As we continue to grow in size and popularity we have reached a point where we can afford to reward our mod authors with a Premium Membership directly without them needing to "buy" it with Donation Points, even if it was heavily discounted. Only approximately a quarter of our mod authors have opted their mods into our DP system so with this change, we'll be able to reward all our mod authors whether they are opted into the DP system or not.
While the system isn't quite ready to go live yet, we have removed the ability to buy Premium Memberships from our Donation Point store as we didn't want mod authors to buy something in the DP store now that they would have been given for free only a short while later.
Below is a list of the milestones in Unique Downloads (UDL) that will need to be achieved in order to receive a free Premium Membership as a reward:
- 1,000 UDL: Free Supporter Membership and Access to Mod Author Discord Servers / Nexus Mods Forum (This is current functionality)
- 3,000 UDL: Free 1 Month Premium Membership
- 6,000 UDL: Free 1 Month Premium Membership
- 9,000 UDL: Free 1 Month Premium Membership
- 12,000 UDL: Free 1 Month Premium Membership
- 15,000 UDL: Free 1 Month Premium Membership
- 18,000 UDL: Free 1 Month Premium Membership
- 21,000 UDL: Free 1 Month Premium Membership
- 24,000 UDL: Free 1 Month Premium Membership
- 27,000 UDL: Free 1 Month Premium Membership
- 30,000 UDL: Lifetime Premium Membership
These rewards will be redeemable at a time of your choosing and the Unique Download count will apply to all historical mods including those that are Hidden, Archived or Deleted. Further details will be provided closer to the release time, which we are hoping will be within the next 30 days.
329 comments
Nexus is going to give away a free lifetime Premium Account to the new mod authors soon ?
Mod authors not only can still spend the 30,000UDL worth of DP in the shop, they also get a free lifetime Premium Account.
That's like having the cake and eating it. Nomnomnom
Not that I don't want the new mod authors to have the premium account because they did earn it by getting the 30K unique downloads !
It's just adding this all up ...
Sure, all of them who already got a premium account years ago have enjoyed the benefits of the system.
But to say : " yeah, thanks for the fish and thank you for your contribution " and leave it at that is ... well : disappointing.
I think it's also because of their contribution that Nexus is able to do this.
Without the big mod authors from way back when, getting traffic to the site, Nexus would not be where it is now, at least not in this shape or form it is in now.
Is Nexus willing to think about the picture I painted above ?
If I missed something and effed up my reasoning please tell me, and I will apologize.
But I think I got it right....
Right ?
cheers
-=DD=-
I also feel like, just because something new comes along, and it's a good thing, it doesn't automatically mean you are owed something just because you've already paid for it another way. You still had the benefit of what you paid for before the new thing came along. Likewise, even if there is no benefit, that doesn't mean new people shouldn't be able to benefit from something just because you had to pay for it. See things like Student Loan Forgiveness or new cancer treatments.
They're trying to implement a good thing. You shouldn't ask them to punish themselves for doing so in the process, nor are you entitled to.
Just take the win, man.
I dont really get why though. For me modding is a passion and Nexus has always been here to share that passion and with the added benefit of a community! Not to mention you guys adding DP to begin with is a massive thank you imo.
Im not sure what the solution would be exactly. But something non monetary is probably the ideal. Give the veterans who bought lifetime a special badge next to their username or something equivelant minimum. But then that could end up costing nexus more in dev time to set that up (i know how janky their account/forum system is :P). Similar to what flowerguy said, i wouldn't want it to come at a significant cost to Nexus.
@Dark0ne I believe his inital point is that compared to vetaran authors that bought lifetime premium for presumably "30,000UDL worth of DP", new authors get that much value for free as the now free lifetime sub, ontop of not having to spend 30,000UDL on the sub. I see the logic but don't really agree. It presumes a lifetime sub is an essential buy and again that those who did got no value from it.
I think he sums it up well towards the end with
Which i mostly agree with. But it comes across more entitled than i would like..
Make mods. People download them.
