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NexusMods Changes Hands
- zelphirkalt 1y agoI 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.
- jekwoooooe 1y ago[dead]
- zihotki 1y agoI 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.
- selfhoster11 1y agoOr they could work on switching to CDNs or P2P for file delivery instead.
- whywhywhywhy 1y agoHonestly no good reason a mod site couldn't be pure torrent based, could have even built it into their own mod manager they had.
- altairprime 1y agoThey’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.
- Jgoauh 1y agoIDK, 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.
- diggan 1y ago> 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.
- Jgoauh 1y agoi'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.
- whywhywhywhy 1y agoMost 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.
- diggan 1y ago> 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.
- noirscape 1y agor2modman 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.
- diggan 1y agoI 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.
- noirscape 1y ago
- Workaccount2 1y agoI 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.
- zelphirkalt 1y agoPersonally, 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.
- orthoxerox 1y ago[flagged]
- ToucanLoucan 1y agoI can't read comments like this without that one human thumb guy screaming FUCKING PRONOUNS into his webcam at full volume. Gamers are so sensitive.
- AlexandrB 1y agoBut don't you DARE make a mod to change the pronoun selection back to male/female or we'll BAN[1] you from our site (because you're so sensitive). [1] https://www.eurogamer.net/starfields-pronoun-removal-mod-has-been-banned-by-nexusmods https://www.eurogamer.net/starfields-pronoun-removal-mod-has...
- brendoelfrendo 1y agoWho's sensitive? I feel like the people who made the mod are the sensitive ones, so sensitive that they can't exist in a fictional space where trans or non-binary people exist so they had to make a mod to restore their version of reality. The only thing they got right is that a world without trans people is, in fact, a fantasy.
- jekwoooooe 1y ago[dead]
- Tadpole9181 1y agoExcept that modder explicitly stated that the mod was created to offend trans people. Nexus has a right to not host transphobes who are using their platform in a way that could hurt their business.
- mrguyorama 1y agoI remember when Mass Effect 2 was a laughing stock for giving Miranda a prominent camel toe and half the cutscenes were just creepshots of her butt. Now, if your female character looks like an actual human instead of a sex doll, teenage twitter pitches a fit.
- jekwoooooe 1y ago[dead]
- xnorswap 1y agoHopefully 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.
- xingped 1y agoI'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.
- esperent 1y agoPresumably it doesn't work with pirated games.
- diggan 1y agoWell, it goes a step further and doesn't work with any non-Steam game (unsurprisingly), so it basically locks you to Steam Workshop.
- ddtaylor 1y agoIt 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.
- esperent 1y agoI 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.
- DrillShopper 1y agoThe link above doesn't work, but it is archived here: https://archive.is/DnOhe https://archive.is/DnOhe
- selfhoster11 1y agoIt's back now
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- strangescript 1y agoSo 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!
- brianjlogan 1y agoHonestly 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.
- belval 1y agoYes 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.
- brianjlogan 1y agoProbably because a vast majority of those people don't read HackerNews to be fair.
- diggan 1y agoJudging 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.
- altairprime 1y agoAs 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.
- zeagle 1y agoThey 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.