NexusMods Changes Hands (opens in new tab)

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?

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.

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.

Not everyone has or wants Steam. I'd rather deal with NexusMods than with Valve as a GOG user.

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.

Presumably it doesn't work with pirated games.

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.

Probably because a vast majority of those people don't read HackerNews to be fair.

Or they could work on switching to CDNs or P2P for file delivery instead.

> 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.

> 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.

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.