SteamDB Has Been Acquired By Nexus Mods

SteamDB has been an incredible resource for Steam users ever since it was launched in 2013. In all that time, it has been able to provide charts to track price history, sales, player counts, update history, and so much more across games. That and it's always been indispensable as a resource to see every game currently on sale on the platform.

Nexus Mods has been another essential platform for PC gamers for years as a place to stop by for mods, which went through a huge chance when Dark0ne stepped down as administrator last year. Today, it goes through yet another huge change as SteamDB has now been acquired by Nexus Mods.

xPaw, founder of SteamDB, had this to say about the acquisition, reassuring users that SteamDB is not changing because of the partnership.

Quote From xPaw

When Marlamin and I decided to start this project back in 2013, we were driven by pure curiosity and a desire to make helpful public services for the community. We were young and passionate.

I was always a fan of Valve's games and used to spend countless hours coming back from school working on custom game mode plugins for the CS 1.6 servers we used to run, so creating a project like SteamDB has been a natural progression of that drive.

Years went on, and the site kept growing and the amount of relentless work kept increasing. Marlamin decided to step back from the project for personal reasons. That was around the time Steam Direct launched, and the number of games and new users has exploded since then.

What started as a hobby project became something I could never have imagined. I always took pride in what kind of a helpful service I was able to create and sustain for all kinds of gamers and, in later years, developers and publishers. With its helpfulness came growth, but that doesn't come for free. I have always considered SteamDB to be my hobby, but the amount of hours I have worked on it could be considered a full-time job. It was pure passion, and the ever increasing self inflicted workload has taken its toll.

After COVID and with the rise of AI, the internet we once loved is gone, and with it my passion. I have started experiencing burnout with the project, but I powered through. A few years ago I tried to find someone to continue the project, but I couldn't find a team that I was confident in, so I decided to keep going by myself.

Steam keeps growing, in terms of games, players, and the number of new features being added. It's hard to keep on top of this alone, and the mental load has only kept increasing, and in good conscience I cannot continue like this.

Running a service like SteamDB is not easy. I wouldn't be able to live with myself by either just letting the site run as-is and letting it wither, or completely shut it down. In January, I started looking for a worthy partner that could continue the legacy that I had built.

This is where Nexus Mods comes in.

Nexus Mods has been serving gaming communities for more than two decades and, like SteamDB, grew from a passion project into a service relied upon by tens of millions of people. What mattered most to me was finding a team that understands what it means to be responsible for something the community depends on, and that shares my belief in building useful tools for gamers.

SteamDB will continue to be SteamDB. The goal is not to change what makes the project special, but to give it the resources, development capacity and long-term stability that I could no longer provide alone.

I have full confidence the team will be able to continue improving the project for gamers, developers and publishers alike. I will be helping the team ensure a smooth transition in the coming months.

This project has occupied my whole adult life. Thank you to everyone who has used SteamDB, contributed to it, reported bugs, shared it with others, or simply found it useful.

The CEO of Nexus Mods, Victor Folmman (or "Foledinho" as he is known by on the website), reported a similar sentiment as xPaw. In this post, he also mentions that the collaboration between the two businesses simply make sense as one of SteamDB's major functions is as an update track, and Nexus Mods being a modding site, would benefit greatly from one as one of the major reasons that mods break is... updates.

Quote From Victor Folmman (Foledinho)

We’re incredibly excited to announce that SteamDB has joined Nexus Mods.

For anyone who plays games on PC, SteamDB probably needs very little introduction. But for those of you who might not have heard of the site, here’s a little backstory. xPaw and Marlamin started the project together back in 2013. Since then, it has grown from something built out of curiosity and a desire to create a useful public service for the community into one of the most trusted resources in PC gaming.

As it’s evolved over the years, so has the amount of work required to keep it running. Marlamin stepped back from the project some years ago, and since then, that growing workload has rested on xPaw. What began as a hobby quickly became something closer to a full-time job, whilst still being run as a passion project supported by donations.

So, earlier this year, xPaw started looking for someone who could take the site forward and give it the resources, development capacity, and long-term stability that had become increasingly difficult to provide alone. Most importantly, he wanted to find a team he trusted to look after something that millions of people have come to depend on. That’s where we came in!

Why SteamDB?
Well, there are a lot of similarities between us and SteamDB. Both started as passion projects built by people who wanted to make something useful for PC gamers. Both grew far beyond anything their original creators expected, and both eventually became services that millions of people rely on.

SteamDB has also spent more than a decade building trust with its community by giving people useful, transparent information about the games they play. Something it does incredibly well. We think that’s worth protecting, and we’re not interested in changing SteamDB into something it isn’t.

