I tell you what! I come back to playing WoW after an almost 6 year absence and learn that CurseForge was no longer usable on my PC because it was bought out by Twitch and then I had to sign up for a Twitch account, THEN two months later Twitch sells off CurseForge to a crappy company that wants to monopolize and force players to see popup ads and gain revenue off the backs of mod/addon authors through their “service.” From bad to worse. I want change for the better, not this nonsense!
My thought is maybe players should band together and form our own startup mod/addon service, payed through volunteer player donations and get the author/developers to sign on keeping their programs going that way on a profit share basis.
You couldn’t raise the money to cover the hosting fees. The best thing you can hope for is mod authors start using github but then 90% of the average user had no damn clue how to use that either.
And you can close the updater once you are done and that closes Overwolf and their ad stream. By the way, you will still be able to manually update your mods thru the Cursed Forge web site.
Except there is no upside in doing that. First they would need to host their own repo, which costs money. Then they would need to hire a team to review the mods. And then every major patch they would have to deal with people around here crying “Fix your broken mods Blizzard!”.
They would do it if it was in their financial interest.
Any method they can use to monetize the games without actually stuffing people around too badly would be attractive. So they could offer something like what Spotify does - you can get for free but it has site adds when you open it, or you can pay a small sub for a add-free version, perhaps with some extra helpful benefits.
Why would they when there are other alternatives that do it already. Blizzard has long since been very hands off when it comes to mods. The last thing they are going to do is dive face first into this battle. If Overwolf turns into a mess, someone else will step up and replace it.
If it started to effect their bottom line, they would probably reconsider mods all together. It’s not a cheap or easy process to do this and you would still need the mod authors support. Blizzard can’t just rehost their work without their permission.
Everyone will call me a troll, but I have been using Curse Forge on Overwolf and it’s been fine with me. It’s actually a lot better than it was on Twitch. It’s the same UI that I’m used to and everything works the same way. The fact that they actually give money to the addon developers is a bonus.
I have been using it for about 3 weeks now and I haven’t had a single issue. If you configure it correctly, it will even close Overwolf when you close the CursedForge app. It’s not like I kept the Twitch updater running in the background either, so it’s not really a change for me.
Now we haven’t actually seen what their ads stream will be like but seeing it takes maybe 20 seconds to run a scan and update, it’s not that huge a deal for me.
Since the add is off to the side, I honestly don’t even care. I can’t see why I would ever look over there anyway. And like you said, just open, update, and close.
My only real concern with their ads stream is who is providing it. They have had issues in the past with bad actors in their ad stream but then they are not alone in that regard. WoWhead had similar problems with ads on their site in the past.
See how ads work in Overwolf is an app developer places down a UI element for an ad. They have control over how big it is and if it shows up in game for someone. Overwolf is the one responsible for the ad stream that goes into that ad.
Let’s hope they’re vigilant with administrating their ad stream.
I think people are confusing the Overwolf app… and the new CurseForge app that Overwolf is developing (which is currently in beta). They’re not the same thing.
This new CurseForge app is JUST for installing and updating addons that are created by other people. It’s not going to have any impact on your in-game WoW experience whatsoever.
