Community made mods are love letters to games by fans. Whether it’sfixing an annoying issuein a beloved game,adding interesting features,introducing more content, or simplyturning the protagonist into CJfrom GTA: San Andreas, mods are the community’s way of keeping the game alive post launch.
While there are countless free mods available for almost every popular game – andcountless more just for Skyrim– there are also certain mods that require you to pay for them. Whether it’s through a developer or via a Patreon account for individual creators, paid mods have become more prevalent than ever. This phenomenon has promptedNexusMods, arguably the biggest modding site in the world, to introduce new policies.
NexusMods Offers Clarity On Paid Mods
With the rise in the number of paid mods, the process of payment is currently not properly regulated. This has resulted in creators and community members asking NexusMods to clarify its policies, making it easier for all parties. A community manager at NexusMods addressed this on the site’s forum (thanks,PC Gamer), but mentioned that the website stands for free mods.
“Over the past year several game developers have introduced varying paid modding schemes, including Bethesda’s Verified Creators (Skyrim, Fallout 4, Starfield) and InZoi’s Creations Marketplace,“said the statementby community manager Pickysaurus. “As a result, we’ve received a lot of requests for clarity on our paid modding stance and our paid modding rules from a number of our users. We are now updating our policies to reflect our official stance.”
The site has stated some guidelines after consulting with several creators in the community. These guidelines address several factors, including linking to paid mods, trials or demos of paid mods, patches that require payment, collections that require paid mods, and mandatory backlinks to NexusMods. You can read the full policy in detailhere.
The community manager reiterated the site’s stance towards paid mods, saying, “We firmly believe that modding should be a pursuit of passion first and foremost, with financial compensation being a nice bonus but not the main driver of creating content.
“Our mission is to “Make Modding Easy” and we strongly believe that paid modding is in direct conflict with that goal. Modding games is already a complicated process and forcing users to navigate a confusing split of free and paid mods to get their setup working does not represent an easy, accessible and positive modding community.”
