After enormous Fallout-related traffic spike, Nexus Mods announces increase to its subscription costs to keep up with increasing demand

Leading game modding site Nexus Mods has announced that the price of its premium subscriptions will be increasing next month for the first time in three years.

Nexus Mods recently saw a major increase in traffic thanks to the release of the Fallout TV show, making the RPG series skyrocket in popularity. It's not strictly because of this that the subscription price is going up, but the infrastructure required to keep the website running smoothly has definitely become more costly over the years due to the increasing demand. 

"We know that increasing prices is never an easy thing to talk about, and it’s something we try to do as infrequently as possible - the last time was three years ago and before that, it was back in 2013, so two price increases in 11 years," a news post on the Nexus Mods site reads. "Monetary inflation alone is over 15% since 2021 and we could write an entire news post about how we’re using the money to improve all of our products but to keep things simple here are the big ticket items."

The examples listed include the site sending $8 million to mod authors – a number that apparently increases by around $10,000 per day. Nexus Mods' staff headcount has also risen beyond 30, with plans to expand its community team even further. As for the website itself, the post says that the capabilities of both the Nexus Mods servers and content delivery network infrastructure (CDN) have been increased many times over the years in order to keep up with demand. 

"We have just this week signed off on purchasing another 30x 16TB NVME drives for our own CDN nodes and increasing their network capacity to 80GB/sec per node to keep up with demand," the post explains. "During our most recent peak following the release of the Fallout series we moved more than 2.5PB in 24 hours at an average speed of around 225GB/sec, and this would have been even higher if we weren’t maxing out every 10G network port that we had available!"

Right now, the website's infrastructure requires "over 700 CPUs and 5TB of memory to help serve around 4,000 incoming web requests per second at peak times," the post adds, with the site currently serving around one billion requests every day. Needless to say, it's popular, even without enormous boosts from the likes of Fallout's recent resurgence.

As for the changes themselves, from June 17, monthly fees will rise to $8.99 USD / £7.19 GBP / €8.39 EUR plus tax, while annual fees will go to $89.99 USD / £71.99 GBP / €83.99 EUR plus tax – while existing Lifetime Premium memberships will remain unaffected. New subscriptions will be handled by payment provider Paddle, while existing ones are planned to be migrated over to the provider by the start of October. 

Having a premium subscription isn't a requirement to use Nexus Mods – the fee allows users to have uncapped download speeds and browse ad-free, as well as directly support mod creators. So this won't affect all users, but if you are a subscriber, be sure to check how much things are set to change for you before next month.

Be sure to check out our list of the best Fallout 4 mods available to download now.