Nexus Mods, the largest video game mods on Earth, has been sold.
I first learned of the news from AlternativeTo, which I use regularly as a resource for discovering more software, and subscribed to its RSS feed to follow software news. The founder of Nexus Mods announced the ownership transfer, and he is stepping down due to burnout in an official post. A founder being burnt out from the responsibilities and thus wanting to transfer ownership is understandable. However, I already sensed that not disclosing the identity of the new owner was not a good sign.
If you are a PC gamer, doubly so if you are ever interested in video game mods, you most likely would have at least heard of Nexus Mods, so the acquisition of Nexus Mods is a big news. I have created mods for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel The Sith Lords and I use many mods for both games myself. I also use mods for some other video games, including Stardew Valley and Mass Effect. Therefore, I am a regular user of Nexus Mods, and in March 2024, I even received a lifetime premium membership for free from Nexus Mods themselves for my mods.
Two days after Nexus Mods' official announcement, Aftermath's article about Nexus Mods getting sold, "New Nexus Mods Owners Scramble To Assuage Community Concerns Following Sale By Burnt Out Founder", arrived at my RSS feed reader. This article was when I learned that people have been digging and finding out the new owner of Nexus Mods is a company named Chosen, which, as described by Aftermath:
[...] bills itself as a less-terrible alternative to venture capital and private equity, but it still very much speaks in terms of scale and monetization.
It is true that running a huge website that hosts files for the public to download, especially one that has a large user base, costs a serious amount of money. It also does not help that like other forms of fan works and derivative works, video game modifications are in a legal grey area due to potential copyright infringement, thus most modding communities forbid selling mods. However, with enshitiffication of online platforms being a phenomenon, users have every right to be worried that transferring ownership to a company focusing on monetisation would speed up the decline of Nexus Mods.
On my part, I am not ruling out the possibility of me pulling my mods out from Nexus Mods in the future. All my mods that are hosted on Nexus Mods are for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series, and the main hub for KotOR's modding community is actually Deadly Stream, not Nexus Mods, so even if I remove all my mods from Nexus Mods, you can still find them on and downloaded them from Deadly Stream.
To be honest, the only reason I uploaded my mods to Nexus was in the first place because it is the largest video game mod website, so sharing my mods on Nexus Mods helped improved my mods' visibility, especially for my same-gender romance mods, which I created and shared for fellow queer KotOR players. In fact, sharing my same-gender romance mods for KotOR 2 on Nexus Mods was what led me to get interviewed by Ars Technica at one point. However, Deadly Stream remains my go-to recommendation for others for looking for KotOR mods. Nexus Mods' acquisition makes me appreciate the existence of Deadly Stream as a modding community platform independent of large, centralised platforms like Nexus Mods even more.
We shall see what will happen with Nexus Mods under the new ownership, but I have no expectation that the platform will become better.