Incline Nexus Now Disallowing Creators To Delete Their Mods (Aug 5 Cutoff Date Passed)

[JamesDixon]

Because being able to take something down is a fundamental element of online privacy and property rights (who owns what you uploaded regardless). Nexus needn't claim any other right other than the right to keep it up, and that's still a loss for anyone uploading there. Someone always keeping something you uploaded, however sanitized was is still a very bad idea from any kind of rights perspective. The question is why they shouldn't have that right but why they should. And why should they? Because the uploaded material is in a legal grey area? I'd like to see how they respond to their first DMCA takedown notice.

If you want to archive something, archive it yourself. No one is obligated to keep free content up for you. Buy an external HDD, a pendrive or use fucking google drive, which is free up to 15GB. Its still easier than pushing this off the slippery slope into hosting sites wanting to keep your files for millennial economics experiments.

I've already debunked the "property rights" that you conveniently ignored. Copyrights are property rights.

 

[JarlFrank]

Technically, the only ones who can take down a mod (because they have the right to do that) are the owners of the game's IP.

And it has happened before that asshole IP owners took down mods and fan projects via DMCA. Luckily, most companies realize that modding is a good thing and allow mods to exist.

A good comparison for modders are graffiti artists. They make cool art with their spray cans on walls that don't belong to them. If the city thinks the art is nice, they'll let it stay. If the city thinks it sucks, they'll send someone to remove it.
The graffiti artist has no ownership over his artwork because he placed it onto a wall that's either public property or someone else's property. The very moment he created his artwork, he signed off all ownership of it... because he created it on a platform that isn't his.

 

[Rinslin Merwind]

Alright, since we hitting almost twenty pages on this topic, there my experience.

Recently I decided to play Stalker Anomaly with bunch of mods on it. Don't ask why I decided to subject myself to suffering of modding Stalker game in first place, it's a long story.
Anyway, majority of mods is on ModDB, not Nexus, so I had to go on ModDB and browse. And oh Boy, addon section for Anomaly is a mess, to find anything in the sea of outdated/conflicting/meme mods is a hassle. And this unbridled Chaos is only grows with every duplicate mod (with same functionality), created by annoyed modder, who gave up on searching mods from other users or decided to fix/update someone's else mod.

So, I said: "fuck this shit" and decided to use a mod list, because a even a shitty table on Google docs is better and faster to find mods which work together than lurking moddb sea on your own. Or at least I thought so, until I had to comment about deleted mods on Google table.
I was fucking lucky that no essential mods was deleted, but it was annoying to click a link and find out that mod was deleted. For Stalker games it could be twice as annoying as for other games, due to conflicts/dependencies/overwrites that solved by installing over9000 patches in specific order. Thank God, there mod organizer 2 for Anomaly or else I would still figure out conflicts instead of actually playing.

Anyway, maybe I am wrong, but Nexus taken a right decision, because since number of mods grows every minute - community mod lists grow in importance too and it's fucking annoying to a see highly dependable mod deleted.
Hell, even if you use your own mod list or pack - it can be annoyance too.

 

[Alphons]

I never said anything about Nexus. My position is that the modders use it for free and Nexus is a buisiness. They have to pay for that storage, servers, and employees somehow. Are you adverse to companies being able to operate on cash or do you expect them to run on slavery?

Meanwhile the modders themselves are being readily enslaved by Nexus, and you cheer it on.

Abolish the modder slavery! Amen, brother!

 

[ADL]

Say what you will about Nexus but imagine the alternative for Bethesda's games in particular where you're dealing with dozens of mods all with their own compatibility patches from dozens of sources. Sure you might be able to bypass the free/premium-tier monetization but on the other hand you might get stuck downloading from some server at 20kb/s assuming that the mod you want is still hosted anywhere period. Fuck that.

I've had good experiences with http://mod.io as a platform-agnostic alternative to Steam Workshop but that's paid for by the developer and I don't think you're gonna get a lot of publishers onboard with that in favor of their own proprietary bullshit or just going with Steam at the expense of your EGS/GOG users like Rimworld does.

Alright, since we hitting almost twenty pages on this topic, there my experience.