Mod author gets DP from Unique DownLoads, UDL is also counter for "free lifetime Premium Account" (30,000 UDL needed) and starts ticking.
Accumulated DP gets more and more because more and more people download the mods. UDL number is also increasing...
Finally 30,000 UDL is reached, and X amount of DP has been earned in the meantime.
Normally some part of the X amount of DP would be needed to buy a lifetime Premium Account (about 50k-ish of DP) so after buying lifetime Premium Account the DP would have been 50k-ish less.
But not anymore : Mod author gets free lifetime Premium Account and gets to spend x amount of accumulated DP which normally would have to be spend for the lifetime Premium Account.
So as of now everyone without a lifetime Premium Account gets double the fun.
They can spend the DP and get lifetime Premium Account for free.
Whereas before this you could spend your 50k-ish DP on goodies or lifetime Premium Account.
Isn't this the same as "trying to have your cake and eat it" ?
Like "you can't have the best of both worlds." ?
Or in Freddie's terms : I want it all, and I want it now
I don't understand why presumably the lifetime sub is an essential buy ? People spend DP on it. DP is worth money, real money.
Normally you can spend your "money" only on one thing. Now it's keep the "money" and have some fun with it, here's a free lifetime sub.
In my eyes it's just not "fair" to those that helped make the Nexus to what it is now while they did not have the opportunity to keep the DP they spend on buying the lifetime sub.
I never wrote this about me (although I have a lifetime Premium Account bought with DP), therefore it was never intended as "entitled".
It's about balance and fairness, please check the post and how I have worded it.
And if you've done your part in helping to create something together (positive) , how can you be "entitled" (negative) if you've deserved your share ?
Thats what i mean, i agree it would be fair to give them something. But i think it's too entitled to imply that something should be worth $60 or whatever the lifetime sub is/was. We already got some of our "fair share", via enjoying premiums features until now and donation points. Where we disagree i think is how much and what these modders are owed.
You've explained how it was before and how it is now. Ok. What I don't understand is why or what point you're trying to make, so I don't know what answers you want from us, if you want any answers at all!
Just a little Question, can you please bring back the FREINDS Menu, and please let us modder self deciding about to delete a mod from the site?
greetings Neutrogen
*sigh*
Again, and still keeping it civil :
If you know what people had to do to get a lifetime sub some time ago...
And know how the rules will be in a few weeks/months....
Then you know the difference, right ?
So, if you know the difference, how does Nexus view the fairness of this deal compared with the way it was ?
Does Nexus think this new deal is a fair deal for all users of the Nexus? Does everyone benefit from this ?
Or only those that don't have a lifetime sub yet, i.e. the "new" mod authors (and of course Nexus themselves) ?
What I'm asking is if Nexus acknowledges that there is a difference in the old way and the new way, and if so, if they think it's beneficial for all users of the site, or only for a few ?
And if they come to the same conclusion as I do, are they willing to take appropriate action to shift the balance back if needed, so things are fair again for the whole community.
And no, I'm not telling what these actions should be (they never listen to me anyway ), I want Nexus to think about this and come up with a plan themselves. Some intrinsic motivation to do the right think, hoping that this train of thoughts will stick.
btw :
* I see some people suggesting that I want a refund. That's not what I'm asking.
* I see some people claiming I'm acting entitled. Again, it's not for me. It's for all those mod authors (not me, I'm but a small fish) that have helped Nexus to become the biggest modding site in the world.
* Some suggest that these mod authors benefitted from their lifetime subs. What? They paid 50 bucks or more for that lifetime sub, how is that a benefit compared to getting the lifetime sub for free ?
If the whole world worked on the premise of "we can't make things better for people from now on unless we go back and retrospectively compensate everyone who didn't get the same deal in the past" then nothing would ever be improved. We'd still be in our caves. This seems to be what you're asking us to think about doing, which I can tell you now, we did think about it and knew some users would ask this, but ultimately if we had to go back and retrospectively payback users/give some sort of odd incentive to compensate them for the fact they didn't have this privilege in the past then we simply wouldn't be offering this reward at all. Nor would we have made the DP system, because we wouldn't have been able to retrospectively pay for all the downloads accumulated by mod authors up until that point.
