Full article:
It's come to that time of year when we prepare to see in the new year, whether it is with the chink of glass with family and friends, an early night in bed or being sat in front of the television/computer. Yep, 2017 is soon to be upon us! So with champagne and leftover Christmas morsels in hand, Michael Buble still blaring out his renditions of well-loved Christmas songs and people preparing to nurse a hangover, I can't think of a better time to reminisce with our wonderful community over what has happened this past year at Nexus Mods.
While 2016 has been harsh for the sheer number of 'A' list celebrity deaths, it has been a very successful year for us.
For starters, we have seen our membership increase by over 2.1 million users in 2016. Our total member count now sits at 12.2 million and growing! We approved 189 new games and their mods to the site and over 92,000 files (including those from GameFront) have been uploaded. We have two new staff members and have seen significant progress in some of our internal projects.
The beginning of the year started with a bang as we were still riding the Fallout 4 rush. Mods were added to the site at a frantic pace, 4,656 Fallout 4 mods were uploaded in the first quarter alone! It leads all other games for files uploaded between January and October, only being beaten by Skyrim on the launch of the Special Edition. We're now hosting over 16,000 Fallout 4 files and have had nearly 150 million total downloads.
Other games released during this busy time include 'Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen', 'Darkest Dungeon' and 'XCOM2,' all of which received favourable reviews from the critics and have seen an excellent uptake of mods on the site with nearly 2.5 million downloads between them. Dragon's Dogma and XCOM2 were also added to Nexus Mod Manager, making the addition and management of their mods super easy.
March time saw us look long and hard at our Ad provider as we were receiving more "bad ad" reports from the community than usual. We introduced the “Report this ad” functionality under each advert to try and gather more information about our advertising and to ascertain how bad the issue was. Over the course of two months, we saw a significant number of reports (8,500+) come in, and Robin decided enough was enough with the ad provider. We successfully transitioned to our new (and still current) provider and hope that the amount of ‘bad ads’ has dropped considerably for you all. Since then, Robin has written an extensive blog piece about the ads on Nexus Mods and how you can report them more effectively to us.
Dark Souls 3 released to a wave of positive reviews from the gaming media. It is very similar to its predecessors with its level of difficulty and gameplay, and thanks to the bright people in the community getting involved, it is also moddable. It was added to the site in April and has seen over 125 files added to the site.
It was with sadness that we saw the closure of one of the oldest and once most popular download sites on the internet when in April, GameFront closed its website doors for the last time. Luckily we liaised with the folks over at ArchiveTeam who were working on a project for Archive.org and also with some of the old staff left at Gamefront to ensure that all the mods that were going to get lost in the ether of cyber deletion got moved and catalogued within Nexus Mod's growing list of games.
Back In May, we decided that we needed to make the 'file uploader' both easier to use and far more robust, enabling it to upload files of any size. The old method had led to some users struggling to upload larger files, meaning that users had to contact us to do the uploading of their mods for them. Site programmer, MrMason, set about creating a new uploader that would enable files to be sent in ‘chunks’, meaning that it was more reliable to use, far faster to get your files onto the site and that you could resume your upload should you accidentally (or on purpose) close your browser window.
One of the largest mods we have ever hosted was released to an incredible reception in July, Enderal: The Shards of Order. Not only did our community love it (9,192 endorsements and counting), but it also picked up the 'Best Fan Creation' at this years 'The Game Awards'. If that isn't the sign of a fantastic mod, then I don't know what is.
August saw the release of one of the most hotly anticipated games of 2016, Hello Games 'No Man's Sky'. To say that the game was a mighty disappointment for many is an understatement. It promised to take you to distant galaxies, a journey through diverse and well-populated planets, a voyage of discovery as you will. Instead, it saw many users clamouring for a refund due to ‘false advertising’ and ‘misleading’ videos and screenshots. However, what seemed like an eternity of silence, ‘Hello Games’ are now releasing large and comprehensive updates to try and draw back in some of its initially huge player base. We may yet see it return to its initial promise of a game of deep exploration and wonder. In the meantime, the community once again stepped up to the task and the site has seen mod authors answer the call for more diversity, population and addressing some of the annoyances of the vanilla game.
On the site side in August, we chose to move our chat platform from the IP.Board Chat application to Discord, not only allowing our users to chat via text but also communicate on a range of different voice channels. We saw the average number of users online at any one time rise from approximately 15-20 people to over 2300! The feedback has been exceptionally positive, and it’s great to see our community chatting together.
Robin graciously gave up time one evening in September to be bombarded with questions from you all in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) format. It was a cracking night that saw him asked everything from "What is his favourite lunch?" to "Did he ever expect Nexus Mods to get such a large community?" And everything in between. It’s a good listen/read so be sure to check it out.
Tannin (of Mod Organiser fame) came on board in September to head up the development team of DuskDweller and Luco81 for our new Nexus Mod Manager, we are well underway with this new application, and we look forward to showing you its progress in the new year.
Terrorfox1234 joined us in October to look outside of Nexus Mods and to represent us on the wider web. He has also begun to look at our social media presence, and we've seen a 29% increase in Twitter followers in just two months. Social media is an area we would like to concentrate on due to its immediacy, and that it grants us the ability to share content with our users quickly and easily.
The huge story of October was the release of Skyrim Special Edition, that saw a resurgence of love for the world of Tamriel. People once again donned their rags to set foot in their beloved Skyrim, just this time, in glorious 64 bit! This surge in users caused a bit of a mini-meltdown at Nexus HQ due to the sheer number of players coming back to the games.. With our servers begging for mercy it caused a few hiccups and (like an episode of Star Trek) saw us having to reroute resources from elsewhere to keep the sites afloat. We weathered the storm relatively unscathed and saw some outstanding mods appear for the game; our community has been quick to respond by porting over their mods at a dizzying rate.
Over the course of the year, we have been working diligently behind the scenes on the website redesign. "Be like a duck" is the best way to describe the process as it stands. On the surface, we are making steady progress, and everything is cool, calm and collected. Underneath we are kicking frantically, working hard to get this behemoth of a task completed. Considering the small size of our development team and that they're regularly pulled away from their work on the redesign to fix issues on the current design, we're making significant headway. The internal alpha release is ready, and everything is finally slotting into place. Each passing day more bugs are getting squashed and it is becoming more and more feature complete.
After the initial internal testing, we will address anything that we find and then pass it over to our very patient and very helpful focus group to get their feedback. Once they've given the redesign some extensive testing we'll then work on our launch process. We'll provide more details on that as the time gets nearer.
So onwards to the new year and I can already picture it being one of the biggest ever for Nexus Mods. We have the redesign of both the website and the Nexus Mod Manager to look forward too; we have a larger social media presence where we can announce updates, news and giveaways and we have plans to expand our content in new and exciting ways.
So from everyone here at Nexus Mods, we hope you have all had a fantastic 2016 and wish you a very happy New Year.
82 comments
Comments locked
A moderator has closed this comment topic for the time beingP.S:You forgot Apollodown throwing a hissyfit and locking his mods away .DD
Here is wishing y'all, the best of things in the New Year!
Raising my glass in a wish for your prosperity and that you have smooth sailing for all of your endeavours in 2017. Cheers!
And, in the words of my late son, "Stay Gold"!
lot's of people joined, new web design, Tannin making replacement for NMM