Chazore said:
I'm a bit on the fence when it comes to modders. Sure they do great things for our games and that deserves credit, but what I don't entirely agree with is the whole "ownership" aspect of modding, mainly because without the game, you don't have the mod, the mod cannot exist without said game, meaning the mod relies on that game, and well... the modders don't own the rights to those games and they certainly didn't create those games, which means they only added to a tiny fraction of an already crafted and licensed game. Like in the artists side of the industry, tracing over someone's work and even adding to it is still frowned upon, yet adding and copying existing ideas from an official studio and adding them onto an existing game is somehow okay to retain some form of ownership (And I know some modders and fans alike, chalk modding in with "art", meaning by their logic that the two industries can be compared). I feel like games preservation is important, but I also feel the same for mods that greatly improve a game or even fix the issues some games have. If those mods are taken away because some mod author got a bit frumpy, then really you're at the behest of that mod author's emotional outburst, which isn't really all that great when you think about it for the long-term. Like we already saw the numerous times when SE threw a hissy fit when Tomb Raider didn't hit sales targets with their exclusivity deals, but at least they didn't entirely pull said games from the market for emotional reasons. I just think that emotions should be completely removed from modding anything, meaning you've got to be purely logical, and logic would dictate that you should want the mod to be preserved, not deleted and removed (I know it exists on another site, but time changes everything, nothing remains the same forever, that site will eventually either die or remove the files by the author's will). |
A third party (Nexus Mods) fighting this fight is what bothers me the most. If there's one party that I might kind of be willing to accept to fight this battle, it's the publisher - because the publisher is the one with all the rights. My right then is to consider them a company I don't want to support, but I digress. Anyway, if you want to pick the route where the modders don't have much rights because they're basing their work on someone else's work, I'd say it's up to the party who has the rights - and if modders don't have those rights, Nexus Mods definitely doesn't have them either. From a rights perspective, to me this seems like two third parties fighting.
I might feel otherwise about this had Nexus Mods been like this since the beginning, but this seems to be a change that is retroactively applied to previously uploaded mods as well. This doesn't feel right to me, which is why I'm siding with the modders here, regardless of any long-term consequences this might have. If you want to, you can still back up any mods you have downloaded, and you should definitely do so if you're worried about things in the long term.
