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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34966 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I've had a similar beef with mod hosting sites like Nexusmods and Moddb regarding their recent removals.

Mods in the past could be downloaded from multiple different hosts and mirrors, but usually required you to have the awareness to seek out the dev's website. Sites like NM gave a lot of convenience of a central location for downloading, managing, and discovering content, with community tools for ranking and feedback. These days it's common for NM to be the only host for many mods, and removals were typically reserved for the truly heinous and illegal. While not perfect, it felt like a spirit of community collaboration mostly divorced from politics (more the norm 10 years ago than now) was working fine.

And now we see mods removed for petty political reasons, with the platform owners basically saying "Tough shit. You're paranoid. Don't like it? Delete your account." And boy would I (I even donated to you guys in the past!), likely while still begrudgingly downloading their hosted content without logging in. But now it seems many mods require a NM accoint, and so my options are to eat shit or just not play the mod. And if you were a modder who wanted to pull your own mods from the site in protest? Too bad, NM has made it so all mods are archived to preserve compatibility with other modlists.

It's such a blatant flex - "We dare you bigots to cut yourself off from the primary platform for modding" - and one they can only afford because of their position. I should not be feeling nostalgic about Filefront and Fileplanet.

At least there's still GameBanana, maybe?

Sadly no, game banana is worse if anything.

A couple of days ago it banned a retranslation and uncensor patch of Fire Emblem: Engage, which aimed to be closer to the Japanese version

Welp, RIP.

The hell has NM been doing?

KMC brought up the Spider Man example, and another more recent one was a mod that altered the voice of a trans character in the new Harry Potter game.

I feel like a decade ago the culture would have said "If you don't like it, don't download it". But apparently region switching your game to the Saudi version in order to remove pride flags is too much of a moral affront. It should not just be deleted, but shamed in a public statement.

And nowhere in this controversy does anybody stop to wonder if maybe the devs should catch some flak for even making this an option within the game's own code. Just burn the guy who pointed it out.

This, for one.

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