Recently there was a lot of drama in the Skyrim (and Fallout 4, but whatever) modding community. Nexus Mods, the largest site to host mods for over one thousands games decided to change their policy regarding mod hosting. The site, you see, hosts game modifications, or mods, made by user so that other users can download them and install them on their game to enhance it. They even provide tools that make this process easier for users of their more popular games to mod.
The service they provide is free to use. They do have the ability to use premium subscriptions, which really just give users faster download speeds. But other than that, users can download and upload their mods for free, provided they don’t violate certain terms of service (pornographic mods, mods that contain seriously morally reprehensible content like child exploitation, etc.). Essentially, Nexus Mods is hosting people’s content at this expense and banking on a small fraction of its user base to subscribe to their site in order to cover their expenses.
About a month ago, they announced a change in their hosting policy. They wanted to be able to provide users with a mod list ability so that users could create packages that allowed other users to enjoy a list of mods that they themselves have installed. Basically, if you play games heavily modded, this allowed other users to get your current mod list and download it and enjoy a similar playthrough. With this change, they had to make a hard decision and that was to keep mods from being completely deleted.
At face value, this doesn’t seem like a big deal. Mod creators could still archive their mods and thus keep them from being publicly listed. So what’s the problem?
Well, some mod creators felt that their work was no longer theirs as a result. And this is understandable. After all, if you don’t have the ability to remove your own content, do you really own it at this point?
This is where property rights become a bit messy and not so clear cut. Because while it could be argued that the mod creator owns the mods he or she creates, Nexus Mods is the platform that is hosting it and they are ones who are footing the bill for hosting it. If anything, this change adds costs to Nexus Mods in that they now have to maintain data storage that they previously didn’t have to do.
In any case, it’s a tough call to make. Sure, an artist owns the painting he makes but if he doesn’t own the studio who hosted his painting for free, do they not get to dictate how and when it gets displayed? On the other hand, shouldn’t a platform respect the wishes of a creator to some degree?
There is no easy answer here. I would argue that Nexus Mods has been more than fair to creators for years now and that this policy change really isn’t a huge deal. There have been many times in the past where beloved mods have been wiped from the Internet for various reasons.
On the other hand, I do understand that mod creators put time, effort, and love into their creations. And if, for whatever reason, they decide to not share it anymore, then they should have some form of creative control.
This whole fiasco also highlights a problem with the Internet as a whole. A ton of services online are essentially free. Because of this, most users do not have any stake in what they produce online. Social Media companies, for example, are able to get away with a lot of customer abuse because most users are paying them for their services. Once money starts changing hands between the producers and the hosts, then you start to have more cohesive contracts and more consumer protection laws apply.
As it stands, there have been a few people who left Nexus Mods because of this. They were allowed to have their content deleted from the site. I don’t fault them or condemn them for their decision, even though I do disagree with them. And I do understand why Nexus Mods made their own policy changes, which is actually something I think they should have done much earlier.
In any case, what’s done is done and the aftermath of the change actually wasn’t that bad. Nearly all mod content remains as most mod creators are perfectly fine with their content to continue to be hosted, even if they archive it. And until the Nexus Mods owners decided to start charging mod creators for hosting, there really isn’t much mod creators can say about how their content is hosted on a site they use for free.