Last year, File Front quietly shut the doors of a variety of their gaming hub sites that operated as a collective location to upload and download mods for a variety of games, as they were largely defunct and/or outdated. The parent website, Game Front, would continue to operate and contained all the files that were located on File Front. The problem was, however, that the website was in even worse shape than the File Front sites were and were horrible to navigate, lacking file images, descriptions and even details about their files' author.
When Game Front announced they would shut their doors as well at the end of April, many people, sites, and communities have been scrambling to archive as many of these files as possible. For example, Gamefront.online seems to be an exact replica (including downloadable files) of the now gone Game Front site.
Today Dark0ne, owner and creator of the Nexusmods websites, has declared in a News post that his website will now be the host of as much of File Front's files as possible while they work together with the various teams already at work. The purpose of which is to preserve the files, category structure, descriptions, and author information as they would prove invaluable for the archival process, not to mention that he states they were similar to that of the Nexus sites.
Once preserved, they can be used to integrate the mods along with the rest of their metadata into their respective Nexus websites. The expected timelapse for this process is somewhere in next week, but some games and their related mod files have already been made available for users of the Nexus, including Star Wars: Battlefront, Supreme Commander, and Unreal Tournament.
At the end of the news post, Dark0ne states that while his team doesn't expect these sites to be popular or demanding on their servers, he felt he couldn't sit by and watch idly by as tens of thousands of mods for games he grew up with would be lost forever.
What do you think of Nexus archiving these mods? Will you make use of these mods? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
