many games. Suddenly you've got an unhappy customer, and with money comes liability.
I doubt any game developer would want the burden of being liable to maintain backward compatibility for old mod APIs to support third party mods, but if they take a cut of any money then they ought to be responsible for maintaining that.
Part of the reason KSP has ironically had a modding renaissance is because the community knows that there won't be any updates which could break some of the more ambitious mods being made.
a) yes if they sell it
b) no, why? does the carmaker get a cut from the unbranded accessories? If anything, it should be the other way round as the Oblivion reboot proves.
Not everyone has or wants Steam. I'd rather deal with NexusMods than with Valve as a GOG user.
This ain't a defense of Steam Workshop - it has a lot of issues and sucks quite bad- just a remark for anyone struggling with using Workshop next to anything else.
You don't actually need a steam account or the client - with SteamCMD you can have CLI access to all the mods there, as well as download any mod (or, for example, dedicated server hosted via Steam) to a custom location.
As for what's bad with Steam Workshop: - No built-in way to host multiple versions of a mod or to revert to an old version.
- Very unreliable reinstalls (you might think you deleted a mod, and yet there are leftovers - and at least historically they liked to remain even over fresher files).
- Somewhat arcane directory structure (that makes fixing the above harder than it should be).
> You don't actually need a steam account or the client - with SteamCMD you can have CLI access to all the mods there, as well as download any mod (or, for example, dedicated server hosted via Steam) to a custom location.
Not 100% correct, some are restricted to accounts that have licenses for the game. Same with some dedicated servers, you'll get an error ("Failed to install app "xxxxxx" (No subscription)" ) if you try downloading anonymously
As someone who has been using Steam since I had to put my WONID from my Half-Life CD, what's wrong with Steam?
1. For the most part[*], publishers on Steam use DRM, from kernel-level DRM which can crash and pwn your computer, to Valve's relatively lukewarm Steamworks., whereas GOG primarily (exclusively?) sells DRM-free games.
There are lots of ideological and practical concerns with DRM, I won't list them here other than to say game players want to be in control of their machines and their experience, not let game publishers control their machines.
2. Steam policy is that you can only run the very latest release of a game (it will update when you go online, and you can't remain offline forever). It takes away your choice to reject publishers bad updates - for example, when 2K forcibly added their marketplace/launcher malware to Bioshock games, breaking them on Linux, Steam was their henchman/goon forcing it on everyone.
[*] Not everbody! https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_g...
I can't use Workshop mod with my GOG version of the game, but can use Nexus Mod mod with any version.
At least I didn't found a way, and that one reason alone is enough for me to avoid the Workshop.
It depends on the game and what the mod maker decided.
I made the mod for the Divinity: Original Sin that changes a few bytes in the game XML files to allow for 4 players in game instead of just 2, since it was mostly supported but probably removed for console porting simplicity. This is a braindead simple mod that just needs to find some XML tag inside the embedded EXE/DLL file and update it. I didn't even have to update any checksums, etc.
When I published the mod I chose to target the hashes/offsets of the Steam EXE since that was what everyone had. So, while I didn't target the workshop (as this modification could not be done with it) I did target Steam end-users.
Gabe's done a decent job keeping the capitalism at bay, but he won't be around forever. Even if you support steam and what valve is doing now, that may change in the future. Diversity is good for consumers.
Despite how annoying it is to navigate around nexus mods, the workshop is somehow worse.
The curse of Valve. No one there cares about Steam Workshop enough to improve its UX. Every mod you "subscribe" to is automatically downloaded and installed, which means each game has to provide its own way to switch mods on and off.
Nexus doesn't help you to manage your modlists, but at least it is smart enough to step back and let you manage them however you want to.
Being locked into a store would be much worse than being locked into an annoying independent site.
Agreed. It's so painless to use and yet the adoption is so bad
I guess because not everyone brought their game on steam, and it also probably does not work on pirated games.
Because it doesn't work with pirated games.
Saying that only half jokingly.
Untrue. I downloaded a couple of mods for my GOG release of the game. Works well. Few more steps but otherwise doable.
The truth is that Workshop is worse and aimed ONLY at Steam. So why would anyone bother.
Presumably it doesn't work with pirated games.
It does work with pirated games AFAIK.
Steam as a platform is very open in many ways. Likely not intentional, just holes that never got plugged.
Most of the pirated steam clients just lie and say you're always playing a free Steam game that everyone owns and use that to backchannel all of the steam features like messaging, p2p, etc.
Last I checked they even had some rigged up system for achievements since some games interact with them in ways that are needed.
