Nexus Mods, arguably the biggest repository for game mods on the Web, has crossed the impressive milestone of 10 billion downloads.
The team behind the website has put together a few fun and totally made-up facts about it:
- If every download were a footstep, you could walk to the moon 11 times or walk The Seven Thousand Steps to High Hrothgar 4,161,464 times.
- If we celebrated every download with a slice of pizza, this pizza would cover 15 times the size of Manhattan Island.
- If a file download was made every second, it would take 317 years to download all files.
The 10 billion downloads were spread across 539,682 mod files for 2,683 games. There are 128,361 mod authors and more than 47 million total members. Nexus Mods has been online for 19 years, but its growth has massively accelerated in the last few years, as shown in the graph below. Nowadays, the site registers an average of around 10 million mod downloads each day.
Nearly five years ago, Nexus Mods started paying mod authors based on unique downloads through their Donation Point system. According to the team, over $7 million have been paid to date, with a current average of more than $300K paid monthly to modders.
Soon, the website will also grant a free premium membership to mod authors who hit a predetermined number of unique downloads. Meanwhile, work on the new Nexus Mods app continues. It’s supposed to be a ‘next-generation’ mod download manager. The source code is already available through GitHub, where you may also track the milestone progress.
The success of Nexus Mods shows the rising power of user generated content, which also thrives within hugely popular games like Minecraft, Roblox, and Fortnite. GTA creator Leslie Benzies is making a game called Everywhere, which is all about UGC in a metaverse-like environment.
