NexusMods Changes Hands

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

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.

As someone who has been using Steam since I had to put my WONID from my Half-Life CD, what's wrong with Steam?

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).

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.

Well, it goes a step further and doesn't work with any non-Steam game (unsurprisingly), so it basically locks you to Steam Workshop.

Don't forget the ultimate crime against humanity: changing a remade RPG's "body type 1" and "body type 2" character creation options back to "male" and "female" as they were in the original game.

https://www.neogaf.com/threads/mod-that-restores-male-female...

Lmao that mod is clearly targeted at the worst kind of right-wing snowflakes. People who can't even see a trigger warning without getting incensed and try to legitimize their behavior by saying it's "misinformative," but then dog whistle who they're really talking to with the Pepe frog. Nazis are, by default, weak-sauce; not being able to tolerate something this innocuous is both weak-sauce and perfectly coherent with fascism's inherent insecurity.

> No, they really weren't, they were made to restore an experience that matches 99.99% of people's own experiences and sensibilities at the very start of a game

Exceptionally funny to read this in the face of the most recent example, where the author was banned after he explicitly said that he was making his mod for the purpose of upsetting people.

> No, they really weren't, they were made to restore an experience that matches 99.99% of people's own experiences and sensibilities at the very start of a game.

Too true! I can handle VTOL spacecraft, lizards with tits and guns that shoot other guns, but a gay person!? IMMERSION RUINED

If this is about that Tomb Raider mod that someone mentioned up above, this reaction is so overblown as to be hysterical. Three sentences of text that indicate a game that came out 30 years ago might have some offensive racial stereotypes is somehow so egregious to you? What is this about "restoring an experience?" The text displays before the game starts; it doesn't impact your experience at all. I highly doubt 99.99% of people care, let alone are upset that Crystal Dynamics would dare to acknowledge that games from the 90s weren't always tactful in their depictions of diverse ethnic groups.

It's so dishonest to strip out the context in your reply to try and make this issue sound like some valiant crusade when it's really just some racists who enjoyed a racist thing feeling bad that someone told them they should feel bad for being racists.

Except 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.

Who'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.

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".

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.

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'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.