I got curious after writing my comment and decided I should research it. What I found was a couple of people on reddit saying it was possible, but getting a ton of downvotes and replies saying that they're wrong, that it's no longer possible. At the very least it looked fairly convoluted, and possibly you need to also own the game on steam to download mods for non steam (pirated or otherwise) versions of the game.
I don't have an oar in this fight - my comment about pirated games was mostly tongue in cheek - but I am glad the main mod site isn't tied to owning the game on one particular store.
Well, it goes a step further and doesn't work with any non-Steam game (unsurprisingly), so it basically locks you to Steam Workshop.
They certainly provided a needed service with free bandwidth before it became cheap and a centralized repository. Tho I do wish there was more mod packs for games like oblivion or fallout new vegas as I’ll spend an evening getting it all to play nice then not have time to play games and for a few weeks. As a funny aside TESNexus and roll20 are the only two sites that show up for me with have I been pwned.
Honestly the comments so far don't line up with my experience.
Possibly for the very experienced devs/games on HN who are making their own mods Nexus was limiting and annoying.
For me it was the level of difficulty just low enough I didn't have to work to enjoy mods. I remember trying to install mods on Halo CE pre mod managers and it was a nightmare.
Did Nexus solve all of that? No but it was an easy enough experience that I could know one website, one tool, and be able to mod my games.
For the normies. For myself Nexus was a fixture throughout my teens and into my adult life.
I'm very thankful for all the hard work they put in.
It's impossible to keep everyone happy all of the time, but for some people like myself it just worked and we were able to enjoy it.
Yes it is very interesting how the comment section is overtly negative yet NexusMods is one of the rare thing that "just works" for me. Even my girlfriend who is not well-versed in tech at all mods her Skyrim/Oblivion herself thanks to how easy it is with NexusMods.
Judging by your two's comments, there seem to be a mismatch what people think of when they hear "Nexus Mods". Originally, it was just a website where people uploaded mods, and others downloaded them and manually re-organized stuff on disk, or with some game-specific mod manager.
But what you two seem to be talking about, is the relatively new mod manager that Nexus also has, which basically allows you to one-click install mods.
I think many comments talk only about the website (in isolation), while both of you are talking about the mod manager, hence the mismatch in experience.
As an occasional user of either form of NexusMods, both have been worth paying for in the recent past. The last time I played through SDV I had approximately thirty mods that I hand-installed because I was patching them locally to improve weather handling and learning C# from it. I’ve also used the mod manager to do a couple other games that badly need the improvements (“Stop Wasting My Time” is the best mod ever) and that I wasn’t modifying further. In both circumstances, I paid for a membership to support them, and I ended it when I stopped playing the game I was modding. Glad they exist and will continue to pay them when I use them, especially if they continue to be opinionated along current lines.
Relatively new? I feel like a decade ago I was using their mod manager (pre-Vortex) and it "just worked".
Probably because a vast majority of those people don't read HackerNews to be fair.
Yeah. I paid for the lifetime plan a long time ago. It’s fast and easy to use. Generally I would categorize it as inoffensive.
I loved the change a few years ago that prevented mod authors from removing mods. I use Wabbajack, an amazing program where modders compile lists of mods and bundle them with compatibility patches to make everything work nicely. The Wabbajack program automatically downloads and sets up everything.
But random disappearing mods created endless work for the Wabbajack modders, because they would have to adjust lists and compatibility patches every time someone removed an old version. Mod lists would go away for days, weeks, or forever because someone removed some tiny mod from Nexus for no good reason. It’s so much better now.
Seriously, Nexus works great and I vastly prefer it to the clunky Team workshop or, God forbid, manually installing everything.
I'm convinced a ton of people commenting here haven't even used Nexus in years or convinced themselves they're "power users" who don't need to use a launcher, just to blame Nexus on the subsequent pain.
Some of them are clearly commenting in bad faith though, and have never used Nexus and are just slinging mud because of their audacity to moderate offensive content or inflammatory users.
So many people on their high horse when Nexus attempted to do collections, as if Nexus Mods was their god given place to post their mods for free and control everything about how they are used.
Congratulations! You are going to be so happy moving forward!
I found their platform quite toxic, walling everything behind login and making the registration and login atrocious to deal with. Hopefully things will change, so that one can just get done what one came for: Downloading mods, without other shenanigans.
I think that most of niche platforms would become walled behind a login sooner or later due to increased costs associated with AI crawlers downloading every single bit they could reach.
Or they could work on switching to CDNs or P2P for file delivery instead.
