A little over a year ago, Nexus Mods changed hands, with the new owner and lead developer promising to keep the ship running without changing the core philosophy of Nexus Mods. Now, in a year-one update blog, the new owner, Victor Folmann, has detailed his plans for the mod platform going forward.
One of the major points Folmann brought up in his update was the future of Nexus Mods, with planned changes including a wholesale redesign of the Nexus Mods infrastructure. According to Folmann, Nexus Mods “has been modeling mods as files,” and he goes on to explain that “Mods are not files. Mods are systems.” In order to address this, Folmann says that Nexus Mods will be redesigned to treat mods as systems.
The goal with the infrastructure changes appears to be to have Nexus Mods operate more like a traditional software repository, as we typically see with repos on Linux. The idea is for installation of game mods to be a seamless experience, but with the power and flexibility of something like GitHub. In this vision, Nexus Mods would automatically handle dependencies, setup validation, and updates and changes, in order to make modding more predictable and hassle-free.
This announcement comes not long after Nexus Mods also promised a Linux version of its Vortex application, which is a native mod management and installation platform that appears to be the foundation of the new direction announced in the one-year update.
For going on 25 years now, this platform has been modeling mods as files. Mods are not files. Mods are systems. With dependencies, with conflicts, with load orders, with versioning, with environments, all that complexity. Everything that has been making you angry over the years can be attributed to one factor: the platform models your mods as files.
That changes. A platform that knows modding as systems. Where the difficult parts are done for you: dependency resolution, setup validation, and change deployment, making modding more reliable and easier to maintain for everyone. Where a mod is a repeatable experience that works reliably for everyone who installs it, not just for its Mod Author. Where a shared link brings you a working modded game without any need for three hours of digging on Reddit or through comments on mod pages. Will this be hard to do? Yes, but we’re committed to providing this experience.
The long-term vision, and I’m going to say this publicly for the first time, is for Nexus Mods to become the layer of the infrastructure that makes everything else possible. Not only your home for mods, but a platform that enables modding on the whole ecosystem. An operating system for user-generated content in gaming.