[Peer to Peer mod distribution via IPFS]

> I suspect that if this were to start gaining traction there would be a way to flag Nexus with an "I downloaded this" flag associated with the users' account.

I certainly hope not! Exposing any programmatic way to increase download counts for files sounds like it's ripe for exploitation, no matter how carefully the tracking would be done. That's not an unsolvable problem, but it's a pretty big one given the problem it's solving is, you know, paying authors for their work.

 

> Licenses etc.

 

Your points are all very sound, and make sense for someone who is used to working with open source code. Mod files, however, don't follow the same rules. The reason lots of mods don't include licenses is because lots of mods don't *have* licenses. Mods don't follow the same standardised method of licensing assets that software does so all the conveniences of things like SPDX lists just don't exist.

 

You're right that authors *could* post IPFS identifiers but you're now back to the problem of having to parse some arbitrary text fields (the only API-exposed text fields per-file are the name, description and changelog), which is far from ideal.

 

> code vs non-code mods

 

Yeah, that ones a common misconception that also tripped me up early on. For an example, the most recent game I've been modding was Ace Combat 7. It's skin mods are literally image files, packed in a proprietary format and installed as-is. Mod creators never see a line of code, and their only real option for effective licensing would be the CC family, which is definitely not what most of them would choose.

 

---

 

As for why I don't allow external uploads: the primary reason is support. Every time I get a user reporting something wrong with one of my tools, I want to know that those files came from a known source that I trust. While hashes can help with this, I don't want to have to ask users to start checksumming files just so I know that no-one has messed with the files or that they're not hilariously out-of-date (honestly the bigger concern of the two). It also lets me more effectively control the impact/reach if I accidentally introduce a critical bug in an update.

 

If someone wants to compile it themselves, they a) have some idea of what they're getting into and b) should understand that I can't necessarily help them.

[Peer to Peer mod distribution via IPFS]

Could you give me a little more background on the types of problems modders who distribute their work freely on Nexus tend to run into in terms of people stealing their work? Some examples I could see people running into are:

• People literally copy-pasting a modder's work and removing the copyrights + attributions
• People including the modder's work within their larger work and not giving credit
• People reposting the mod on another site without the modder's permission but with full credit + attribution (i.e. they have not licensed their work for redistribution in non-Nexus places)
• People including the modder's work within their larger work and giving credit, but not respecting the license of the work

While some of these issues can crop up as a result of decentralized technologies being harder to censor than a simple DMCA request some of them are not that big a deal. For example, game mods are code and it's generally pretty important that you know what code you download is doing. While you can download data from anywhere the only way to know if you're getting the "real" thing is to check the digital fingerprint (or hash) of the data stored on Nexus itself. This means that if you are given a link to the mod code but with the attributions removed and license changed that you're getting data that's different from that on Nexus with no real way of telling how similar they are without downloading both versions since the digital fingerprints of the files have changed. This should push people towards keeping the credit where it is due and distributing the licenses with the mod.

Note: there's also a nice bonus here which is that the more people have downloaded a mod the faster you will be able to retrieve it. Aside from the nice performance benefits this gives it also highly incentivizes people to download the correct version of the mod instead of an altered one since there should be more people who have the correct version of the mod which will cause it to download faster.

 

I've worked on projects with various sorts of open and closed source licenses in the past and I relate to the pain of people stealing your work. IMO the benefits to the modding community are worthwhile due to the added flexibility and resiliency it gives to mod distribution (e.g. there are people who are interested in building version control tools and package managers that work IPFS for similar reasons) and I'd definitely like to learn more about the particular concerns that are prevalent here.

 

Just to add to some of the discussion we had on Discord earlier: I'm an open-source developer, work for an open-source organisation and have spent a lot of time working on modding tools at this point. The very first thing I noticed was "game mods are code" because that is definitely not always true. A massive quantity of game mods are creative assets with zero code involved.

 

One of the main lessons I've learned is that the demands of "traditional" open-source environments and modding are surprisingly different. Couple of examples:

 

- Licenses are frequently not distributed in-file because these files are going directly into a game's directory which you probably don't want to be full of license files. That means that mod files from different sources can have the same hash even when one of them is breaching license/permissions.

- Licensing for mod source and permissions for mod files are not the same thing. My *code* is open-source (MIT), but I specifically don't allow my binaries to be uploaded without permission (in Nexus's permissions)

- The target users of your files are frequently not familiar with the development side of your work. I can explain the specific terms of the MIT license to users all day, but they just want to install skins in their game

- a lot more, but its hard to think of them all!

 

That's also not even going into the fact that bypassing Nexus and downloading files from other users also takes potential earnings away from authors using the DP system, since that is measured from Nexus's download numbers.

 

I understand your motivations (they're clear and reasonable!) and what you're looking for is *probably* doable with Vortex and Nexus with enough work, but I personally would also not recommend it and would be ensuring my files weren't being distributed through it (which admittedly doesn't really apply for most of my files).