Recently I decided to play Stalker Anomaly with bunch of mods on it. Don't ask why I decided to subject myself to suffering of modding Stalker game in first place, it's a long story.
Anyway, majority of mods is on ModDB, not Nexus, so I had to go on ModDB and browse. And oh Boy, addon section for Anomaly is a mess, to find anything in the sea of outdated/conflicting/meme mods is a hassle. And this unbridled Chaos is only grows with every duplicate mod (with same functionality), created by annoyed modder, who gave up on searching mods from other users or decided to fix/update someone's else mod.

Anomaly's addon section is a best case scenario representative of ModDB modding since it's treated as a standalone total conversion mod and it's a fucking mess. It's a great example to visualize how it would theoretically work when every relatively ambitious mod needs to have their own listing with their own respective addon section and you have compatibility patches contained within that section. If this is the only viable alternative to Nexus, I don't want it.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-anomaly/addons

 

[DeepOcean]

Creating a community for modding requires alot of free work, patience and time, most modders dont wish to do that, the Nexus did all this work for free, you have forums, you have hosting, you have web design. There is a problem in there, if you offload the work you should be doing (creating a community) into strangers that have to pay the costs of hosting 1 million+ files, dont act surprised when those strangers have their own ideas on what to do with that. If you really, really care so much about curating your stuff, then have the work of creating your own community and pay the price for it, too lazy for that? Then shut the fuck up.

What people want is the benefit of a community without paying the price for it, this isnt about property rights and more about free loading, I bet if Nexus started charging those modder prima donnas for hosting their stuff even if it allowed them to keep their mods, pretty much all of them would bail out, they want someone else to pay. People want someone else to have the annoyance of maintaining a community and they only get the benefits, actually that is okay, not everyone wants to create a community but then you need to accept the rules of the people that actually are providing the service you are too lazy to do. If they wish to monetize it, if they wish to place any paywall they want, that is their right. If DarkUnderlord decides to close the codex and place a Pepe The Frog meme image on its place, that is his right, it is my fault for being too broke/too lazy/too cheap to donate.

They dont wish to leave the Nexus because that means their mods losing alot of attention, they dont wish to create a new community from scratch because it is painful to open a community to only see 10 people to register on it in the beginning as communities take years of consistent work to grow, many have mediocre and miniscule mods that dont create traction so they depend of a pre-stabilished community, all this bs is they pretending being poor oppressed modders in the hopes of pressuring Nexus so they can keep free riding. Dont complain about people exercizing the power you gave to them by being too lazy.

 

[good fucking shit happen]

What people want is the benefit of a community without paying the price for it, this isnt about property rights and more about free loading, I bet if Nexus started charging those modder prima donnas for hosting their stuff even if it allowed them to keep their mods, pretty much all of them would bail out, they want someone else to pay.

 

[Immortal]

Recap:

According to Parabalus and Young_Hollow :

Rules Nexus Must Follow

- You MUST host my content under my terms free of charge
- You're not allowed to profit in any way
- Your ~6 figure server bill / staff of developers have to be paid for out of pocket
- You must continue to pay me for the pleasure of hosting my mod though, I won't be your slave.
- You must not offer a better service than other modding sites otherwise you will become more popular and thus a monopoly

--

You two are fucking retarded.

 

[Parabalus]

Recap:

According to Parabalus and Young_Hollow :

Rules Nexus Must Follow

- You MUST host my content under my terms free of charge
- You're not allowed to profit in any way
- Your ~6 figure server bill / staff of developers have to be paid for out of pocket
- You must continue to pay me for the pleasure of hosting my mod though, I won't be your slave.
- You must not offer a better service than other modding sites otherwise you will become more popular and thus a monopoly

--

You two are fucking retarded.

Again, that's fine and all for Nexus, they're a corp,

Nexus is smartly conducting its business. That's great for them and their owners wallets. Kudos to them.

You might realise this isn't the best outcome for mod consoomers when they start taking down or taking over rivals.

 

[Orud]

Nexus is smartly conducting its business. That's great for them and their owners wallets. Kudos to them.

You might realise this isn't the best outcome for mod consoomers when they start taking down or taking over rivals.

Plenty of people have argued why this is good for consumers. I personally heavily disagree with your simple argument of "a corporate entity benefits from it, thus it is automatically bad" because it completely ignores any context and substance, and is far too much of a simplistic (and extremist) view to be applicable to most things in real life.

