Nexus Mods now has 10 million registered members

[Dark0ne]

It is with great pleasure and pride that I can announce that Nexus Mods now has over 10 million registered members, of which over 4.2 million of those have been active on the sites in the past year. Not bad for a 14 year old site!

 

While our new member sign up stats have remained pleasantly constant since the release of Skyrim, the recent release of Fallout 4 has catapulted the registrations over the past week to ground-breaking levels and sped up our rise to 10 million members in short order. In a typical week before Fallout 4 was released we would see 25,000 new members joining the sites. Last week we saw over 65,000 new members join the site. Demand for Fallout 4 is, obviously, quite high right now.

 

http://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/images/110/1-1448211707.jpg

 

For a recap, we hit the one million member milestone back in May 2009, followed by the 2.5 million member milestone in October 2011 and the 5 million member milestone in January 2013, which means that we've doubled our membership every 2 years for the past 6 years.

 

I can only thank all of you for the continued support you provide to the network and for your understanding over the years when things have been tough. I'd also like to thank the staff, both on the technical side (programmers) and the social side (moderation team) who have not only been the behind the scenes heroes of this community, but who have dedicated countless unpaid hours, of their own volition and without complaint (even the programmers, who are on a salary), often in the early hours of the morning, to keep this network afloat. Not because they have to or because it's expected of them, but because they actually want to.

 

I'm extremely proud of what we have built here and, narcissism notwithstanding, I believe Nexus Mods to be a relatively unique "diamond in the rough" on the internet. While other owners of networks of our size (or smaller) have needed (or wanted) to seek venture capitalism or outside investors, with outside interests, to help support, develop or even expand their sites, Nexus Mods remains completely investor and outside interest free. We really live and die on the wants and needs of the community we aim to support. We grow and expand when the times are good, and we consolidate and trim when the times are bad. So when I say Nexus Mods is run by gamers, for gamers, the cliché actually rings true, for once. When we cease to be of use to the community, or when someone comes along that can do things better than us, we'll no doubt have to reconsider our position. And really, that's how I think it should be.

 

http://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/images/110/1-1448211758.jpg

 

This network was founded at a time when the situation in the Morrowind modding community was dire, so my motto when first focusing on hosting mods and ever since has been "to provide a stable and reliable source for mods". With the launch of Fallout 4 we've seen unprecedented (lol, cliché) levels of traffic on the network, smashing our previous records. And yet we've not seen anywhere (seriously, absolutely nowhere near) the issues we had with Skyrim's launch and the subsequent months after. As a result, I'm ridiculously happy right now as I sit watching the Google Analytics once again creep over the 8,000 page views a minute mark, and I frantically sit refreshing the site looking for any sign of slowdowns and server instability. There isn't any of note. And for that reason, I'm proud. Finally, I'm making good on that motto. Finally, we've done it.

 

How did we get here?

 

 

A brief (and relatively dull) history of time...

 

Nexus Mods evolved from humble beginnings.

 

At the age of 14, in early 2001, I was bouncing on a trampoline in my best friend's garden on an early summer's day when he told me about a game I'd never heard of. That game was Daggerfall. It sounded amazing. He went on to tell me about the new game that was being developed to follow on from Daggerfall. It was called Morrowind. After much research and young excitement at the prospect of the game we both decided we'd develop our web and graphic design skills, and give ourselves a project over the summer months, by building a website ready for Morrowind's launch. The aim of the site was to provide lots of information about the game for like-minded fans and to build a fun community around it.

 

Over the course of many months we learnt about building and hosting a website, and released it to the world in August of 2001. That site was called Morrowind Chronicles.

 

http://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/images/110/1-1448212090.jpg

 

We were even lucky to have some contact with Pete Hines, then head of PR at Bethesda, who was kind enough to send us an early copy of the Construction Set to play around with before the game's release.

 

Morrowind released in 2002 to critical acclaim, and around it, a substantial but not altogether as huge (by contemporary standards) modding community formed around the game. The focal point for the modding community at the time was Morrowind Summit, which was run by a great guy called Dalin under the Game Spy network brand. At the time, we had no intention of hosting mods and simply focused on a fun little community we'd built of a few hundred users who came to our forums to talk about Morrowind.