The alternative is that we remove the option to purchase Premium from the DP store now, then wait a year until everyone who has purchased a Lifetime membership recently feels like they got some "value" from it, then give everyone their free Premium one year from now. The Lifetime Premium option was $51 in the DP store. 1 year of Premium Membership costs $62 now (based on current exchange rates). Therefore, after a year, those users shouldn't feel too aggrieved because they still got a heavily discounted Premium Membership from the store and used it over the last year.
Or, we draw a line here and now and say "hey, we can now afford to do this when we couldn't before and we have a bit of time in our dev sprints to get this done before we start on the next major overhauls/new systems at Nexus Mods, let's give our authors another cool reward". This is the option we took, because we feel waiting 1 year so a few folks don't feel like they wasted their DP wasn't worth thousands waiting to get their reward. We hoped those users would understand, in the same way it's annoying when you buy something and then it goes on sale not too long after. Yes, it's unfortunate, but lots of people stand to benefit from this, so lets be happy for them.
diziet
well thats the crux isn't it? you can afford it now because of veteran modders (as well as your own work maintaining the site), bringing views and subscribers as well as alot of them buying premium themselves. But when you say your giving your authors a cool reward, the modders that likely supported you most are missing out.
What are you suggesting we do to raise the funds to "pay back" mod authors who used DP to buy Premium Membership? Do a fund raiser? Not pay our staff this month? Take it out of the DP pot? The latter is the only feasible choice. I'm not sure that would be in anyone's best interest.
I'm not entirely sure you can speak for the mod authors who have "supported us most", you can only speak for yourself. Indeed, you can see some of our veterans replying positively in this comment section to this news. With many mod authors now making hundreds to thousands of dollars each month from DP, these folks who you are claiming "supported us most" really aren't going to be too fussed about us giving Premium Membership to more authors, for less, either. They are being rewarded for their support.
Who is missing out and how? Now even more people are going to become Premium Members. A minority of people are treating this like some sort of kick in the teeth which, I won't lie, I'm finding fascinating.
I appreciate you feel some sort of outrage for the fact some people have paid for something they could have later received for free but I doubt we are going to see eye to eye on this, so I shall leave you folks to your outrage now.
A good point. But i cant imagine itd be that difficult to do a proper poll were you interested in better stats then just anecdotes. However i agree your mostly likely correct about most modders.
I really don't think the money is the issue. it's more how the OP was worded and the implied meaning. It comes accross as a little insulting to say your celebrating the sites growth to veteran modders (paraprasing alot i know), but then go on to explain the result doesn't apply to said modders.
I also really don't think it's outrage in most cases. Eveyrones likes to paint is black or white, when it's more like their just a little insulted or feeling that the message was a littlle disengnuous. Not that they are about to flee the enxus and take their mods with them, while s#*! talking the enxus on twitter or whatever else outrage would entail.
It honestly seems to be those in full support that are most outraged, throwing around insults and swears and exagerating any criticism as outrage and the like.
As a mod author myself I can only say that even if I was the first mod author in here I still would not be upset about new features the site offers no matter if they include me or not :)
That said I am not really sure if there really are authors making thousands of dollars per month here since 20-25k unique downloads per month bring about 50-75$ per month so one would need to have over 500k unique downloads per month to achieve 1000$/month mark. Can't say no one does but I can say with quite high confidence that even if someone does there can't be many, as the site really doesn't seem to have that much traffic yet. Even for Skyrim Special Edition(the most modded and downloaded on-site) the best mod has 4.7M unique downloads since 2016 so it brought the author around $5000 in 8 years not in a few months but lets say he has 100 mods that do that well constantly and yes then you might reach a higher income but still rarely reaching 3 zeros income monthly. I am not moaning about insanely low income from unique downloads as at least we do get something real out of modding from this site but I really don't want users to think authors can get a normal living income from this site either as this idea really lowers and mostly nulifies donations from 99.99% of users.
