Nexus Mods removing lifetime membership option
As part of changes to payments system.
If you were ever tempted to splash out on lifetime premium membership for Nexus Mods, it's now or never, as the mod platform is removing the option in August.
Nexus Mods yesterday published a blog post detailing upcoming changes to its billing system. While Nexus Mods is usable for free, premium membership has been an option on the platform since 2007, providing perks such as ad-free browsing and uncapped mod download speeds. The current membership options are split into 1-month, 6-month, 12-month and lifetime plans, but that's set to change on 3rd August.
"Since we first started offering Premium Membership, our billing system... has been handled by our Invision Board forums software and PayPal," Nexus Mods explained. "To be frank, it's old, archaic, held together by duct tape and glue and was never really intended to be used by a site as big as ours. It's so delicate, we have not been able to update our Premium Membership pricing since 2013 because doing so breaks many different elements of the billing and Premium membership system which we have no control over as the code is not ours.
"...We began work back in June 2020 to completely strip out our Premium Membership billing system and replace it with our own solution. Our aim is to make the process far simpler for users, provide all the information and functionality they need to manage their membership in the Nexus Mods user area, away from the forums, and to give us more control over the pricing and packages offered."
Nexus Mods noted that the changes to the billing system means that any recurring PayPal subscriptions will be automatically cancelled, so you may need to manually switch over to the new subscription options.
Along with the changes to the system itself, Nexus Mods is also making some "long overdue" changes to the Premium pricing packages. There will now be two options: either a monthly subscription billed at £4.99 per month, or an annual subscription of £49.99 per year. The Lifetime Premium Membership option, which is currently being sold for £49.99, is also due to be removed - although those who have already bought Lifetime Premium membership will still retain access.
"While this option has provided a great deal to our users over the past 14 years, it is becoming less and less sustainable as the cost of keeping the site online increases and the years continue to roll by," Nexus Mods said of the Lifetime Membership package. "We're thankful to anyone who has taken us up on our Lifetime Membership option up to now but, due to the nature of running the site as a longtime service, we incur ongoing and recurring costs that we need to continue to plan for in the long term and this is why we have decided to remove Lifetime Premium Membership as something you can buy from August 3rd."
Nexus Mods also explained that it had not changed its prices in over eight years, and that the price increase reflects a number of factors including "the ever increasing costs of our platform and the implementation of our Donation Points system which gives back to mod authors who use our site". The site noted that Premium Membership was essential in allowing it to host its services, hire staff, create its mod managers and "expand to over 1300 more games".
This isn't the only major change for Nexus Mods in recent weeks: in preparation for the introduction of a new "collections" system, the platform will no longer allow mod authors to completely delete their files from the website - a decision that certainly stirred up debate in the modding community.