The Fallout TV show has been driving fans to the games in numbers we haven’t seen in years, and nobody is feeling the effects more than Nexus Mods. The site is seeing massive spikes in traffic that admins are attributing directly to the success of the Amazon Prime series, and a new update offers some fresh insight to the challenge the site is facing.
“We are aware that over the last 7-9 days our website performance has been heavily degraded, with file download speeds being particularly slow,” community management lead Demorphic says in a news post. “We know this has been incredibly frustrating for you and it’s frustrating for us as well. We have spent two weekends battling to keep the site running as best we can and will continue to work at all hours to try and ensure as smooth an experience as possible.”
That time frame, of course, coincides with the launch of the Amazon Prime series on April 10. The post highlights a couple of charts showing total mod downloads for the past month, with massive spikes starting to build around April 12, and it seems the hype is still growing. Fallout 4 went from less than 1.5 million daily mod downloads to nearly 7.5 million.
“As you can see, Fallout 4 and Fallout New Vegas have seen big spikes on the site, contributing to peaks of 24 million total file downloads per day, compared to a norm of 10 million daily downloads,” Demorphic writes. “Between Friday and Sunday we served over 6.3PB (6,300 TB) of mods to our users. That averages out at a constant 194 Gbits per second. This is equivalent to downloading the entire Skyrim SE game twice every second for several days.”
Unfortunately, it seems that Nexus Mods is running into the same issue that big online games do when the servers take a beating – that paying for more servers to cover a spike this massive just wouldn’t make sense long-term. “We normally have sufficient capacity to support over double our bandwidth needs at any one time and regularly invest in our download infrastructure as demand continues to grow,” Demorphic says “What we can’t do is provide an infinite/fully scalable solution to meet very large, short-term spikes in site traffic, due to the prohibitive cost that would be entirely unsustainable for us as a business.”
But ultimately, the takeaway in this post is a positive one: “It’s an exciting time to see so many people trying out mods for the first time or returning to the site after so long away.” It’s going to be a long, long time before Fallout 5 comes around, but the Fallout modding scene is keeping the old games fresh for scores of new and returning series fans.