Honestly no good reason a mod site couldn't be pure torrent based, could have even built it into their own mod manager they had.
They’ll still end up being the seeder 99.999% of the time, and their audience is typically quite hostile towards them for trying to charge the bandwidth costs to their audience in any manner whatsoever, whether it’s subscription fees or upload bandwidth.
IDK, hosting files and having people download them will always be the most expensive part of the internet. It will never be free, and the money will always need to come for somewhere. And on the internet money comes from adds and prenium subscriptions. I don't think it would even be possible for them to not insentive people to pay for prenium. The only way it is possible to go back to how it was is if 75% of the users agree to close their accounts to reduce server costs enough to have it be free for others.
> It will never be free, and the money will always need to come for somewhere
Yeah, true, ThePirateBay is excellent evidence that absolutely everything MUST be driven by profits.
i'm sorry but yes, TPB and torrent sites DO rely on money, the user who uploads the mirror pays for their own storage, they pay to serve the file to others and they pay to keep their computers powered on when it wouldn't be otherwise, the money comes from somewhere too.
I hate capitalism as much as the next guy but the comment i was replying to was about the hope of the new owners being less profit driven, you cannot be a non profit driven company, and the problem do not rely on the owner of the business but with the system and insentives at play.
Please do not deform my words or this conversation to try to make yourself look smarter than others.
I don't see a near future where every work hour, gigabite, watt and kb of data that is currently required to make nexusmods work every day will be obtained without the insentives of 9-5, salaries and other profit type shit. TPB heavily relies on a low maintenance structure, and hyper dedicaded users relying on the intense belief that knownledge and culture should be free. All things the 'prettier textures' industry do not have.
If you know of or have plans to create a free equivalent of NexusMods, maybe relying on open source technologies and torrents, feel free to let me know, it sounds very interesting altho i think it will remain niche.
Most egregious thing was didn't it have a forced password reset if you didn't log in for 6 months, so if you're a normal person you'd sign up, mod your game, come back in 6 months to a year to mod another game and then it takes 15 mins just to get back into the site after resetting your account and everything.
Really surprised such a big community hadn't gotten sick of it already and built an alternative.
> Really surprised such a big community hadn't gotten sick of it already and built an alternative.
There is already, probably the biggest contender at the moment would be r2modman/Thunderstore, which is a relatively game-agnostic modding website + mod manager. Seems a lot more "open" (both in terms of source code and community) than Nexus ever was.
r2modman is just an alternate frontend to Overwolfs nonsense and basically exists on the grace that most people install Overwolfs launcher (Thunderstore, which confusingly is also the name of the repository hosting the mods - my understanding is that the original devs of Thunderstore sold their repository to Overwolf) for it instead of r2modman.
As implied by negativity in the prior sentence, Overwolfs stuff is pretty awful to use; compared to r2modman, it feels like you're installing a PUP instead of a mod manager. There's lots of ads and it's pretty clunky to use.
I don't know enough about Overwolf to say yay or nay, but it is possible to use r2modman/Thunderstore without Overwolf, since I never had it installed yet I have mods published on Thunderstore + used it in the past for using mods. So I don't feel like Overwolf being bad should translate to r2modman+Thunderstore also being bad by association.
It's more a warning to not get the Overwolf version of "Thunderstore", which is what they named their mod manager.
R2modman is fine, but because it exists on the grace of what appears to be a third party (Overwolf), it could be shut down at any point. Which is mildly concerning.
> but because it exists on the grace of what appears to be a third party (Overwolf), it could be shut down at any point
The source of r2modman is available, and under a FOSS-compatible license (https://github.com/ebkr/r2modmanPlus), together with a relatively small but dedicated community. Ideally, the actual file sharing shouldn't be centralized (imho), but it sounds overly alarmist to say it can be shut down at any point.
I totally agree here. IIRC you either have to register with a mainstream e-mail provider account or they actively block temporary email services.
I understand only allowing subscribers to download files, but going to extra distance to only allow people to use their main e-mail accounts is too far.
Personally, I don't want to give them my e-mail address. I don't want them to sell my e-mail address to the next bidder, to make some cash to run their platform, or leak it in the next database breach or whatever. Personally, I don't use gmail or similar any longer. But then all kinds of people put their mods on NexusMods and thus beyond reach for me, without being aware of contributing to an ecosystem, that extorts users e-mail addresses.
Personally, I am also not frequently in the mood to solve shitty captchas, especially not from big brother Shoogle.
Well, it would have been nice to play some mods, but this price is too high to pay for me, so I guess then I just have to treat it as not available on the Internet.