Wago.io has announced their new partnership with WowUp, a popular addon manager focused on providing a good experience for the users while maintaining their privacy.
Originally Posted by Wago.io
Hey everyone,
It all started with a Discord DM and today, we’re proud to share that we’ve partnered with WowUp, the popular open source addon manager to expand our addon repository and create new opportunities for devs to be compensated for their hard work.
Both Wago Addons and WowUp have the same goal: to create the best user experience possible. Equally important, the WowUp team shares our dedication to maintaining your privacy.
Here at Wago, compensating devs is very important to us - we know how much work goes into creating an addon that so many WoW players rely on. We were upfront about this when speaking with the WowUp team and were happy to learn that they were open to making changes to their client in order to ensure devs were compensated for their work.
What this means for you: If you only use Wago Addons, absolutely nothing - you can still update, install and search addons in the desktop app as you are used to. If you also use WowUp, you will see in the coming weeks that we’re accrediting downloads to Wago so that we can compensate developers. We are doing this through an integration that adds Wago Addons as an addon provider to WowUp.
As an addon developer you might be wondering how we can ensure there’s a sizable pool of funds to distribute when players download their addons through WowUp. The solution is very simple. Users are now able to choose Wago as a provider in the desktop application. This will slightly change the app’s layout because it unlocks Wago’s promotional panel. After that, all downloads through the Wago Provider will be attributed to your share of the monthly rewards.
You can start using it by downloading the recent beta release of WowUp from GitHub: LINK
Wago has always been a community driven project and we want to support community members however we can. Partnering with WowUp ensures our community project continues on and gives the community a choice when it comes to supporting an addon platform.
All the best,
The Wago Team
CurseForge Denies WowUp's Application for API Access
Overwolf has shared an update on the CurseForge API, citing a 700% increase to the average monthly earnings for creators, and the denial of WowUp's application for API access.
Originally Posted by Overwolf
CurseForge API Submissions and Approvals
Since we acquired CurseForge from Twitch in 2020, we’ve been excited and honored to partner with an incredible modding community. We are particularly proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish. Since the transfer of CurseForge to Overwolf in December 2020, the average monthly earnings each creator makes grew 700%! This reflects the hard work done by the mods authors, the CurseForge team, as well as the trust that the community has given us.
In October 2020, we explored offering an official CurseForge API to creators and developers, and we addressed three core issues in a Medium post. We had open conversations with mod manager creators to address fundamental issues listed in that post in order to find a way to co-exist. After those conversations, we created an official API with a Terms of Service (TOS) agreement with the goal of providing stabilization and allowing us to scale. Overall, we received 107 applications for API access from developers. As of January 31, 2022 Overwolf approved 94 of those and denied or requested edits and reapplication from 13.
WowUp's application for API access
Since the transition of CurseForge from Twitch, Overwolf has supported WowUp, a well known front end addon manager, that pulls updates and downloads directly from several WoW repositories including CurseForge. WowUp’s application for API access was in the process of being approved when they announced their partnership with Wago, a direct competitor to CurseForge.
As a result of this announcement, WowUp’s application was denied as this partnership does not comply with Section 3.1 of our terms of services which states that a “Developer shall not use the API or SDK, or any materials obtained through the API or SDK, in order build any product or service that competes, directly or indirectly, with CF, CFC or the Platform.”
We welcome competition. Competition leads to better products and a more developed community. Our ultimate goal has always been that people will choose CurseForge because it’s the best way to support addon developers, and because it is the best product out there, not because it is the only option. But while we welcome diversity in the marketplace, we can’t sponsor the costs of the competition that is building its user base on top of Curseforge infrastructure, metadata entered by addon developers and our server and CDN costs.
WowUp is a respected project, we wish the WowUp team and Wago success and look forward to seeing what they build in the future.
If you have any questions about our ToS, please reach out to api@curseforge.com.
We are excited for the future of WoW creations no matter what platform they are built on. On the CurseForge side, we are happy to announce that we are close to releasing our Linux App alpha for users who until this point were not able to use the CurseForge app. We’re hyped for WoW’s upcoming Patch 9.2 and thrilled to see how the CurseForge API can serve the community in developing additional awesome, passion driven creations.
WowUp's Update on the CurseForge API Application
Jliddev, the creator of WowUp, posted a reply on Patreon in regards to Overwolf's statement.
