Wowinsider brought to my attention that Blizzard has changed their policy on addons. And while I would like to compliment them in a way on this I can also understand why authors would have a problem with it. I hate the idea of having to pay for addons and there are a few of them out there that have enhanced versions of their addon like Carbonite and Wowecon. I personally would never bother with getting the enhanced version but if they take the time to come up with these and then go to the trouble to market it, it is in a sense a sign of free enterprise. After all if we really weren't interested in it we wouldn't pay for it and they wouldn't be able to afford to offer it, so there must be some people willing to pay for these enhanced versions.
So now Blizzard has a problem with it and I can't help but wonder why? Is it that they are worried about peoples accounts being compromised by it? Are they worried that people will have a greater advantage than others with these addons? Or are they just worried that they aren't getting a cut of the action? And how do they plan to enforce this?
The main reason I bring this up is that I have run across a few authors out there that are fighting this move by pulling their addons altogether from circulation. That is their free will to do it, it is their work and they should have the right to do this. It is just that I find it frustrating on my part that they are doing it. There are quite a few addons that I don't need and yet love there are some that I as a GM don't want to have to live without. The main one for this is GroupCalendar, we have been using this addon from day one to setup runs in our guild and while I am sure we can come up with a new way to handle the runs it will take some work and development.
So here is to you authors, we have come to rely on you for alot of our game interaction and we hope that you will understand that we appreciate you. And I hope we can get this "strike" thing figured out.
Edit: Tobold thru up an interesting post on this exact case.
Monday, March 23, 2009
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I'm no addon developer myself but I can imagine how it goes for some of those guys:
ReplyDeleteYou have good knowledge of coding, you have a good idea and you start to develop a neat little addon. You have fun doing so, you get great feedback from the community. But as your addon gets more popular there comes a certain degree of responsibility. People complain, patches break your addons, a new feature you implement will interfer with other addons etc. Thus I'm sure there are addon authors out there who sometimes feel like doing work when updating their addons.
And we all like to get paid for our work am I right?
But what I want to say isn't that all addon others should receive money. I agree with blizzards policy. I absolutely don't like addons that have a free version but offer additional features for money, that's how commercial software works, not WoW addons.
The only thing I wanna say is: Many addon authors have a little paypal donate button on their download page. If an addon really helps you, if you ever asked an addon author to look into an issue for you, if a UI compilation really changes the way you look at the game: do click on that donate button!
Total biscuit argued the point that bliz has not right to do this very well at the beginning of last weeks Blue Plz over on wow radio (I think last tuesdays show but i might be wrong).
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