Modding has long been a popular perk of PC gaming. But it can be tricky to install mods, especially if you are a newer PC gamer. That’s why the new person in charge of Nexus Mods, the biggest modding site around, has ambitious plans to make it incredibly easy for users to download and install mods.
Last year, Nexus Mods changed ownership for the first time in the site’s 20+ year existence. Many feared that this big change in leadership would lead to the site falling apart or changing in terrible ways. But we’re now a year out from that big shake-up and things have mostly stayed stable at the site. That doesn’t mean the new guy in charge, Victor “Foledinho” Folmann, isn’t planning to change things up in the future. And as explained in a post on July 28, one massive shift will be how mods are represented, shared, stored, and installed via Nexus Mods.
“For going on 25 years now, this platform has been modeling mods as files,” wrote Foledinho in a lengthy letter to the community. “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.”
Moving forward, this will change. Foledinho says that in the future the “difficult parts” will be handled by Nexus Mods. This includes managing dependencies, setup validation, and more. The goal is to make modding “more reliable and easier to maintain for everyone.” The hope is that mods in the future will just work thanks to changes being made to Nexus Mods, turning the site into more of a platform than just a place where mods are hosted.
“Will this be hard to do? Yes, but we’re committed to providing this experience,” said Foledinho.
“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.”
What this should look like is that in the future, Nexus Mods should be “Spotify-easy” to use while offering “GitHub-powerful” tools for mod creators and their collaborators.
This all sounds good, in theory, but how Nexus Mods reaches this point seems hard to say. And the letter to the community lacks any specific timetables or dates for what to expect. Still, I’ve used Nexus Mods’ Vortex tool before, which makes it easy to install and update mods for popular games without having to tinker too much. So I’m cautiously optimistic that this team can expand on that concept and truly make it easier than ever to share and install mods.
“We still have a way to go,” wrote Foledinho, “but the path to getting there goes right through the issues you’ve been highlighting for a long time.”