Games

Well, for one thing, Nexus gives modders a share of ad revenue. Under a different name, I have a mod that's a backend requirement for a big, popular mod, and that nets me a reliable few bucks a month.

That said, a good portion of the modding community also exists on Gamebanana. If you want BotW, ToTK or Source engine mods, GB is the go-to.

I mean, github does exist. It looks like people just prefer platforms with a pre-existing community.

Steam workshop exists as well, for games that support it.

That went so well until your proposed alternative was Microsoft.

There's also steam workshop. Neither are shining examples of a free modding community. I think nexus mods starting out better and slowly enshittified but I don't know the extent of it.

I think it's just the internet being the internet. Or at least how it's been for awhile. There are big sites that a lot of people crowd to and that becomes the default. Like auctioning things off online. Ebay. That was where everyone went to. Need to order a few different things online? Amazon. Are there other online stores? Plenty. But Amazon is seen as cheap and convenient.

Nexus mods is just the popular site, but the moders have other options.

We don't. My ultrawide mods get thousands of downloads and I haven't uploaded a single one to Nexus.

There's also the Thunder store!

That's kinda like saying PlanetMinecraft monopolized sharing world's, isn't it?

There's stuff like Curseforge, but it's only for some games, mostly Minecraft. The problem, if someone considers it a problem, is really that communities for games generally centralize around one site for their mods for the most part, and Nexus has garnered a lot of trust and therefore has more pull/inertia for communities working those things out.

As for Github, I believe the vast majority of mods have Github pages, but Github itself doesn't really have a UI suited for mod downloaders, and no real incentive to implement one. So sites like Nexus and Curseforge are still a necessity.

I believe modrinth will be expanding to be more than Minecraft mods iirc.

I was really hoping thunderstore and mod.io would take off more since they seem more platform-agnostic and FOSS-like with their integration with git and versioning (and for some games they have), but people just prefer convenience of nexusmods and steam workshop unfortunately. They just have a bigger community and better discoverability in the end

R2Modman and thunderstore.io has grown it's catalogue quite a bit as of late, but it's mostly (don't know if it's entirely or not) unity games. It's my favorite modding platform with features that make sharing modlists for multiplayer a breeze.

Their rate-limiting isn't bad at all, their integration into everything is excellent, and for games without much of a community Vortex is often the only mod manager. Their API isn't closed down, so Mod Organiser can integrate with Nexus just as well, and they probably would also do it with other mod sites if those ever bothered to set up a version check etc. API. They have an excellent search function.

In short: They provide a good service. Like the most annoying part about Nexus as a freeloader is the five or what seconds wait before your mod manager picks up the download.

And, no, their rate limiting really isn't bad. 1.5MB/s for people with adblock, 3MB/s for people without. How often do you download gigabytes worth of mods it's not like they're bullying you into a subscription.

Nexus has the lions share, but only for some games, I had a premium subscription but still found for like half the games I mod that nexus either didn't have a modpage for them or that most modders for that game used other sites to host their mods