NexusMods Believes Paid Mods Are In "Direct Conflict" With Its Goals

Community made mods are love letters to games by fans. Whether it's fixing an annoying issue in a beloved game, adding interesting features, introducing more content, or simply turning the protagonist into CJ from GTA: San Andreas, mods are the community's way of keeping the game alive post launch.

Paid Mods Go Against Everything A Bethesda Game Should Be

Creation Club has once again come under fire for very obvious reasons.

While there are countless free mods available for almost every popular game – and countless 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 prompted NexusMods, 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 statement by 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 detail here.

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."

What's The Most Amount Of Mods You Downloaded For A Single Game?

I've probably downloaded a hundred for a Minecraft run once. But what about you? Do you beat me in mod count?