 

Later in to 2002 myself and many users of the forums, on the back of hype and hysteria over the recent release of The Fellowship of the Ring and the impending release of The Two Towers, decided to begin work on a total conversion mod for Morrowind based in the Lord of the Rings universe (but with a storyline unrelated to the films or the books). The mod was labelled The Middle Earth Mod for Morrowind, or MEMod for short, which was homed on the Morrowind Chronicles forums, which increased interest and membership on the forums considerably.

 

http://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/images/110/1-1448212175.jpg

 

The Morrowind modding community went through a turbulent time throughout 2002 and into 2003. While Morrowind Summit, with its corporate backing, formed the backbone of the modding community, there were several other centralised sites providing mod hosting and support, typically with slightly more (or different) functionality than was offered on Morrowind Summit. It became common practise for mod authors to use more than one site to promote and share their work but, unfortunately, the internet was still reeling from the burst of the dotcom bubble and bandwidth costs were ridiculously high. Running a file hosting service back in those days was a very expensive business that needed (comparatively, for a free service) large initial capital and a strong return on advertising income to be able to get anywhere near break-even to pay the costs. Because of the dotcom bust, advertising revenue was at an all-time low. Bandwidth costs ridiculously high, advertising rates at an all-time low. It was an awful combination.

 

Subsequently, several of the major mod hosting sites at the time (Morrowind Files, with its cloudy PHPNuke setup, being the most prominent) struggled and ultimately failed, taking with them countless mods. Sites popped up quickly to replace them, only to fail over the same issues, with more mods being lost each time it happened. It was a sorry situation.

 

http://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/images/110/1-1448212141.jpg

 

In late 2002, Morrowind Chronicles had a keen and active community of a few thousand regular posters on the forums so I decided to set up a mod hosting solution as a side-project, called Morrowind Mod Library. It was a completely separate site to Morrowind Chronicles and I ran the two side-by-side.

 

I, too, struggled to keep things afloat.

 

While I'd accounted for some things, bandwidth was only getting more expensive and it wasn't long before changes needed to be made. I had a short stint being (very graciously) hosted on the GameSpy network servers with help from Dalin, but the level of bureaucracy was high and the convoluted methods to get simple things done were stifling. I moved to the UGO network (don't these names bring back some memories!?).

 

While this was happening I had helped set up my first company, with three friends (including the friend who had helped me with Morrowind Chronicles), that focused on web design and, a bit later, web hosting. While I focused my efforts on the gaming side of things, Krystal, as it was called, was building up a reputation and a network of their own. The friend who had helped me develop Morrowind Chronicles had stopped working on the site 6 months or so after the site's launch in August of 2001 so he could focus on Krystal, so I was on my own from then on.

 

After a year or so on the UGO network, I moved over to Krystal servers that were graciously being provided by my friends at the company I had helped found. With the security that Krystal provided I was able to focus more time on the sites and less time trying to keep them up.

 

Through my ordeals trying to run a free hobby site in that very expensive time on the internet I setup a second company, Gaming Source, with the help of my friends at Krystal, that would provide free hosting to other gaming related fansites who were suffering from the same problems I had. I offered help to some of my favourite gaming sites that I knew were being run independently and at a cost to the owner and many agreed to use the service. By 2005 I was hosting 80 gaming fan sites across a broad spectrum of games that saw us become a major network practically overnight. We were serving 2.5 million unique users and 80 million pageviews a month. Slightly before this apex, back in 2004, Morrowind Chronicles and Morrowind Mod Library were consolidated into one site that was named Morrowind Source, to be a branded site for Gaming Source.

 

I continued to teach myself PHP and MySQL in the hopes of finally being able to do away with "off-the-shelf" file database scripts from the internet and building a completely custom coded file database that would be highly focused on mod hosting. By the time of Oblivion's release in 2006, the new file hosting system I'd written had gone live and the site was renamed to The Elder Scrolls Source (TESSource). It quickly became a direct "competitor" to Game Spy's dominant Planet Elder Scrolls site (or PES, formally Morrowind Summit), mainly because the TESSource system had an instantaneous mod uploading and publishing system, much like today, while PES was still requiring manual approval of all mods added to the database by a staff member.