You should judge things, and people, on their merits and not on your own ideology.

 

[Parabalus]

Nexus is smartly conducting its business. That's great for them and their owners wallets. Kudos to them.

You might realise this isn't the best outcome for mod consoomers when they start taking down or taking over rivals.

Plenty of people have argued why this is good for consumers. I personally heavily disagree with your simple argument of "a corporate entity benefits from it, thus it is automatically bad" because it completely ignores any context and substance, and is far too much of a simplistic (and extremist) view to be applicable to most things in real life.

You should judge things, and people, on their merits and not on your own ideology.

What ideology?

Nexus has been getting more invasive and expensive for users the longer it exists. They can do it since they have no viable competition, they're practically unavoidable for BGS games.

 

[Orud]

What ideology?

"a corporate entity benefits from it, thus it is automatically bad"

 

[Reever]

Anomaly's addon section is a best case scenario representative of ModDB modding since it's treated as a standalone total conversion mod and it's a fucking mess. It's a great example to visualize how it would theoretically work when every relatively ambitious mod needs to have their own listing with their own respective addon section and you have compatibility patches contained within that section. If this is the only viable alternative to Nexus, I don't want it.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/stalker-anomaly/addons

Maybe I've grown accustomed to it but I don't think ModDB is that bad, unless you have a mod like anomaly with so many addons, especially since I can download stuff without having to sign in unlike Nexus.
However, you'd think that by now modDB would do some updates especially since they appeared way before Nexus Mods. The site's pretty much the same since like 2007.

 

[JarlFrank]

when they start taking down or taking over rivals.

Except they have shown no ambition of doing that and I've already shown you several mod communities that are entrenched in other places and won't ever move to the Nexus due to already having an established infrastructure elsewhere.

 

[Van-d-all]

While thankfully I'm mostly unaffected by Nexus since I don't use it, I'd lie if I wrote that I'm not curious to see how the situation unfolds. On one hand I'd reckon, now some people would think twice before getting bound to them for eternity, on the other the smell of potential money probably nips that in the bud. We'll see.

Fun question though, does the new rule mean creative atrocities like FNV: The Frontier would get archived for posterity as well?

 

[Parabalus]

when they start taking down or taking over rivals.

Except they have shown no ambition of doing that and I've already shown you several mod communities that are entrenched in other places and won't ever move to the Nexus due to already having an established infrastructure elsewhere.

Those game are a blip and not worth Nexus' time taking over. Do all of them together have even 1/10th of BGS unique games users?

I use ModDB myself, but the games it's used for usually have a one or two big mods per install, so it's deficiencies are less noticeable.

 

[Orud]

Nexus has been getting more invasive and expensive for users the longer it exists. They can do it since they have no viable competition, they're practically unavoidable for BGS games.

What you're pointing out has no bearing at all at the fact that we have a (somewhat) public permanent mod version repository now.

While thankfully I'm mostly unaffected by Nexus since I don't use it, I'd lie if I wrote that I'm not curious to see how the situation unfolds. On one hand I'd reckon, now some people would think twice before getting bound to them for eternity, on the other the smell of potential money probably nips that in the bud. We'll see.

As said plenty of times already earlier in the thread; this move is simply going along with industry spanning standards. Being against it is the equivalent of screaming from the top of your lungs that printing music on paper sheets is the only legit way to bring music to the masses, while in reality it's the 21st century and everyone moved on to recorded music that they listen to on Spotify. You can try to fight it now, but in reality you're 30 years too late and the system has proven its detractors to be wrong.

Because of this, if the Nexus keeps it foot down, I'll guarantee you that you'll see other mod platforms eventually adopt the same stance.

 

[JamesDixon]

What ideology?

Nexus has been getting more invasive and expensive for users the longer it exists. They can do it since they have no viable competition, they're practically unavoidable for BGS games.

One word for why prices are rising: Inflation.

As more money is printed the less valuable it becomes which in turn raises the prices on things. It's the economy stupid.

 

[Reinhardt]

So if you posted some potentially libelous mod 10 years ago I'm 99% sure you could convince the Nexus to delete it, especially since mods like that are almost certainly shit that nobody cares about.

