Should You Use CurseForge? CEO Explains WoW App’s Privacy, Feature, Ad Changes

[rhorle]

Not trying to make a point of it but Overwolf are worth 16 million dollars
as compared to the competitors consisting of mostly independent developers. Im not going to judge anyone for what addon manager they want to use, but Im obviously not going to use Overwolf in any shape or form.

Who bought it from Twitch. Who is owned by Amazon. There is no flex here. There is no "big man" coming to bully the small independent guys. You are obviously biased and that is leading to silly arguments.

[rrayy]

Who bought it from Twitch. Who is owned by Amazon. There is no flex here. There is no "big man" coming to bully the small independent guys. You are obviously biased and that is leading to silly arguments.

The big man, in fact, sold it to the much littler man. Overwolf is so small it's hard from them to bully anyone.

[melodramocracy]

The bullshit Twitch app was bad enough, hard pass on this nonsense.

[rrayy]

Not trying to make a point of it but Overwolf are worth 16 million dollars
as compared to the competitors consisting of mostly independent developers. Im not going to judge anyone for what addon manager they want to use, but Im obviously not going to use Overwolf in any shape or form.

16 million? That is barely a spit in the ocean. Guess who they bought Curse from? Amazon. Guess how much they are worth? 1.7 TRILLION. So tell me again how Overwolf is a big company when they aren't even in the top 1,000 companies. The number you gave kills your own argument because they are a VERY small company.

[rowaasr13]

Thats a valid view, but people should be able to choose what app they want to use without a big company coming for monopoly.

It's not that simple. All those alternative apps don't come with their own repositories and infrastructure, right now they use the very same CF infrastructure OW now pays for.

[rrayy]

It's not that simple. All those alternative apps don't come with their own repositories and infrastructure, right now they use the very same CF infrastructure OW now pays for.

Nothing is stopping any of those apps from estabglish their own repositories. They don't want to because they were able to leech off of Curse for free.

[Metriss]

If you decide not to use the Curseforge/Overwolf just because there is a small ad in the corner then that is pretty insane to me. The money they give devs for their addon is a pretty nice incentive to update addons when when it breaks even if the author doesn't play the game anymore. I understand blocking intrusive ads on sites like YouTube/Twitch/Spotify, but installing 3rd party stuff just to get around a slightly worse experience and to block a tiny ad in the corner (which is basically stealing CurseForge's bandwidth and ad revenue from devs that spend hundreds to thousands of hours making addons) is pretty entitled.

[Baneto]

Who bought it from Twitch. Who is owned by Amazon. There is no flex here. There is no "big man" coming to bully the small independent guys. You are obviously biased and that is leading to silly arguments.

I am entitled to my opinion as you are to yours, you're lobbying for Overwolf so you're the biased one if anyone in that sense.

16 million? That is barely a spit in the ocean. Guess who they bought Curse from? Amazon. Guess how much they are worth? 1.7 TRILLION. So tell me again how Overwolf is a big company when they aren't even in the top 1,000 companies. The number you gave kills your own argument because they are a VERY small company.

16 million dollars a spit in the ocean? Im not gonna take that as a serious reply.

It's not that simple. All those alternative apps don't come with their own repositories and infrastructure, right now they use the very same CF infrastructure OW now pays for.

I am sure WowUp and the others will find a way to adapt to the situation and continue to be great alternatives for players.

[Magical Mudcrab]

Nothing is stopping any of those apps from estabglish their own repositories. They don't want to because they were able to leech off of Curse for free.

From what I'm aware, the problem is primarily adoption by addon authors. Consuming Curse or WoWInterface APIs allows them to serve the managed addons to users, whereas addon authors don't feel inclined to migrate to the new services over current, established services which are monetized and can provide small amounts of income to the authors. Obviously these 3rd parties using these APIs is not great, especially because you're essentially piggybacking off of someone else's resource cost, but also because they may be violating the distribution licenses included with the addon repository.

[rowaasr13]

I am sure WowUp and the others will find a way to adapt to the situation and continue to be great alternatives for players.

So, in short, "fuck devs".

[Baneto]

So, in short, "fuck devs".

I hope they depend on boyfriends/girlfriends for that, and not their users.

Jokes aside, if I like an addon I will donate money to it as I've done with DBM and Weakauras in the past, as example.

[rowaasr13]

Yeah, yeah, I've heard this libertarian drivel in so many IT circles: people will flock to support popular stuff! 17m downloads of my work later I know better.
Also what happens to authors who only starting out? Fuck them too, right?

Besides, most direct consumers can only offer money. But can you "donate" infrastructure? Will you "donate" central DB that knows all dependencies to package into single addon release? Localization system? Comments feed for each and every addon? Repository servers for less popular version control systems that authors are used to? Sure, when WoWUp "donates" all this to community you can come back and speak about how it is an "alternative". But right now it is not an alternative to devs at all.

[RoKPaNda]

If I have to go back to manual installs I will. In my decade and a half + of playing this game I've only been using an addon updater for the past couple years. There's a couple raid critical addons that I'll update before my weekly raid and that's about it. Not installing Overwolf.

So, in short, "fuck devs".

I'm all for supporting the devs but I'm not going to fuck myself over to do it either. I'd love for popular AddOn devs to make their addons available outside of CF so they get something out of the arrangement but it's going to require a little effort on their part beyond just uploading it to CF and being done with it. And yes that's on top of the effort they put into making and maintaining their AddOns that we're all very thankful for I'm sure.

[rhorle]

I am entitled to my opinion as you are to yours, you're lobbying for Overwolf so you're the biased one if anyone in that sense.

I am not lobbying for Overwolf just against some of the sillier hate. You admitted that you will never ever use anything from Overwolf. That is crystal clear bias. You are allowing it to color the rest of your statements including clearly false ones.

