Remember the Daggerfall Unity GOG Cut? Odds are you don't. It was, in essence, a pre-modded version of The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, in the excellent fan-made . The idea was that if you wanted to play Daggerfall but didn't want to go through the rigamarole of modding it into modernity, you could just download the GOG Cut and be on your way.
But there were issues. It quickly became outdated as the mods it included got new updates that GOG didn't wrap into the GOG Cut, and even if it had kept everything on its latest version, some of the included mods just didn't quite mesh. It wasn't the best way to play Daggerfall in the 2020s, and ended up earlier this year after languishing there since 2022.
So, presuming mod authors keep on top of their updates, we shouldn't run into yet another scenario where mods on GOG end up woefully outdated compared to their counterparts on sites like Nexus Mods. It's not a free-for-all, though: GOG of [[link]] course has to approve which mods it hosts on its service, and de Marco tells me that the store does "give heads up" to studios whose games are being modded on the platform. "It's for [[link]] us, but for the mod creators as well, right? There are stories in the past where mods could have been shut down completely for a specific franchise, and it's not something where we want to put anyone at risk… We are kind of a middleman to make sure that everything's okay."
I get the impression that GOG's come quite a way from the first days of the DF GOG Cut. Which, you know, you'd certainly hope is the case. In our chat, de Marco told me that assembling the DF GOG Cut was so ramshackle that "Our main person in charge of [the GOG Cut] did not have a premium account on Nexus, so he could send one message a day to people that weren't his friend." Kind of made securing all the necessary permissions for mod authors a bit hard.
I'm interested to see where GOG goes with modding. The whole scene has hit interesting times in the wake of the departure of the 24-year head of Nexus Mods, with some users fearing the might put the stalwart platform on a path to enshittification. Perhaps we're due a shake-up in the mod-hosting scene. Perhaps GOG is well-placed to take advantage of it. It probably has [[link]] a premium account by this point.