I feel like i've been rather quiet lately, which is odd because I'm working harder than ever before. The radio silence has been due to many things. In the space of a few months I got married, went on a honeymoon, launched mod.io, attended E3 to pitch mod.io and triple checked all of our privacy policies to ensure we are GDPR compliant.
It's been a busy time so it's great that things are quietening down and I can focus on what's next. Right now that means helping developers get integrated and up and running on mod.io. I just posted in the forums why I believe this is important (feel free to join the discussion). Ultimately it comes down to our love of mods which begun 16 years ago when we launched ModDB.com in 2002, and thinking about what the future of modding looks like.
I didn't want to change this amazing community by making radical changes, but at the same time I felt there are many gaming companies which cannot use Steam Workshop for various reasons, and a solution was needed. Hence mod.io was born and working on it and ModDB.com remain my priority.
I personally believe that mods are only going to become more significant in the future, and we aim to help all games and consumers benefit by providing a powerful, platform agnostic mod API / SDK. I'm looking forward to sharing what we are cooking up and working more closely with game creators in the future. Get in touch if you'd like to know more.
It still feels like ModDB has been horribly neglected for the past nine years. Desura, IndieDB, SlideDB and VRDB, mod.io ate too much time, effort and way too many resources in general for the old ModDB to truly prosper without sidekicks... kicking in.
Well, I should not be the one to talk, 'm probably the one to blame the most for the current situation, for slacking off and focusing too much on the Sisyphean task of moderation rather than simpler yet more energy-consuming contributions, but I'm still just a goon, a small fry - adding even thousands of games doesn't make a difference, while one little, tiny v5 could affect and bring in (or back?) millions of members and visitors to the site.
"I didn't want to change this amazing community by making radical changes, but at the same time I felt there are many gaming companies which cannot use Steam Workshop for various reasons"
What a non-sequitur.
p.s. people aren't using mod.io because they recognise it for the walled garden of a paid mods scheme that it is. Valve got away with it because they already had total control over their customers as well as a cult of personality to misdirect the broader consumer base with, but to extend the comparison to Valve further - the Steam Workshop stands out very clearly as being very, very suspicious when taken on its own, and then with mod.io you've got none of what Valve had to prevent the Steam Workshop from being taken on its own. Without any of the pre-existing structure that Valve had to control or to misdirect people with, the best you can do is give the most damning parts of your business plan a smaller font size, or to do your best to not answer or even mention the most damning questions anyone's going to be left with having read over your website, and that's obviously not going to cut it for you.