All I could say about site improvement is, I am not sure if it is true or not as I never tried to remove any of my mods yet but I read something about not being able to delete our own mods from the site if we wanted to? As I said I never tried to click that delete button but if we really can't, then yeah that would be something that needs to change cos not having complete control over your own creation sounds like a very communist thing, to say the least
The only reason I am tackling this is because I also heard Larian is thinking about allowing modders add and sell their mods on Steam which probably means I would remove most my mods from Nexus since even selling them for 1$/download, even if I get 40% of that after Steam and Larian get their cut, it would still bring me more income in 1 month then I will get here in 1 year or a lot more :D
Nexus owes us nothing. The dp points are freely given and something Nexus does not have to do.
If they want to award modders a membership for making mods more power to them. I bought lifetime before they stopped having lifetime and missed out on a previous offer where I could have gotten lifetime for free. I did ask at that time if I could give it to someone else, was told no, and I said ok and went on with life.
Nexus is not perfect, nothing on earth can be, but it is built on a vision where mods ae freely offered and given. Remember the Sims download sites where every mod had a price tag? This is the opposite of that. the philosophy that drives is is the opposite of that.
If someone missed out on a free membership because they bought it already, Nexus has no obligation to give them anything. You do not punish someone for being generous when they can afford to be generous. The money was not there before, but it is now. Let others enjoy. The mods those people make may one day benefit you greatly.
I'd like to use an analogy here:
Nexus is to modding websites as Honkai Star Rail is to turn-based RPG mobile gacha games. Not perfect by any stretch, but I'd be remiss if I were to be too harsh on them considering how generous they have already been.
Here's to many more fruitful decades of Nexus Mods <3
Some of the whiny entitled bullshit I'm seeing ELSEWHERE in this comment section sickens me.
I started moding for personal use to tweak to my liking but last year with BG3 I got into posting what I have done to myself here encouraged by what the comunity was also sharing at the time, one of my UI mods got midly popular and all I needed was the great coments I had on it.
That mod wasn't event enrolled in the program becuase I probably forgot to opt in at the time, I only understood the DP program becuase of the 10 billion downloads post and then checked in all my mods :)
The free supporter account was enough for my use but Iam glad to receive the premium membership and able to spend the DP points on some game key.
This may be true, if you're working for a wage. However, modders (at least those who upload their mods on this site) aren't working for a wage, they're volunteering their effort. The donation points are a nice bonus, but they're not being given in exchange for services, they're being given as thanks to make modders feel valued and appreciated by the platform.
Even so, I believe that 30,000 UDL is a rather low figure.
I started out modding when Morrowind was the game everyone was modding. I didn't finish any until the one last mod I made and I really stuck to completing it. I used it in my Morrowind game.
Then the idea for Lifetime Premium arrived. I bought one because of the allowance for the faster downloading speed downloading other's mods.
Then the DL numbers count came along for mods so I uploaded the Morrowind Mod I completed and a Fallout 3 mod I made as a starter mod to build up and add to add to later.
I decided to find out if people liked my Morrowind mod and the Fallout 3 mod.
After I saw how people appreciated my two mods I decided I wanted completely out of the modding arena. Only problem is all my posts didn't get DELETED, just my username and account got deleted.
Again, Aye! Dark0ne. You told me in a post that all my mods would drift out of existence in the depths of the archives.
Dark0ne, my posts are not drifting off into the Archives because some people are reading them now and have been even after I Deleted the account. All my posts are maintained like they are because I have such a large fan base looking in on them; even though my account says it is Deleted54170User. You should be paying me for all the people who keep visiting to see my old stories and fantastic mania I have in them.
I am wondering if I will get shuffled around and Pe Od again.
I ask again, if I upload my mods again, will I be given a lifetime Premium membership and my old paying by the year version of Premium be cancelled?
If I have to keep paying for a Premium Membership when you're going to give new modders a Lifetime Premium. I feel like I don't get it anymore period!?
Give to community, get a little something as a 'thank you' back. :)