[bloodykiller86]

And what makes you think i am not aware of that or that i used twitch before overwolf? It is just quite hillarious to me that they so blatantly state it yet in a manner that is ment to fool you.

im saying that forget about your data being safe, you are being data collected from everywhere, theres no way to avoid it at all. In my mind i would rather support app devs by using curseforge than steal from them by using wowup

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And that is fine, they can do that with their platform, as long as there can be alternatives for people.


Nobody talked about donating to WowUp specifically, I have mentioned donating but to addon-developers themselves through the means of direct compensation or a monthly donation. And the demand shows other people want alternatives to big actors like Twitch-app or Overwolf, or we wouldnt have things like Minion WowUp CurseBreaker, Ajour etc.


I am sorry I dont understand the first sentence of your post, but yeah there are addons like Zygor that are free but take a subscription to fully use.

Thats a valid view, but people should be able to choose what app they want to use without a big company coming for monopoly.

direct compensation through donations would honesty be worse for them as the majority wont. the best way is the way curseforge is doing it as its just like the youtube method. by just using curseforge (or subbing eventually like back in the old days), you help the developer. wowup is just stealing from them

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I am not lobbying for Overwolf just against some of the sillier hate. You admitted that you will never ever use anything from Overwolf. That is crystal clear bias. You are allowing it to color the rest of your statements including clearly false ones.

theyre closed minded and will hear of nothing about overwolf lol like if twitch was any better lmfao

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Yeah, yeah, I've heard this libertarian drivel in so many IT circles: people will flock to support popular stuff! 17m downloads of my work later I know better.
Also what happens to authors who only starting out? Fuck them too, right?

Besides, most direct consumers can only offer money. But can you "donate" infrastructure? Will you "donate" central DB that knows all dependencies to package into single addon release? Localization system? Comments feed for each and every addon? Repository servers for less popular version control systems that authors are used to? Sure, when WoWUp "donates" all this to community you can come back and speak about how it is an "alternative". But right now it is not an alternative to devs at all.

facts. theres nothing else to say. In the end wowup steals from devs unless they force wowup to add in curseforge ads and needing subscription. its like youtube mods or using adblock on youtube. you're just denying content creators their share of profits for the work they do that costs you nothing. its why i sub to youtube as content creators get way more with it than they do with ads

[Baneto]

You admitted that you will never ever use anything from Overwolf. That is crystal clear bias. You are allowing it to color the rest of your statements including clearly false ones.

There is a good reason why I am biased against using Overwolf, you'll just have to deal with it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And the guy above me calling people close-minded for having different opinions on things, amazing logic.

[kaminaris]

Yeah, yeah, I've heard this libertarian drivel in so many IT circles: people will flock to support popular stuff! 17m downloads of my work later I know better.
Also what happens to authors who only starting out? Fuck them too, right?

Besides, most direct consumers can only offer money. But can you "donate" infrastructure? Will you "donate" central DB that knows all dependencies to package into single addon release? Localization system? Comments feed for each and every addon? Repository servers for less popular version control systems that authors are used to? Sure, when WoWUp "donates" all this to community you can come back and speak about how it is an "alternative". But right now it is not an alternative to devs at all.

This, people have no clue what are they talking about. If addon devs never received a single penny you would have 1/100 addons you have now with crap functionality and no support at all.

Good example is loonix, yes system itself is free but is it really alternative for windows? Nope, It began to catch up when big companies took over and created some of their own distributions, actually PAID developers to do their job.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/01/...ource-software

Nowadays, around 70% of contributions are from paid contributors working for companies which have a vested interest in kernel development.

I really hate that Karen attitude some people seems to have. Why pay for it when i can steal it?

[kail]

My history with OW was brief and not pretty. It was during MoP (IIRC) when TeamSpeak had its integration with OW and I thought "neat". Installed OW with the TS3 app and had to jump through hoops to manage that annoying overlay that OW wanted to keep around along with realizing a performance issue while running OW (could be a leak or being CPU hog, I didn't investigate). Uninstalled OW and thankfully Discord reigns king of gaming VOIP.

Fast forward to today, I now have OW installed for Curseforge. Ran it once for a simple update on all my addons and it went smoothly. The minute it tries to be annoying in the background it will get scrubbed super fast. I don't fall for FUD without personal or widespread experiences.

People have their freedom on how they run their PC, but I do find it super ironic when they tout OW being a data miner/seller when Blizzard's Online Privacy Policy makes OW look like a saint. What I've seen with OW's policy is standard across the extreme majority of software and those who take issue with their policy should probably not even have BNet installed as well.

A link for reference. If you're afraid of OW gathering data, then you should be even more afraid of ActiBlizz's software.

[qwerty123456]

This, people have no clue what are they talking about. If addon devs never received a single penny you would have 1/100 addons you have now with crap functionality and no support at all.

Good example is loonix, yes system itself is free but is it really alternative for windows? Nope, It began to catch up when big companies took over and created some of their own distributions, actually PAID developers to do their job.

Addon's were never supposed to be a source of income(atleast for wow) just because some people discovered a way to exploit loopholes doesn't mean they deserve that money nor do those addons need to exist if a person doesn't want to work on it anymore for what ever reason.

[kaminaris]

Addon's were never supposed to be a source of income(atleast for wow) just because some people discovered a way to exploit loopholes doesn't mean they deserve that money nor do those addons need to exist if a person doesn't want to work on it anymore for what ever reason.

And this is where you are wrong. Addons are suppose to be free but nobody said about hosting them, making catalogue and application to automatically update them.
Its not a loophole, exploit or anything, thats dumb to assume so.