For Nexus Mods, one of the key things we discovered that will help with making modding easier is having a better understanding of the game that the player is installing the mods into. We have already started collecting Steam game data ourselves, but once an update is pushed, manifests and data for the old versions become much more difficult to access. SteamDB already does this far better than we can, and has a massive back-catalogue to draw from. 


What does this mean for modding?

There’s another big reason SteamDB and us make sense together, and it comes down to one of the most common ways a modded game can suddenly stop working. Game updates.

As you all know, mods are often built around a particular version of a game, so when there’s an update for it, your game that was perfectly modded and working the day before now just…doesn’t. SteamDB already tracks an incredible amount of information about game builds, depots, manifests, files, and update history across Steam, including years of historical data. Being able to connect that information with modding tools and mod metadata opens up some really interesting possibilities for making modding more reliable.

Over time, we want to explore how a mod manager could better understand which version of the game you’re running, whether mods you’re installing were built for it, and whether an incoming game update is likely to cause issues. It could also make it possible for Collections and other mod lists to better specify the exact version of a game they were built for, rather than relying on someone finding that information buried in a description, comment, or forum post.

We do have to be honest, though, there’s a lot of work between taking over the reins of SteamDB and getting to that point. So we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves or promise features before they exist. What we do have now is an opportunity to bring together two huge sources of information about PC games and modding, and start looking at how they can make the experience better.

None of that requires SteamDB itself to become a modding site. If you’ve never installed a mod in your life, which, if you’re reading this, I would be shocked, and you use SteamDB for player counts, pricing history, update information, or because you’ve noticed a random old game suddenly has thousands of people playing it and you want to know why, that’s what it’ll still be for.


What does this mean for SteamDB?

If you’re a user of the site, don’t worry, it’ll still be SteamDB, keeping its own name, brand, community, and identity. We aren’t just folding it into Nexus Mods, in fact, in the short-term, there shouldn’t be much you notice at all. It’ll still be the same site with all its features and data. xPaw will continue to work with us over the coming months as well to make sure it’s a smooth transition.

Where things will start to change is behind the scenes. With the site being effectively run as a one-man band for so long, we can now start giving it a properly funded team alongside better infrastructure, security, and scalability. That should mean more capacity to work through long-standing improvements, maintain and develop things like the browser extension, improve game coverage, and make sure the future of the site doesn't depend on one person having enough hours in the day to keep it all running.

As I mentioned before, it’s also historically relied on donated Steam keys to help track game files and depots, and in addition we’ll also start funding keys ourselves to games that don’t always find their way to our platform. Community contributions will absolutely still be key, particularly for those games people want to see better supported, but improving that coverage won’t need to rely entirely on donations anymore.


What happens now?

Well, for now, SteamDB carries on as normal whilst we work with xPaw on the transition and start putting the team and resources it needs into it. Everything currently available for free will remain free, the browser extension will continue to be maintained, and the Discord and Steam group will remain purely SteamDB community spaces. Nexus Mods and SteamDB will also remain completely separate services, so you won’t need a Nexus Mods account to browse it.

How connecting the two to make something genuinely better is what we’ll continue to explore and see what is possible over time. That might mean being able to eventually help someone looking at a game on SteamDB to discover its modding community, bringing useful information from the site into Nexus Mods, or using SteamDB’s version data behind the scenes to make installing and maintaining mods less painful. 

We know there will be plenty of questions about what this all means longer term, and we want to be open about our decisions as they’re made, rather than making promises now that might not come to fruition later. You can find an FAQ we’ve put together here, but we’ll keep talking about what we’re working on as things progress, and feel free to ask any further questions in the comments section below.

Finally, we want to say an enormous thank you to xPaw, Marlamin, and everyone who has contributed and made SteamDB what it is over the past 13 years. People have donated Steam keys, contributed code, reported bugs, moderated its communities, financially supported the project, and helped turn something that started out of curiosity into a service used across the entire games industry.

Of course, we’re also very aware that us taking over SteamDB doesn't automatically give us the trust its community has placed in it. As I mentioned before, and as xPaw has said in his own announcement, what mattered to him was finding a team that understood the responsibility of looking after something the community depends on, and shared his belief in building better and useful tools for gamers. We’re incredibly proud, and overwhelmingly grateful, that he chose us to take SteamDB forward, and now we need to show that trust was well placed.

You can read xPaw’s announcement over on SteamDB here.

As mentioned before, Nexus Mods has put together an FAQ section about what exactly happens to SteamDB now.

Quote From Nexus Mods (via SteamDB)

Why does it make sense for SteamDB to partner with Nexus Mods?

Two honest reasons.