Except you don't know what will be considered damning even tomorrow, not just 10 years from now so something like OK sign on old photo can mark you as a literal nazi.

 

[Parabalus]

As said plenty of times already earlier in the thread; this move is simply going along with industry spanning standards. Being against it is the equivalent of screaming from the top of your lungs that printing music on paper sheets is the only legit way to bring music to the masses, while in reality it's the 21st century and everyone moved on to recorded music that they listen to on Spotify. You can try to fight it now, but in reality you're 30 years too late and the system has proven its detractors to be wrong.

Because of this, if the Nexus keeps it foot down, I'll guarantee you that you'll see other mod platforms eventually adopt the same stance.

I agree with you, this is all true, it just isn't a good thing for mod consoomers in the long run. Every service becomes shitter once it dominates its market.

 

[Immortal]

creative atrocities like FNV: The Frontier would get archived for posterity as well?

Yes, but how is that different from any other mod atrocity that wasn't pulled down to date?

There would be two versions of Frontier, the unfixed furry lizard trash and the latest one.
Unless it was illegal or stolen, what's the harm in having an archive of it?

At the end of the day we are talking about code / art assets / sound files.. The implementation may not be to your liking but the preservation of those assets could be the difference between a working or broken downstream mod that relies on X component.
(This is unlikely for a mod like frontier but there are plenty of other smaller mods that are completely not to my taste but are still a dependency from an asset point of view to something I do want - For example there are mods that have dependencies on other mods purely for the resources and don't actually need the mod itself enabled.)

 

[Quigs]

Are they saving every iteration of every mod? What's stopping an update from removing content?

 

[Immortal]

Are they saving every iteration of every mod? What's stopping an update from removing content?

That's my assumption. Essentially following the Git style of change control / releases.
Every iteration of your mod is archived so if you update your mod to be an empty text file, people can just pull the previous version.

 

[Mustawd]

Because being able to take something down is a fundamental element of online privacy

​

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

Because being able to take something down is a fundamental element of online privacy and property rights (who owns what you uploaded regardless).

.

With mods, it's literally a non-issue because if you make mods for the fame and absolutely require a lot of people to see yours, you're modding for all the wrong reasons. Good riddance.
Modding is a hobby performed for the fun of it, and to contribute to a community that loves the game as much as you do. Usually, everyone in the community shares assets among each other so future projects can do even better things with less work required.
If you care about you "property rights" (lol), create your own original works instead of making mods, and fuck off from the modding community. Attitudes like that just pollute it.

We need to completely ban and disallow monetizing mods at all. I love mods. But you should never expect to get paid for making one. When it was just hobbyists doing it for fun, no one fuckin cared. Everyone had a great time. We all knew modding was a hobby done in one's spare time whilst you worked a real job. The real job gave you the security to spend your weekends fiddling with the NWN mod tools and making cool mods for your friends to play. If others played it and it got some popularity that was just a nice bonus.

It is unironically easier nowadays to learn Unity or UE and make your own game. The competent modders did this, left modding behind to make games and either made money or didn't. All we are left with is the incompetents who can't even make an actual game.

The big issue that killed modding was when the autists who aren't that talented decided they should be entitled to money. Huge amounts of trannies and furries on benefits and disability payments thought they could become a game dev off the back of modding. Because these people have never worked a day in their lives they have a warped understand of what work and especially fame mean. Most of these modern modders feel they are owed money and owed attention just for being modders and just for making mods. When that's nonsense. You are paid for providing something someone wants that has worth. Mods have no worth. They should be something done for fun. Nothing else. They're fan fiction. More critically they already require a payment so you have access to the game. (maybe I'm old, I just think you should only pay for a game once. No mtx or paid mods.) They are incidental add ons that add weapons. Maybe change some mechanics awkwardly in a janky way for some Beth games. The absolute exception is total conversions. But even then I have no idea why you would waste time converting another game when you can just make a new game with new mechanics suited to what you've designed. What a waste of work. If you feel you are owed money for the hard work you did make sure there are no other fingers in the pie. IE: AN ENTIRE WHOLE OTHER GAME YOU BUILT YOURS OFF OF THAT YOU DO NOT OWN.