Nexusmods founder retires as owner, new leadership includes former Gamerzclass CEO

Nexusmods' founding owner, known by the alias "Dark0ne", has elected to step back from his position of leadership after 24 years of service. The decision to transfer leadership to someone else was made over a year ago, as they have detailed in their blog post yesterday. Yet, this news is somewhat shocking for the greater part of the Nexus community, and eyebrow-raising for some.

Although Nexus has not officially disclosed the real names of the two new members introduced for the job, internet sleuths have already figured it out.

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Nexusmods transfer of ownership is no corporate cop-out, ensures the founder

Thanks to investigation done by community members on ResetEra, it's clear who the new Nexus staff members are.

By cross-checking their on-site bios and interests with likely growth-centric holding companies and other such enterprises in Scandinavian countries, ResetEra's RandomlyRandom67 zeroed in on the perfect fits.

These are the founders of Chosen, a company about "growing gaming networks", and the CEO is also the ex-CEO of Gamerzclass, a Dota 2 and CS coaching platform.

Rapsak's bio confirms his identity (Image via LinkedIn)

Rapsak's (Marinus Elgaard, Chosen CTO) LinkedIn bio confirms they indeed are "working with Nexusmods" at Chosen. Foledinho's (Victor Folman, CEO) LinkedIn also confirms they were in talks with Nexusmods at least three months ago, according to his post:

"Sitting in the train, heading to meet two incredible founders today. They built something tens of millions rely on, but almost no one knows their names. The best products don’t chase attention, they earn it."

At any rate, original founder Dark0ne ensures Nexusmods members that this is no corporate "exit". He reminisces about the inception of the site, a one-man attempt of creating an author-first modding platform with a 56k modem in 2001.

The reason it took Dark0ne so long to veto a fitting new leader to take the reins is to find someone who "would be able to understand and respect the myriad intricacies of both Nexus Mods as a business and the wider modding community". The Chosen talent, they vouch, is focused on "long-term stability" and not changing the policy or ideals of Nexusmods:

"After months of meetings, face-to-face talks, and a whole lot of soul searching, I am thrilled to say that I truly believe I have found the exact right people for the task."

While it's easy to be alarmist, especially in view of the recent set of divisive UI/UX changes over at Nexusmods, perhaps this change in leadership will accelearte the already successful website.

Last year, Nexusmods turned over a new leaf with the player surge in Fallout modding after the release of the Amazon show. At the time of writing, business is still booming for Nexusmods, freshly coasting off the success of Oblivion Remastered and the renewed interest in Elder Scrolls modding. Skyrim Special Edition, its biggest traffic driver, has recently crossed 8 billion unique downloads across over 100,000 mods.

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