Accelerating Modrinth's Development

There are over 3 billion gamers worldwide, but only a small fraction ever go further and mod the games they play. Modrinth is here to bring modding to every player on the planet—all the while allowing mod creators to make a living off of it.

Since our founding in 2020 and up until a few months ago, Modrinth has been a purely volunteer project. In the past couple months, the Modrinth team has been more productive than ever. We've released the Anniversary Update, we're actively working on the launcher once more, and we're laying out plans for how to multiply Modrinth creator payouts.

The vision we have for the future of Modrinth is great, and right alongside that is the need for an amazing team to build out this vision. That's why we recently announced that we're hiring—we've already come so far on just volunteer work, but for Modrinth to be sustainable and for its growth to be sustainable, we need to pick up the pace.

That's why we're excited to announce that we've raised a pre-seed round of funding led by Makers Fund, with investors including Ryan Johnson, Stephen Cole, Pim de Witte, Chris Lee, and Andreas Thorstensson to accelerate development and expand to new horizons for Modrinth.

What's next?

We're thrilled to keep on building and iterating on Modrinth over the next few years. Here's a look into what we have in store over the next few months for Modrinth:

• A feature-packed launcher

• Creator organizations (like GitHub), wikis, graphs (with playtime, views, downloads, etc)

• More creator payouts, through the growth of Adrinth

• Discovery/recommendation of mods (especially up-and-coming content)

• Comments (with built-in moderation and spam protection)

• [Redacted]

• Support for new games!

We are excited that we are able to build a product that will manage to grow us to sustainability and create the best modding experience for creators and users. Being able to pay ourselves and bring on new people is a big step in making that happen. There is still a lot to do, so let's get to it!

Q&A:

We know there might be some concerns so we included a short Q&A section below for some common ones. Feel free to ask in our Discord if you have any more questions!

Why does Modrinth need funding?

Our main expense is and will continue to be salaries. The labor cost has always been the main bottleneck for Modrinth. Having paid employees will allow us to develop Modrinth faster, bringing Modrinth to a point of sustainability and growing the platform. For example, we're planning to release our launcher this year, and eventually we're hoping to expand into more games. Those won't be possible without having paid employees.

Is Modrinth still community-first?

We started and always will have the goal of creating a community-oriented, open-source modding platform. Simply put, there isn't any reason for us not to be. It's clear that the previous impersonal, corporate approaches to video game modding have not worked, and Modrinth is excited to change that.

Will Modrinth still be open-source?

Yes! We are committed to having all (when possible) our current code and future code we write to be open-source. Copyright is held by the contributors as we have no CLA, so we cannot make it closed-source (even if we wanted to) without, well, violating the law.

Who's behind Modrinth?

The Modrinth team (currently consisting of Prospector, Emma, and Geometrically) is behind Modrinth. We've been modding Minecraft for years, with connections extending back to grade school. Investors have a minority stake in the company, and have no control or say in our decisions.

Is Modrinth going to adopt web3/cryptocurrency?

No. We have no plans to adopt or explore web3 for Modrinth.

Will investment money be used to fund creator payouts?

Not directly. Hiring more people will allow us to build up the infrastructure that can increase payouts, but the money we pay out to creators will always come from sustainable sources such as advertising and never from investment funds.