First: SteamDB is one of the most trusted resources in PC gaming. xPaw and Marlamin started it back in 2013 out of, in xPaw's words, "pure curiosity and a desire to make helpful public services for the community." Marlamin was a big part of getting SteamDB off the ground before stepping back, and for the past decade the ever-growing workload has rested on xPaw alone. A hobby with, as he puts it, hours that "could be considered a full time job", funded by donations. That's an incredible achievement, and also a fragile one. We want SteamDB to still exist, and be better than ever, ten years from now. That takes real investment: a proper team, proper infrastructure, and someone that keeps paying the bills and doesn’t burn out.

Second: SteamDB knows something nobody else does. Exactly which files make up every version of every game on Steam, going back over a decade. That's the single most useful dataset in existence for making modding easy and stop loadouts from breaking. Mods are built against a specific version of a game and when stores silently update games, things break. SteamDB's version history is the missing foundation for fixing that, for everyone, in every mod manager.

What are you going to do with it?

Short term: nothing you'll notice. SteamDB keeps running exactly as it does today. Same site, same features, same data, same URL, still free.

Then we invest. SteamDB goes from essentially a one-person operation to a cross-functional team with modern infrastructure, security and scalability. That means long-standing backlog items actually shipping, more robust infrastructure, and less "everything depends on one person not burning out."

We will also be connecting SteamDB's data to modding tools and modding metadata so a mod manager can know which build of a game you're running, warn you before an update breaks your setup, and make things like collections/mod lists install significantly more reliably.

How does SteamDB make Nexus Mods better?

The most common way a modded game dies is not a bad mod. It's a silent game update. Your setup worked last night, Steam patched the game at 3am and now you have 200 mods depending on a version of the game that no longer exists on your drive.

SteamDB tracks the exact chain from game → build → depot → manifest → file list, for the whole Steam catalogue, with years of history. Plug that into modding tools and you get things modders have wanted forever:

Your mod manager knows which game version you're on, and which version a mod was built for.

You get warned about a breaking update before you launch, not after your loadout is toast.

Version pinning becomes real: "this collection needs Skyrim 1.6.1170" stops being a forum post and becomes something tools can check and act on.

Installs become verifiable. We can tell the difference between "correctly installed" and "silently broken" because we finally know what a clean game folder is supposed to look like.

None of this requires changing anything about how SteamDB works for its own users. It's the same data SteamDB already collects, we’re just doing some extra work behind the scenes.

Are you going to commercialise it?

We're going to be straight about this rather than dance around it: yes, SteamDB needs to make money. What xPaw has built - and kept running largely through personal dedication and community donations - is an extraordinary achievement. Giving it the team, infrastructure and long-term investment it deserves is how we protect that work and ensure SteamDB can thrive for the next decade and beyond.

That said, we want to be smart about it, and it’s very important that we don’t degrade SteamDB from the amazing resource it is today. While we could simply put ads on the website, we don’t think that’s the right approach here. So we’ll be looking at other, lighter-touch ways to make the website sustainable. This may include use of partnerships, integrations, and affiliate links with publishers when you buy a game after visiting SteamDB. These are harder to do, take longer to set up, and may not show the benefits immediately, but we’re happy to take that hit in the interest of doing things right.

Here's what it does mean: we will not paywall anything that exists today, we will not sell your personal data, no login walls, we will not degrade the site to squeeze value out of it. Enshittification is when an owner extracts value while the product gets worse. Our plan is the opposite direction: put money and people in so the product gets better. Judge us on what we ship.

Will you put ads on the website?

No. We don't have plans to introduce display or programmatic advertising on SteamDB. Over time, we may explore things like affiliate links and partnerships where they genuinely provide value to the user.

Will SteamDB stay free?

Yes. Free to use, Steam sign-in stays for the features that use it. Same as it's always been. Funding the site sustainably (see the commercialisation answer above) is how it stays that way.

Will anything currently free move behind a paywall?

No. Everything that's free on SteamDB today stays free. If we build genuinely new things someday, we may make decisions about those then, but nothing you know and use today is getting taken away and sold back to you.

Will SteamDB remain independent, or is it becoming part of Nexus Mods?

SteamDB stays SteamDB: its own site, its own name, its own brand, its own community. It is not being folded into Nexus Mods, reskinned orange, or anything like that.

Ownership-wise, it's now part of the same family as Nexus Mods (both owned by Chosen). Where it makes sense, the two will link up. A SteamDB game page might show you that a game has a thriving modding scene, and a Nexus game page might show live player stats. But your SteamDB account isn't becoming a Nexus account, and SteamDB's editorial independence including reporting facts Valve or publishers might not love doesn't change.

Does this mean SteamDB data will be used to improve Vortex/modding?

Yes. Honestly, this is a big part of why SteamDB + Nexus Mods makes sense at all. See "How does SteamDB make Nexus Mods better?" above: game version tracking is the foundation for mod setups that don't break when games update.