Originally Posted by Jliddev
As many of you may or may not have heard there has been an update on our CurseForge API application.
Long story short after months of relative radio silence about our application to use the new API I received a rejection email yesterday followed by some blog post published by CurseForge minutes later. The blog post says that our application was denied because we gave users the option to use the new Wago integration. I attempted to contact them directly for clarification and received no answers.
Since this blog post was posted I have seen a lot of wild ideas that I might be able to address.
- We do not receive anything from showing the optional Wago ad, it is simply a requirement of giving you access to their API.
- When Overwolf leadership and myself met before they completely took over from Twitch I asked them if they were open to the same method of API access that we now use with Wago. They were not interested.
- We are not "fighting over users" as we are not operating as a business designed to make profit, all the Patreon funds are specifically for paying for infrastructure, WowUp's only goal is to be useful for the community.
Where do we go from here?
As it stands right now, support for the CurseForge API will end whenever they shut off their current V1 API. They have chosen to deny our API key application so we cannot offer a service to support their new V2 for the community. I cannot comment on when this might be as they have pushed back their own deadline several times already.
This will likely dramatically affect the number of addons available to the WowUp client. There's little we can do at this point unless Overwolf suddenly decides that they want to talk again.
If your favorite addon is not available on any of our other providers, you can always politely ask them if they are open to hosting it elsewhere. For example Wago has a similar payout structure as CurseForge. There are dev tools that make this painless. However, remember that it is their choice to make and they are just people like you.
As always I will try to be available to any questions you have, the easiest way is still Discord since i will get notifications there.
WowUp 2.6.0 Client Changes
Several addon managers such as Ajour and CurseBreaker have been discontinued since the CurseForge Legacy API will become unavailable sometime in February (according to Overwolf's timeline update from last year).
Meanwhile, after "months of relative radio silence (regarding the use of CurseForge's API)", WowUp added an option to use the Wago repository in the 2.6.0 release. The Wago repository expands the user's options for searching, downloading and updating new addons, however, this comes at the cost of showing one ad in the bottom left corner. Note that this new feature is optional, disabled by default, and users have to opt-in to enable it.
Jliddev shared more info about WowUp now running ads (optionally, at the user's request) on Patreon.
Originally Posted by Jliddev
As always, it has been a while since my last post. Last time we talked about the upcoming changes to the CurseForge API to limit apps like WowUp and other addon managers. Since then, the updater ecosystem has changed quite a bit with the loss of our friends Ajour and CurseBreaker.
Rest assured, we have been hard at work trying to keep the light of hope alive regarding the transparency of World of Warcraft addon updates. We are excited to announce that we have been working with the team at Wago.io to add them as our latest addon provider. For users and authors, this is good news as it expands their options for installing, updating, and publishing addons.
However, to use the Wago.io addon provider, users will be required to have an ad shown in the corner of the app. I know what you’re thinking “ads!? I use WowUp to avoid ads!”. The good news is that you still can. If you do not want to see ads in your WowUp you can opt not to use the new Wago.io addon provider and they will not appear, simple as that. You will be prompted to enable Wago.io when you first start up WowUp, and it will not be active by default.
Many of you will have questions about why the WowUp team made this decision and its benefit. I will do my best to answer some big-ticket questions here. If you have more questions, feel free to reach out, Discord is probably the place to get the quickest answers.You can check out these changes in progress via our beta builds on GitHub
Its optional
Just to reiterate, if you do not want to see the ad, simply don’t enable it.
Why the ads?
There are two main reasons for making these ads a requirement. First, Wago.io pays the authors a majority cut from the revenue that is generated from the ads. This is good for everyone. Feel free to read more about their author program here.
Second it costs money to serve you addons. Take the WowUpHub for example, it is funded by this Patreon and uses up most of the monthly donations to power the API. We rely on GitHub/GitLab paying the storage bandwidth. Wago.io handles their own addon storage, so their costs will grow significantly higher than ours under the same user load.
What's in it for WowUp?
The same thing that we have always wanted is a transparent way to manage your World of Warcraft addons. We do not get any cut or compensation from these ads so that we can maximize the return for the authors.
Since WowUp is open source, anyone and everyone can make sure that data is not being taken. The advertisement runs in a separate runtime and has no access to platform-level APIs, so it can’t gather anything from your machine.
https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/10 ... API-Access
