Welcome to the team Mat! Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background?
Hello, great to be here after lurking around the community for a few weeks! I recently joined the Nexus Mods team in Exeter, UK. It’s a small team here of incredibly passionate and knowledgeable gamers and developers.
My background in modding comes from a history of video gaming and tabletop gaming. My weekends used to be filled with Warhammer 40k, Bloodbowl, GURPS and D&D, painting miniatures, building dioramas and planning devious dungeons. This led me to 3d modelling and digital painting. I love a bit of Blender and Photoshop and am never too far from my Wacom tablet, but also try to keep my hand in with more traditional media, like pencils and charcoal. Time permitting, I have a weird interest in map making and writing post-apocalyptic short stories. (Some examples in the image below)
Could you tell us more about how you got into gaming, what games you like to play and your favourite mods?
I started gaming on a ZX Spectrum, spending more time debugging code than playing. With 48k RAM on the Spectrum, I couldn’t imagine ever needing anything else. Then the Atari ST, where my first memorable games were Bloodwych, Dungeon Master and Elite (I would be surprised if many in the community are old enough to remember these games!).
I’ve always loved building communities and created a guild management website called Mighty Guilds, mostly for members of the Everquest and Everquest II raiding communities. I used to raid back in 10 B.C. (before children).
I went on to head up the community for Riot Games in Europe. The League of Legends community are known for being somewhat passionate and competitive, ahem…. This got me into esports and event management, where we typically organised 50+ gaming events each year. I’ve also played quite a bit of League and TFT, though I generally get drawn into survival-based games like DayZ, Rust, Fallout and Project Zomboid.
Following Riot I joined Hutch Games and spent some time building communities around racing games and getting more heavily into video content production, both live content, documentaries and event coverage. I’m hoping we can bring some more video content to the Nexus Mods community, focused on modding and highlighting some of the amazing talent we have here.
Which Games are you most looking forward to?
Once you have kids, it’s inevitable that you end up playing Minecraft. I played a ton of Hypixel Skyblock with my son, and I’m pretty excited by Hytale from the same studio. I’ve bumped into Noxxy a couple of times, the Hypixel CEO, and he’s a great guy with a really strong vision for the game. It also looks fairly modder friendly, but yet to see how this pans out. Could it be the Minecraft killer?
StarField is looking great and I can’t wait for the next update from BGS, I recommend you join our StarField Modding Discord server if you are even remotely interested in the game.
Camelot Unchained, from Mark Jacobs and the guys at City State is a game I backed several years ago. I hope to see them come out of the wilds eventually with a launched game, because DAoC was a Realm vs Realm game I loved. It’s all about the PeeVeePee.
I’m one of those gamers who sticks with a franchise, even when it dies, is reincarnated, dies again, then eventually crawls off into the bushes as a weirdly hybrid beast. I hold a few games close to my heart and will keep following their iterations.
Any games that you are looking forward to? (comments below!).
You had a bit of time to get acclimated now, so how would you describe the Nexus Mods community as a whole?
I see a passionate and diverse community with incredible curiosity and talent. A community of such size and varied objectives can inevitably lead to conflict and heated discussion. I want us to pour more fuel on the positive passions of the community, and more water on the more negative and destructive interactions.
Communities at an advanced stage of maturity often undergo mitosis with smaller sub-communities of specific interest shedding off, forging their own path. We have seen this, and generally, it’s something we can support and work with.
I think that Nexus Mods can continue to be the home of modding, not only as the best place to host and serve your mods but as a place for support, learning and sharing. We want to raise visibility around the best content and push to make modding easier for those entering the space.
What are the big issues affecting the Nexus Mods community?
Developments in AI are moving very quickly. New applications and use cases continue to emerge, creating waves of obsoletion in their path. Our community is at the forefront of adoption and throwing up many new and fascinating discussion points for us as a team. This will continue to evolve and our job is to navigate the route while aiming to protect the rights of creative owners and allowing mod authors to make the most of what these new technologies offer.
