Nexus Mods updates its paid mod policy, but there’s a potential problem brewing

While this might’ve been a laughable prospect years ago, in the middle of Skyrim‘s heyday, Bethesda’s paid Creations mods are now the go-to option for many players. At least, this is the case with Starfield, and the resident third-party modding website Nexus Mods is responding accordingly at last.

More specifically, Nexus Mods’ latest policy update includes a proper clarification of how the company feels about paid mods approved by publishers/developers. It sounds fairly innocuous and sensible in general, to be fair, but there are a few tidbits that could bring about problems later down the line. The gist of it all, as Nexus puts it, is that the company is “committed to building a positive modding community where all content is freely available.” As per the new policy, this means no interaction with paid mods whatsoever.

Nexus Mods issues a blanket prohibition on ‘demo’ versions of paid mods and more

As highlighted on r/starfieldmods and featured above, there are three big points of contention to be discussed in the context of Nexus’ latest policy update:

• Nexus Mods does not allow free mods to be shared in instances where they are inferior versions of a paid mod.
• Nexus Mods does not allow the sharing of mod lists that rely on paid mods to the extent that the list does not work without the user paying for content.
• Nexus Mods does not allow any patches or addons for paid user-generated content.

The first two updates are, broadly speaking, fairly sensible. Using Nexus Mods as a demo site for paid content hosted exclusively over on Creations is in bad taste and diminishes Nexus’ value as a third-party host for community-made content. Similarly, sharing mod lists that outright rely on paid mods to function is a poor showing, as it directly drives revenue toward Creations.

Extrapolating from this, it seems similarly sensible that Nexus would also disallow patches and/or expansions for paid Bethesda Creations mods (or for any other similar mod marketplace, for that matter). And there’s definitely an argument to be made that such improvements can still be hosted on Creations to begin with. Yet, this also opens the door to situations where a non-Creations modder will no longer be able to make an X Nexus mod compatible with a paid Y Creations mod using an XY patch hosted on Nexus.

We’ll have to wait and see how this pans out in practice, of course, but this could drive an even bigger wedge between the two modding marketplaces than there currently is.

It’s also worth considering the fact that Bethesda’s taken to releasing some first-party Starfield content via Creations as paid offerings to begin with. Would Nexus now disallow Nexus patches and addons for Bethesda’s own Creations items? Probably not, but it’s all quite up in the air as it stands. Time will tell how this pans out in the end, but it’s clear that Nexus isn’t happy with the direction Bethesda’s taken with Creations.