Worth being clear about what "data" means here: it's data about games: builds, versions, files, update history. It's not data about you. Nothing about this involves your personal SteamDB usage being piped into Nexus Mods.

What will actually get better for SteamDB users?

Fair question. Most acquisition announcements promise the world and deliver a new logo. Concretely:

More people working on it. Fixes, features and long-requested items ship faster, because it's a funded team instead of a spare-time project.

The infrastructure gets sturdier and scales better during peak times.

Game coverage gets better. SteamDB has historically relied on donated Steam keys to track game files and depots. We'll also fund keys ourselves going forward, so coverage doesn't depend purely on donations though contributing keys for games you want supported will still be a thing.

The browser extension keeps getting maintained and improved.

Over time: deeper integration with modding, for those who want it. If you never touch a mod, SteamDB just keeps being SteamDB.

Why couldn't SteamDB just stay independent?

It could have kept going the way it was, but "the way it was" meant one of PC gaming's most important resources depending on the spare time and goodwill of a tiny group of people, with donations as the funding model, and a bus factor of one. That works until the day it doesn't.

And you don't have to take our word for it. xPaw says it himself in his announcement. He tried the independent route: "A few years ago I tried to find someone to continue the project, but I couldn't find a team that I was confident in, so I decided to keep going by myself." Going it alone stopped being an option: "It's hard to keep on top of this alone, and the mental load has only kept increasing, and in good conscience I cannot continue like this." And letting it fade wasn't one either: "I wouldn't be able to live with myself by either just letting the site run as-is and letting it wither, or completely shut it down."

This wasn't a hostile takeover of a passion project. xPaw went looking for "a worthy partner that could continue the legacy" he had built, and chose this path. He'll be helping the team ensure a smooth transition over the coming months. Independence is a nice word, but sustainability is what keeps the site online.

Why should the community trust Nexus Mods with SteamDB?

You shouldn't have to take our word for it, so here are the commitments, in writing, that you can hold us to:

SteamDB stays free.

Nothing currently free goes behind a paywall.

We don't sell your personal data.

SteamDB keeps its own identity, site and community.

The extension stays free and keeps working.

Beyond that: look at the track record. Nexus Mods has been around for 25 years. Mods are still free. The site has taken plenty of criticism over the years (some of it earned), but it has never pulled the rug on the community it serves. SteamDB gets the same deal. If we break these promises, quote this FAQ back at us. Loudly.

Will SteamDB have an API?

We are looking to build better relations and tools for developers and publishers. This will most likely mean an API at some point. Stay tuned for more.

If you’re interested, please reach out to us: [email protected]

Will I have to verify with ID to use SteamDB?

No. You will not need to verify your identity to use SteamDB. However, we may need to comply with local laws, which may mean that certain images need to be blurred in some countries. Game and historic metadata will still be available in its current format.

Do I need a Nexus Mods account to use SteamDB now?

No. SteamDB works exactly like it always has. No account needed to browse, and Steam sign-in stays for the features that use it. Nexus Mods accounts and SteamDB are separate things, and there are no plans to force them together.

Will the browser extension change?

The extension stays free, stays maintained, and doesn't get stuffed with ads or shady link-rewriting. We know exactly which acquisition you're thinking of. That's not what's happening here. The extension is one of the most trusted things SteamDB has built, and burning that trust for pennies would be idiotic. If the extension's behaviour ever changes in a way that matters, we'll say so in the changelog, in plain language, before it ships.

Are you adding tracking? What happens to my privacy?

The honest answer: SteamDB now has an updated Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy, the kind of legal housekeeping a passion project never had. We plan to use analytics to understand what features people use (aggregate stuff, not "watching you personally"), and we'll be transparent about exactly what runs on the site. No selling personal data, no creepy cross-site profiles.

Can researchers/students still use SteamDB data for projects?

Yes. SteamDB has always supported students and researchers using its data for non-commercial projects, and that continues. Reach out the same way as before.

Will games and charts be hidden or moderated?

No. SteamDB aggregates publicly available data, and it's purpose is to provide an accurate historical record of data from Steam. We do not hide, moderate or alter game pages, charts, player counts or pricing history.

In theory, some of these promises are actually incredibly useful. People who are avid modders or mod users know the experience of a game update breaking a mod, and now need to either revert to an older version of the game or find new mods. This is something this partnership should ease.

As with any partnership between business though, there are some skeptics. I'm sure it's not difficult to find users abhorring the thought of what will change later down the line, though we can only wait and see if any of those worries end up being justified in the long run.

What do you think about SteamDB becoming a part of Nexus Mods? Let us know in the comments below.