First report available

Towards the end of May, we announced and launched our Donation Point system for mod authors to receive donations directly from Nexus Mods.

While we don't send Donation Points until 3 months after the end of the month (e.g. Donation Points generated in May won't be received by users until the beginning of September) we will provide a report at the start of each month to all opted-in users, for the previous month, that shows and explains the DP you should expect to receive in 3 months time, subject to any potential moderation issues. This report will show you the total amount of DP you should receive and then break that down further so you can see exactly what mods have produced what amount of DP. It will also show you the DP you've received from others sharing their DP with you.

May's report has been delayed a little while we work on some finishing touches, but it should now be finished and available for viewing for any opted in authors from their wallet page. Hopefully, from next month onwards, this report will be automatically generated and available to you within the first few working days of the month.


Some figures to reflect on

We launched the Donation Point system on the 22nd of May. Within the 10 days the donation system was operational in May, 2,674 mod authors opted in 10,955 of their mods to the Donation Points system.

For the first month, Nexus Mods has contributed $6,000 to the Donation Pool, which means there were 6,000,000 DP up for grabs in May. We intend to put $8,000 into the Donation Pool for the coming month.

Between the 10,955 files that were opted in, there were 5,289,062 unique downloads, which means each unique download in the month of May will be worth ~1.13 DP.

Of the 2,674 mod authors who have opted in, 129 will receive 10,000 DP ($10) or more, 255 will receive $5 or more and 709 mod authors will receive 1,000 DP ($1) or more.

Bethesda owned games accounted for 93% of the Donation Points distribution, despite the fact total download stats (and not just opted in stats) show more of an 85/15 split for downloads between Bethesda and non-Bethesda games on Nexus Mods. This disparity is simply because not as many mod authors from other games have opted in their mods.

While Bethesda games have been our bread and butter for almost 17 years, I am very keen to foster the entire PC modding community and not just Bethesda games. I am going to reflect on what we can do to balance that out a little and ensure games other than Bethesda games receive an adequate amount of donation funding that is more reflective of their worth both to users of the site, and to Nexus Mods, in the interests of encouraging our community past just Bethesda games. More than likely, this is going to mean simply creating a separate, and much smaller top-up pool for non-Bethesda games that takes nothing away from the main pool (e.g. an additional $500 set aside each month for non-Bethesda games). Ergo costing us a bit more, but I believe we can stretch to it so we do a little better by our non-Bethesda mod authors as well.

I'll have a think about it, review the next couple of month's figures, and see what I can do on that front.


Share directly with charities no matter how much you receive

Before the first Donation Points get delivered in September we'll be making some changes to our DP store (and adding more items to it). However, in the meantime, we've made a rather big change to the opt-in system.

You can now directly donate some (or all) of your DP, on a per-file basis, to one or more of the charities we have selected. At the end of each month, we'll tally up the Donation Points each charity has received and then donate the dollar equivalent to that charity. We'll likely open up these stats somewhere on the site so everyone can see how much is getting donated to charity.

The idea here is that there are going to be a not insignificant percentage of mod authors who only receive a small number of unique downloads each month and who might never actually reach the $10 minimum payout we have on the store. However, we can make the DP these less popular files receive still have some significance by allowing them to be pooled together for a number of good causes.

We'll continue to improve on this and we will change the charity system in our store so you can donate any number of DP, starting from just 1 DP, instead of having to wait until you have 10,000 DP. Thus, even if you're not sharing your DP directly with charities and you don't want to give 10,000 DP, you can give whatever you can or want and it will still make a difference when pooled with everyone else's donated DP. Donated Donation Points. Classic.


Fixes to permissions and you can now see what mods are opted in

We have now added some additional text to the "Permissions and credits" section of a mod page that will tell you whether a mod has opted into the Donation Points system. Mod authors need to be able to see and know if other mod authors have opted mods into the system to ensure any permissions or rights issues are being kept to and followed as necessary. This is necessary for us, and other mod authors, to properly moderate the system and is therefore non-negotiable. We will not remove this notification and there is no option to do so on your end.

A few mod authors reported some oddities with the opt-in permissions that you can set for allowing the use of DP, and that should now be cleared up and a bit more logical. Let us know if it still needs some tweaking.