Overwolf & Blizzard Addon Policy

[Macillidan-draenor]

lol I have those mornings

[Punyelf-draenor (Punyelf)]

It’s an independent system which is nothing to do with them. Blizzard rules are that all addons must be free of charge and neither the addon makers nor Overwolf are actually charging customers for desktop app.

Ironically addons are not allow to have advertisments in game.

WoW User Interface Add-On Development Policy

With the continuing popularity of World of Warcraft user interface add-ons (referred to hereafter as “add-ons”) created by the community of players, Blizzard Entertainment has formalized design and distribution guidelines for add-ons. These guidelines have been put in place to ensure the integrity of World of Warcraft and to help promote an enjoyable gaming environment for all of our players - failure to abide by them may result in measures up to and including taking formal legal action. 1) Add…

[Dreamkore-silvermoon]

@Punyelf-draenor

It’s an independent system which is nothing to do with them. Blizzard rules are that all addons must be free of charge and neither the addon makers nor Overwolf are actually charging customers for desktop app.

Ironically addons are not allow to have advertisments in game.

this is what i meant by them being withing tos but still a middle finger

addons cannot solicit advertisement or donations, and they must be free so Overwolf simply wants to buy up all the competition, and provide a ‘‘free’’ service that is filled with advertisements to get you to either pay them for an ad free experience or suffer through tons of pushed ads to continute using their ‘‘free’’ service

[Jånek-argent-dawn]

@Punyelf-draenor

I can see that some addon makers will be interested in using a platform as it may be able to give them some revenue. Very few people have patreon or subs to all the addons they use.

its not just monetization though, Curseforge also provides addon authors with a few other tools, a big one being the Localization supports.

[Jazew-turalyon]

If no other addon manager outside of Overwolf would work I’ll go back to manually install my 35ish mods, say once a week or so, over using that bloated spyware.

[Darkvil-nagrand]

What i dont understand is,
In a normal business usually you look after your users, you support them, you try to fulfill their needs.
But in this case it seems their users hate them and they dont seem to care because they think they have a monopoly.
I think they may have underestimated their potential user base.

[Dreamkore-silvermoon]

@Darkvil-nagrand

What i dont understand is,
In a normal business usually you look after your users, you support them, you try to fulfill their needs.
But in this case it seems their users hate them and they dont seem to care because they think they have a monopoly.
I think they may have underestimated their potential user base.

well to be fair the addon ‘‘market’’ if you want to call it that was very exploitable

sure people can upload to github or whatever, but the Curse website has become so core to WoW addons that as people have said most creators dont even bother uploading anywhere else

it’s not like the elder scrolls, or source-engine game mods where there are 100 different managers & 10000 different websites to source mods from, with wow there was effectively only just curse, unless they made their own platform like raiderio

[Ishayoe-frostmane (Ishayoe)]

@Dottie-thunderhorn

Hang on, other addons updaters are leeching Curseforge data and Overwolf want to stop it after they take over?

That makes business sense, everyone is looking at it from the wrong side. It’s not anyone else’s data, it belongs to Overwolf and they are not going to be giving it away for free to their competitors. Besides there are ways to stop adware and bloatware.

It’s like Blizzard allowing pirate realms.

Edit: Oh dear, bucking the social admonition trends is going to get me hidden isn’t it.

No, we’re not looking at it from the wrong side.

Many people have uploaded to CurseForge either not knowing or not caring about the revenue sharing. We just wanted to share our addon with the world.

Overwolf wants to assert that they are distributing without my permission if Overwolf can’t push a bunch of engagement metrics and advertisements and trackers down the user’s throat to sell it to make money.

Thing is, I never consented to them adding trackers to my addon files anyway, but it actually doesn’t matter.

Overwolf are only talking about addons where the project license is All Rights Reserved. Every single one of their other licenses are either copyleft or completely open.

All my addons are using that.

That means Overwolf, CurseForge, or literally anybody has my permission to do whatever the heck they want with my addon files as long as they credit me if they modify it and distribute it again (in some of those cases) - and that can be done by just not removing my name from the .toc file, really.

It can be done any which way they like and for any reason they like. As far as I care, they can scrape all my addons out of CurseForge and upload them on an FTP site, idgaf. Most addons are under such a license on CurseForge.

