271
Nexus Mods acquires the popular community site SteamDB
(www.gamingonlinux.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2026
271 points (99.6% liked)
PC Gaming
15401 readers
413 users here now
For PC gaming news and discussion. PCGamingWiki
Rules:
- Be Respectful.
- No Spam or Porn.
- No Advertising.
- No Memes.
- No Tech Support.
- No questions about buying/building computers.
- No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
- No Let's Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
- No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
- Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates. (Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources. If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Cuz consolidation is always good for us the consumers/users!
If the choice is between consolidation and the current owner simply abandoning it, I'll take the lesser of two evils.
I don't know man. We've seen how bad enshitification takes hold once a big corporation takes over. Honestly, in a lot of cases, I would rather have them fade and get forked vs relying on the enshitificated version to amble along, like git hub, source forge, all of the game development studios in the past decade.
This site being bought does nothing to prevent another from being started.
In practice it does. There's a big, entrenched competitor out there already, so that puts a damper on any motivation. If the site just closed down, that wouldn't be the case.
Even if SteamDB is gradually enshittified, there will still be that competitor that does a "good enough" job for a lot of people, meaning the bar for a new player to come along is higher.
Why would network externalities not apply here?
They’re a very common and well demonstrated pattern that plays out with this sort of site; e.g. it’s taken almost a decade for many gaming wikis to get off fandom after they were locked in. There’s a finite pool of user attention and contribution that these projects can pull from, and splitting that pool worsens the commons.
There's also selling it to another party that isn't a vampiric parasite as an option. I doubt they were the only potential buyer.