What? Nvidia isn't relying on anyone, or being outdone by anybody. They have no involvement with these mods happening. These are appearing out of an actual demand for DLSS, because believe it or not, people actually like it. The same definitely cannot be said for FSR - if anyone in this story is pathetic, it's AMD for paying devs off to cover up for their own tech's shortcomings, and even that wasn't able to turn around the fact that FSR in this game can be all but considered rejected by the community.
With >222K downloads for the free version at the Nexus (sans frame generation), PureDark's mod alone is being used in the high double digits by the Premium edition's install base, that's averaging 180K concurrent players right now. That's quite the achievement, and Bethesda should seriously consider a proper engine-level implementation of DLSS.
There's no conspiracy and no shady backroom deals: the DLSS SDK is freely available on GitHub for literally anyone with development skills to use at
https://github.com/NVIDIA/DLSS
And PureDark's is no longer the only mod, there's another one now which is free mind you, just see a few posts above. I suspect it will pick up fast since it supports frame generation for free.
Yeah. It's why commercial games can ship with it after all. The advantage of FSR being MIT licensed is that anyone can modify, customize and sublicense the FSR code itself, something you can't do with DLSS. You can still write an implementation in your engine or, like in this case, an FSR to DLSS/XeSS bridge (which is what these mods are). This is your code, not Nvidia's, and if you tell your user base to get the DLSS DLL by themselves from say, TPU's download section, they technically don't even have any involvement with Nvidia at all.