After Overwolf made changes that restrict other third-party programs, World of Warcraft players will have fewer options for managing addons.
Addons are an important part of playing World of Warcraft, whether you’re playing the Burning Crusade, Season of Mastery Classic, or retail. They’re a no-cost way to vastly improve your gaming experience.
Overwolf is the most widely used and popular WoW addon manager and database. However, there are also “third-party” programs that provide similar services.
However, change – for better or worse – is in the air. This is due to Overwolf’s most recent announcement regarding how they will work with addon creators.
Overwolf made an official announcement about how they would roll out their new API. This means that if developers want to be compensated for WoW addons, they’ll have to go through Overwolf.
Downloads from third-party managers will no longer count towards the Curseforge Rewards Program in December, as shown in the official roadmap above.
Developers can still make their addons available to third-party managers if they want, but they won’t be able to make money if they’re downloaded somewhere other than Overwolf/Curseforge because of this change.
After the announcement, one third-party addon manager has already called it quits.
Following the said news, one of the most popular third-party addon managers, Ajour’s creator announced that the program would be discontinued.
Casperstorm, the creator of Ajour, wrote that downloads are not counted toward the CurseForge Reward Program, effectively dividing the community by pitting addon developers against third-party addon managers, and that they will now rate limit third-party addon managers if they become too popular. In addition, not all addons will be accessible via the API.
While many players have chastised Overwolf for the change, others have chastised Blizzard for not publicly supporting the developers of these addons (which are essentially required for high-level endgame raiding).
This type of addon exists in a hazy area but as of now, they are not supported by Blizzard officially but most players use it because they provide significant, and necessary, quality of life improvements for WoW. There has been no word on whether Blizzard will intervene as of this writing.