Chosen, the company behind Nexus Mods, has announced that it will be taking charge of SteamDB in a deal with the tracking site’s Co-founder and long-time Developer, Pavel ‘xPaw’ Djundik. The site began life in 2013, and has grown into one of the dominant tools used by PC gamers to keep tabs on everything from new releases and player counts to patches, backend changes, and the lowest sale prices. Now, it’s entering new ownership, although both parties promise to keep SteamDB “the same site with all its features and data.”
“When Marlamin and I decided to start this project back in 2013, we were driven by pure curiosity and a desire to help make helpful public services for the community,” SteamDB’s creator says in a blog post discussing the deal. Djundik has continued to run the site following his partner’s departure, but now admits, “I have always considered SteamDB to be my hobby, but the 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.”
Steam continues to grow by the day, in both game and player counts, and eventually it reached an unsustainable level. “After COVID and with the rise of AI, the internet we once loved is gone, and with it my passion,” Djundik adds, noting that he “powered through” burnout for a while. “I wouldn’t be able to live with myself by either just letting the site run as-is and letting it wither, or completely shutting it down.” He’s therefore been looking for a partner since January, and has now settled on Nexus Mods.
The Nexus mods team notes that “there are a lot of similarities” between the two sites, both of which “started as passion projects” and eventually “grew far beyond anything their original creators expected.” Djundik says, “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.”
While it promises to keep SteamDB free, and avoid traditional display ads and programmatic advertising, Chosen says, “We’re going to be straight about this rather than dance around it: yes, SteamDB needs to make money.” It promises to take the time to explore “lighter-touch ways to make the website sustainable,” which it says “may include use of partnerships, integrations, and affiliate links with publishers when you buy a game after visiting SteamDB.”
Chosen reiterates that there will be “no paywall on anything that exists today, no selling your personal data, no login walls, no degrading the site to squeeze value out of it.” It notes that while this might be a longer process than pursuing traditional ads, “We’re happy to take that hit in the interest of doing things right.” If you have more questions about what this means for the future of SteamDB or Nexus Mods, the two parties have put together an extensive FAQ addressing other likely concerns.
There’s also hope that this partnership could prove beneficial to modding in the long term. Game updates are typically “one of the most common ways a modded game can suddenly stop working.” To help counteract this, the Nexus Mods team is planning “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 makes clear, however, that “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.” Chosen also states it’s not planning to turn SteamDB into a modding site: “If you’ve never installed a mod in your life 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.”
The Nexus Mods team acknowledges, “We’re very aware that us taking over SteamDB doesn’t automatically give us the trust its community has placed in it.” Djundik has clearly spent a lot of time picking who to hand the reins to, however. He states, “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.”