The addon code does not belong to Overwolf. I have given them, and everyone else, license to distribute it. Scraping is legal according to the US courts as well. Overwolf does not have a leg to stand on legally. They are 100% completely out of their minds if they think they can sue people for scraping free software addons from their site.

If Overwolf was doing this because they wanted to help addon authors by making sure they had permission to distribute it, then they would simply limit the addon downloaders to only allowing downloads of anything that is on a free license.

But it’s not about that at all. It’s because they want to install engagement metrics and cookies and bloatware and all sorts of other nice stuff on your PC so they can sell your data and give me some of the money - but I don’t want that blood money, so Overwolf just wanna go “lol ok thanks” and take it.

They have the right to do that - but they’re not doing it for me.

[Ishayoe-frostmane (Ishayoe)]

@Jånek-argent-dawn

its not just monetization though, Curseforge also provides addon authors with a few other tools, a big one being the Localization supports.

This is really easy to do on github, or just git, as well. It’s just a matter of downloading the repo, adding the translated texts to a file, and then making a pull request out of it. That’s it.

[Dottie-thunderhorn (Dottie)]

@Ishayoe-frostmane

Scraping is legal according to the US courts as well. Overwolf does not have a leg to stand on legally.

They can stop it. I am not talking abut the addon code and neither are they, it’s their database of the addons information, not the addons themselves. Anyway this topic is mute now that they have said they are going to allow scraping.

[Punyelf-draenor (Punyelf)]

I’m not sure they have specifically stated that. Unless I’ve missed something, which is possible. The only statement I’ve seen is this one:-

Our Stance on Scraping CurseForge

This seemed to be a response to the negative feedback they received initially but still doesn’t really clarify what they intend, other than they want to have a conversation with these other addon app creators.

Because WoWUp have clearly been contacted:-

Yesterday I was approached by a member of the Overwolf team who essentially told me I could either join them by embedding WowUp into their framework or stop using the CurseForge API.

Overwolf | jliddev

[Ashelía-tarren-mill]

They are a company that wants to make money off their investment and when they legally can shut down competition they will. I’m not liking it of course and I have no plans on grabbing Overwolf myself but I think we can all relate to trying to maximize profit from a product. They didnt pick up the compay to lose money on it.

I’m glad I’m used to manually updated, luckily I don’t play with all that many addons and out of them its only DBM I’m updating before every raid during progress. The rest I don’t bother with unless an addon is acting out. Doesnt matter if I don’t have the latest version of all addons since for most parts they work.

[Redd-moonglade]

Only use one addon but if it has to go it has to go …

[Jånek-argent-dawn]

They have clarified that for now nothing is changing, and there is an open dialog between overwolf and wowup/ajour. I wouldnt worry to much Overwolf certainly seems to understand the demand.

Here is what the Author of Ajour said on discord about the current situation:

[Dejarous-draenor (Dejarous)]

It’s “moot”, not “mute”.

[Rhaeve-magtheridon (Rhaeve)]

@Antler-terenas

I have been sorting out addons very smoothly in Twitch. Is that option gone now?

Sorry for asking something that maybe is common knowledge, but I am totally not updated.

Yes, from November on, Twitch is useless for WoW addons. They sold curseforge to Overwolf and well, that doesn’t look good. Keep an eye on this topic.

[Punyelf-draenor (Punyelf)]

I read the vague ‘nothing is changing’ bit from Overwolf. It’s not an outright statement that they are not going to stop other addon managers. It’s a fluff statement IMO.

However I think they’d have been better off trying to push their platform based on positives rather than approach they went with initially that seemed to want to bully people out of using the alternatives. That has definitely backfired on them and I don’t think they expected the backlash.

Trying to promote your platform because it rewards people who are addon creators is a positive, if they listen to the feedback about the problems overwolf causes and address those etc.

There is clearly a portion of the player base that is not going to be swayed and will never install Overwolf because of issues they’ve suffered in the past or purely because they believe OW is pure evil.

[Ume-haomarush]

@Dejarous-draenor

It’s “moot”, not “mute”.

Actually it’s “moo” - like the opinion of a cow - it’s doesn’t matter.

/Joey face of smug

[Lunamcaeli-silvermoon (Lunamcaeli)]

I wish I could express how much more I want to like this post than just clicking the like button.

[Хмв-soulflayer]

If u don’t want to pay install/update addons manually, thats was ok in the past. What a problem do it now?