I happened to come across an ad for zygorguides dot com on youtube.
While the addon itself is apparently free, you need to purchase a membership in order to get the ‘full experience’ of their guides.
I thought independant profitting from Blizzard content was against ToS (and also illegal)?
“Guides” are simply opinion matter, you’re paying for their opinion on how to go about the game not the actual game material itself.
Hm… I genuinely don’t know about this one–depends on how Blizzard has dealt with such things before. I would argue that the actual guides aren’t really “Blizzard’s” content. Similarly, Twitch WoW streamers reserve stuff like ElvUi set-ups for Twitch subs, and that hasn’t appeared to be a problem so far.
Yes, but the difference in this is that if the ad is to be believed, then purchasing a membership unlocks content (full guides) within the addon. And I am very certain that paid content within addons or of addons themselves is a no no.
Blizzard hasn’t cracked down on people reserving their UI and WeakAuras packs for subscribers to their stream. So I doubt they’d care much about this either.
Trade skill master offers the same deal. You can use the addon and receive the database it regularly updates. But in order to access a feature “good deals or whatever they call it” you have to pay a fee.
If I recall, the addon is free to download, you are paying for the data files the addon uses. Kinda shady to me though.
It’s a grey area.
That’s not really the same thing. Subbing to TSM doesn’t change the addon, it just gives you further info outside the game.
I mean, is it against ToS? Probably. But what are they supposed to do? Send the lawyers on some random website that is probably based in a foreign country?
They’ve done that before.
It does change the addon, by changing its functionality (highlighting deals). Rather disingenuous to say nothing happens.
It does not lol, we have premium, it doesn’t change the addon.
The addon policy is here,
probably not against the TOS as you are not technically paying to access an addon function, or being advertised by the addon itself. Guides and premium website activity I believe fall outside of that policy.
Consider Curse is changing to a possible ad funded or sub addon manager. You can technically download said addons for free and manage them by yourself, or you can pay them to automate the management. That probably would not be terms breaking either.
I understand what you’re saying, though a subscription addon manager isn’t a great comparison. That would be paying to manage content already third party to Blizz, not paying for something directly tangible as in-game content (such as actually purchasing an addon).