 

The community's opinion was divided. While many didn't like the idea of another modding site being used over PES, and questioned what the point was when a huge corporate behemoth like Game Spy, with the backing of NewsCorp, would "out live any independent site and be around for ever" (considering Morrowind modding's past, it wasn't an altogether rude or inappropriate assessment), TESSource continued to gain traction. Typically, the community welcomed having an additional, reliable, mod host that could provide something different from PES. Both had their merits, and after the amount of Morrowind mods lost to hosts failing, it became a widely accepted and appreciated practise to use both sites for file hosting.

 

Ultimately, I relinquished my role in Gaming Source in 2007 so that I could focus on my university education and other business projects. This soured relations with my friends at Krystal, but we were able to come to an amicable conclusion (with my deep thanks). To this day I maintain close ties with Krystal. Not only was it the first company I helped to found, but they've gone from success to success themselves. They currently host the Nexus's entire database cluster and our entire cloud VM system and we are, as far as I'm aware, their biggest customers to date. Their generosity and desire and wish to tackle the difficult tasks that the Nexus presents has been a major factor in the smooth operation of the sites, and they've often been awake at 3am with us trying to help us diagnose problems and issues without complaint or demands for money. I know of no other hosting company, and I have extensive experience in this area, that would go to the lengths they have to see their customers satisfied. So consider them officially endorsed by us here at Nexus Mods.

 

Despite dropping my role at Gaming Source and focusing on other things, my love for a site that had gotten me into web design, graphic design and the internet in general saw me desperate to continue TESSource and not see it fail. Because of the split, TESSource was renamed first to TESDB on a temporary basis, and then to TESNexus, and funded by myself to the sum of £10,000 while the site could get back on its feet. And get back on its feet it did.

 

The rest, as they say, is history.

[iAmChe]

How can there be 10 million registered members while there are only 2 million people in the world?

[Johnspidermc]

In response to post #30816220.

berkman123 wrote: How can there be 10 million registered members while there are only 2 million people in the world?

Where do you live my friend? I mean, in what Planet? Edited November 22, 2015 by Johnspidermc

[SkepticalJoker]

http://i.imgur.com/sfV3FUa.gif

 

The Nexus is an Internet treasure. Makes PC gaming infinitely better thanks to how easy it is to find and keep track of mods. Congrats!

[wolfsangeleyes]

Congratulations on having reached 10 million registered members. That is a huge number.

To me the Nexus is my home away from home. I hope it goes on for a long, long time.

 

Btw, your background story was a great read. Amazing that all this began with a 14 year old kid.

Edited November 22, 2015 by wolfsangeleyes

[wolfsangeleyes]

In response to post #30816220. #30816725 is also a reply to the same post.

berkman123 wrote: How can there be 10 million registered members while there are only 2 million people in the world?

Johnspidermc wrote: Where do you live my friend? I mean, in what Planet?

I hate to break it to you berkman123 but there are 7 billion people in the world.

[xwitchblade]

In response to post #30816220. #30816725, #30817050 are all replies on the same post.

berkman123 wrote: How can there be 10 million registered members while there are only 2 million people in the world?

Johnspidermc wrote: Where do you live my friend? I mean, in what Planet?

wolfsangeleyes wrote: I hate to break it to you berkman123 but there are 7 billion people in the world.

He's making a joking reference to the 2009 YouTube comments.

[axonis]

Congratulations. While you should have included the cumulative number of bans over the years, successfully managing this huge number of creative (and therefore quirky) people is something to be proud of.

[Jokerine]

In response to post #30816850.

SkepticalJoker wrote: http://i.imgur.com/sfV3FUa.gif

The Nexus is an Internet treasure. Makes PC gaming infinitely better thanks to how easy it is to find and keep track of mods. Congrats!

Great use of an awesome gif! And congrats to the Nexus, too. Rock on, guys!

[LethalThreat]

In response to post #30816220. #30816725, #30817050, #30817275, #30817295 are all replies on the same post.

berkman123 wrote: How can there be 10 million registered members while there are only 2 million people in the world?

Johnspidermc wrote: Where do you live my friend? I mean, in what Planet?

wolfsangeleyes wrote: I hate to break it to you berkman123 but there are 7 billion people in the world.

xwitchblade wrote: He's making a joking reference to the 2009 YouTube comments.

xwitchblade wrote: He's making a joking reference to the 2009 YouTube comments.

nexus is illuminaty confermed