Popular modding site Nexus Mods recently announced an update to its policies on paid mods, and, as ever with the topic that seems very much to be a never ending source of controversy, the response from players and modders was a bit complicated.
So, having parsed the comments on that update, which saw it outline its stance that “modding should be a pursuit of passion first and foremost”, the modding site’s team has now shared an update, which at one point sees it suggest some frustrated parties would be better off trying to put more pressure on platforms which do allow and support paid mods to improve their offerings feature-wise.
“Thank you all for your feedback on the policy announcement. We’ve been reading your comments here on the forums, on our mod author Discord and in several external communities,” Nexus Mods community manager Pickysaurus wrote in a fresh post. “We can see that some authors – often those currently benefiting from the Verified Creator program – are upset by certain parts of the policy, while a large number of users are generally praising the changes.”
They went on to state that “a great deal of the ire about this change” seems to be related to folks enjoying the features Nexus Mods currently offers it users, with the commuinty manager suggesting these are viewed to be “far more powerful and convenient than those offered by the paid modding platforms”. “We’re flattered by this,” Pickysaurus wrote, “but we also feel it prudent to point out that if you’d like these features on platforms that do support paid mods you should be pressuring those platforms to do better to support their paid ecosystem.”
Moving on, the site did address criticism of the new policy it’d announced when it comes to patches for paid mods or mods that depend on the use of paid mods being hosted on it. “We’ll be tempering this part of the policy to allow compatibility patches to be posted on mod pages alongside free content to allow for better interoperability with paid content,” Pickysaurus wrote, “We do, however, still feel that pages where the primary purpose of the content is to support/interact with paid content should not be permitted.”
You can find info on the revised policy here, but the basic gist seems to be that modders will be allowed to provide patches that simply allow their mods to work alongside a paid mod, provided that said paid mod isn’t a hard requirement for the free one, and as long as this is just an optional file on the page of the free mod. Translations of paid mods won’t be covered, so will have to be hosted on other platforms that do allow paid mods.
“It is not lost on us that this change doesn’t address all the problems you’ve raised,” Pickysaurus continued, “For example, we understand that a lot of patches/translations are not made by the original author of the mod. In these cases, we recommend that the patch creator ask the original author of the free content to add the patch to their mod page – where possible – or upload their patches to the paid mod vendor themselves.
“To be clear, we aren’t trying to say you shouldn’t use paid mods,” they concluded, “However, we want Nexus Mods to be about free modding such that when modders come to our community, they get a complete user journey – from start to finish – where everything they are going to get on the site is free, and for free mods.
Where do you stand on the issue of paying for mods? Let us know below.
