Nexus Mods celebrates 10 billion downloads, almost half of them are Skyrim mods

Nexus Mods is something of an institution in the modding circles on PC. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with ModDB, Nexus is one of the most prolific and popular modding websites, bar none, and this fact is driven home as it reaches a new milestone — 10 billion file downloads in total.

According to the latest official announcement from Nexus Mods, the site will reach a grand total of 10,000,000,000 mods downloaded on February 9, 2024. At this time, Nexus supports a whopping 2,683 different moddable games, with almost 540,000 unique mods hosted on the site. Nexus also prides itself on serving as the home to 128,361 mod developers, giving it the sort of variety a site would need to reach stats as impressive as these.

Image via Niero Bethesda RPGs are modding powerhouses, according to Nexus It should come as no huge surprise that the vast majority of Nexus Mods’ 10 billion downloads can be attributed to Bethesda Softworks RPGs. The breakdown is as follows:

#1: The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim (Special Edition) – 3.8 billion downloads #2: The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim – 1.9 billion downloads #3: Fallout 4 – 1.3 billion downloads #4: Fallout: New Vegas – 513.7 million downloads #5: Stardew Valley – 296.4 million downloads #6: Cyberpunk 2077 – 288.7 million downloads #7: The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion – 285.7 million downloads #8: Fallout 3 – 166 million downloads #9: The Witcher 3 – 137.9 million downloads #10: Baldur’s Gate 3 – 96.7 million downloads In other words, Bethesda’s Gamebryo/Creation Engine sandbox RPGs take up 60% of the Nexus Mods top 10 downloads list, with Skyrim alone taking more than half of the site’s celebrated 10 billion mod downloads. To call this anything short of impressive would be ridiculous. Now, Bethesda’s latest first-party flagship, Starfield, is still sitting at a relatively humble 35.6 million downloads, though that number is bound to balloon in the coming months and years.

Notably, the first major Starfield revamp mod (bundle) has only just come out, and it’s certainly worth remembering that the game’s official modding SDK hasn’t even been released yet.

Back on track, Nexus Mods’ incredibly impressive numbers are assuredly going to grow even more in the coming days, months, and years. “As we move towards the next 10 billion downloads,” read the Nexus blog, “we have a lot of exciting developments on the horizon including the future Nexus Mods App and our significant investment in scaling and developing our services and website, for example site preferences and notification improvements.”

According to the announcement, Nexus Mods has, so far, paid out over $7 million to modders via the site’s Donation Points feature, supporting the most prolific PC game modders with over $300,000 in monthly donation payments. “Through this, we can give back to the creators, the curious-minded, whacky and inventive modders who continue to discover new territory in game development and keep pushing the boundaries of creativity,” Nexus Mods’ statement concluded.

Filip Galekovic

A lifetime gamer and writer, Filip has successfully made a career out of combining the two just in time for the bot-driven AI revolution to come into its own.