Yesterday, modding site Nexus Mods announced a change in ownership that’ll see its founder step back. Not much info was provided in the announcement as to who the new owners were, but it’s now been confirmed to be a company called Chosen.
As we reported, the ownership change announcement penned by Nexus mods founder Robin ‘Dark0ne’ Scott didn’t go into much detail as to the identity of those being handed the reigns. A Victor and a Marinus were cited as having “come on board to lead this next chapter”, along with links to their Nexus Mods profiles that only offered brief bios.
We reached out to Nexus Mods yesterday in order to try and learn more about the identity of the new owners, and were provided with a statement by community lead Mathew Elliott.
“We didn’t go into too much detail about the new ownership in the initial post, but the community has been quick to put on their investigator hats, digging into the new owners’ identities, backgrounds, beliefs, even their favorite football teams, and speculating on what this might mean for modding,” it said, “A bit of Reddit or Twitter sleuthing will surface most of what they’ve found.” It added that the new owners are “very hands-on and are now embedded directly with the team in our offices.”
The community sleuthing Elliott referenced was this ResetEra thread, which saw users RandomlyRandom67 and chocobalt conclude that the new owners are a company called Chosen, with co-founders Victor Folmann and Marinus Elgaard believed to be the Victor and Marinus referred to in Scott’s post. This has now been confirmed via a stickied comment on Scott’s original post.
In it, Folmann, Elgaard, and Nikolaj Nyholm address Scott’s post not mentioning Chosen by name, writing: “This post wasn’t about Chosen — it was about Robin and the legacy he built over 24 years. We’re the new owners and ultimate decision-makers at Nexus Mods. We’ll share more about ourselves when we’ve earned that right. For now, we’re focused on listening, learning, and making modding even easier, and yes, you’ll see us around in the community being active.”
The trio assert that they don’t plan to start charging for mods or revoking lifetime premium subscriptions, adding in terms of monetisation in general: “We’re not changing the core model. No aggressive monetisation. No paid mods. If anything, we’re aiming for fewer ads, not more.”
Chosen, which was only founded in January 2025, state their aim as being to “partner with founders to help scale what they’ve built—amplifying their impact, supporting their team and culture, and ensuring the business thrives for the long term.” Basically, they look to be in the business of buying into or buying up community-focused platforms (their website cites previous work with the likes of EA FC community databases FUTBIN and RenderZ), and running them, with founders offered the chance to stay on board or take a “quick, straightforward exit” that Chosen claim shouldn’t leave them worrying about their creation going down the pan.
Folmann’s LinkedIn activity came under scrutiny following the aforementioned ResetEra sleuthing, including a ‘Gaming startup monetisation cheat sheet’ that mentions NFTs and crypto, originally posted seven months ago. When a commenter fretted about these features being added to Nexus Mods, Folmann responded “100% agree — not happening”.
Another post from four months ago sees him predict that in 2025 “AI will enable solo devs to create $100M hits and 2-person teams to build AAA games”, and claim “AI-powered modding will revolutionise game development”.
We’ve reached out to Nexus Mods and Chosen for comment.
It’ll be interesting to see how all of this plays out, but originally announcing the ownership change in a way that left folks needing to do some pretty in-depth detective work to find out exactly who was taking over seems a strange and counterproductive move on Nexus Mods’ part, at least from a PR perspective.