The key areas of creativity, ownership and user intent will continue to dominate a lot of discussion within the Nexus Mods community.
Additionally, the desire to monetize modding is a strong draw for many new corporate entrants in this space. We are proud to be an independent platform, self-financed and not answerable to investors. We do not have the ticking time bomb of many other investor-financed services who need to focus on revenue generation and squeezing their users to maximise profits. Our focus has always been and will continue to be, bringing the best level of service and value to our community of users.
We fully support the fundamental belief that modding should be free for users. At the same time, we believe that mod authors, who invest significant time and resources into their passion, should benefit from their hard work. Our Donation Points system has paid out $4,635,412 to mod authors and we will continue to explore new opportunities to help authors benefit from their efforts.
On the flip side, we also want to improve benefits and experience for users who financially support the site and our mod authors. Our premium supporters and author supporters are so important to our efforts, the literal fuel that drives the Nexus Mods engine.
This year holds much in store. We quietly passed 2,200 games supported on the site and while BGS remains a big focus of our content, the community is becoming much more diverse. Several big game launches are coming along which we are incredibly excited by, including Starfield.
Looking to the next couple of years, I’m incredibly excited to be working with you all as we create the future of modding and keep building an amazing modding community.
Could you share your vision for the future of our community and what you hope to achieve as our Community Manager?
Our community of modders continues to grow with over 40Mn registered members and close to 8Bn downloads to date. Being the best place to upload your mods and reach a large audience, who can easily download mods, can be summed up by our goal to “Make Mods Easy”.
I want to further improve our support for mod authors, help them to reach a wider audience and expand on reasons to bring their mods to our platform. I also want to continue leveraging the power of our community to better support new games and bring more existing popular modding communities into the Nexus Mods family.
Our community is diverse, something we are proud of. This variety in backgrounds and beliefs is a strength and shows the wealth of the modding community. One of our goals is to support a Positive Modding Community. This means promoting a strong sense of community, enabling people of all backgrounds to feel welcomed and putting the tools and resources into users hands to achieve their modding goals.
Modding is the thing that brings us all together. At times, it can be easy to lose sight of this.
What are the plans for the forums?
There’s been a recent trend with game communities moving away from traditional forums to Discord-only. Often because large community forums are complex and expensive to manage.
The Nexus Mods Community Forums are an essential resource and we have no plans to discontinue them. In fact, our aim is to revitalise the forums to improve their ease of use and value as a place to share knowledge, engage with other members of the community and troubleshoot issues.
We have close to 2 decades of shared resources and rich knowledge within our community forums. This is something to celebrate and preserve.
Discord as a tool serves a very different (and useful) purpose. As a place for quick and timely back-and-forth discussion, it works well. It is not a replacement for the forums or for deeper discussion around often highly technical subjects.
If someone in the community has an idea to share, how can modders make sure their voice is heard?
Our goal is to Make Mods Easy. Part of this is to build the tools and services that our modders want. If you have thoughts or ideas for new features, please add them to this board where other modders can view and vote on features they think should be implemented.
Also, it is possible to view a curated roadmap of new features which our development team are currently working on here: https://trello.com/b/xl2W3ALM/nexus-mods-roadmap
This doesn’t include everything we are working on but provides an overview of things you might find interesting.
We would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate BigBizkit (Stefan) on his move from Community Manager to Product Designer. While he'll still be around, he won't be a point of contact for support anymore, so if you used to talk to Stefan feel free to poke Eric (Happybara), Mike (Pickysaurus) or Mat.
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Good to see the Nexus got a game industry veteran with a solid gamer / creative cultural background.
One of my areas of focus will be to improve the 'new modder experience'. As well as supporting existing modders and users, we need to focus on growth and better onboarding modders early in their career.
The media section can be a bit of an unsorted melage of games and mods. It's something we can better organise.
Our job here is not to dictate direction or drive innovation. Our job is to empower its use for modding within the bounds of fair use. What is considered fair use continues to evolve. Doubtless there will be many future discussions regarding reasonable use, creativity, ownership.
"Come join my merry band"