Blizzard Policy Update Prevents Addon Devs from Charging/Requesting In-Game Donations

by Chad Lakkis on March 23, 2009 at 5:10 pm

Chances are, that if you have played World of Warcraft for any substantial period of time, you have heard the name of a few helpful addons used by many of loyal subscribers. In fact, the majority of WoW gamers today are lost without them.

If you don’t believe me, ask a few what they do the moment a new patch comes out or they transfer their character to a test realm. My guess is that the majority scramble sites like curse.com looking for updates to these very plugins. So why then has Blizzard recently (last Friday) changed interface their policy to no longer allow these third party developers from charging for their work?

In asking a few gamers, some believe that this will help to lighten the burden of addon Trojans that compromise account security, but I’m not buying it. My logic tells me that taking away an individuals means to profit legitimately from their work will open two avenues. One, they will cease to create their product, and two they will seek out other methods (addware etc) to obtain compensation for their time.

Head on over to wowinterface.com and try to download the popular outfitter addon which allows you to switch your gear with the ease of one click and you will be greeted with the following message:

“Disabled by request of the author in protest of Blizzard’s new UI Addon Development Policy.”

Setting aside the compensation aspect for a moment, it seems unfair to me that Blizzard would slap the hand of those that help make the user experience inside their game more friendly at a pace that they could not maintain on their own.

The creator of Quest Helper (the number one downloaded addon according to curse.com) is also closing his doors — sharing the following piece of information in his last version update:

Version 0.95 3/20/2009

Disable donation request.

Bad news, everyone. Questhelper’s dead.

Blizzard just posted their new UI Add-On Development Policy at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/policy/ui.html. The important part is that I’m no longer allowed to ask for donations in-client. I know how much I got before I added the in-client reminder – it doesn’t pay a significant fraction of the bills. And, as much as I like you guys, good intentions don’t pay for my apartment.

So that’s it. I’m going to be finishing up and releasing v1.0, and I’ll keep posting incremental database improvements every month or two. I do plan to keep QH functional, at least through the end of Wrath, and probably further. I’ve got one or two features in mind that I want to do for my own sake – a few achievements, mostly – but besides that (and the v1.0 release) that’s pretty much all there’s going to be.

I would like to say: thanks to everyone who donated in the past. I enjoyed working on this quite a bit, and I always enjoyed seeing another donation come in – not just because of the money, but because it meant that people wanted to use QH and wanted to keep it going.

Let Blizzard know if you don’t like it, and if I can get an exception, I’ll start everything right back up again :)

So while it sounds like the developer above is not planning on cutting off the community of crafters immediately, you may want to heed his advice and throw a little support his way in the form of vocalizing your disagreement with the Blizzard policy change.

My suggestion to Blizzard is this — rather than remove the option for developers to include an in-game donation request button, why not regulate it internally by allowing those whos efforts undeniably have made an impact on your gaming community (such as Quest Helper, Deadly Boss Mods, Pally Power, etc) the ability to include an ingame donation button.

This is similar to the process that Media Molecule and Sony have with their user created content. If they deem the content worthy of charge, they allow the dev to do so. This makes the most sense to me and I would be curious to hear what readers of this site think as well.

Share This: