Reminder for Authors re Blizz's AddOn Dev Policy
Given the reports we have received from a number of authors concerning an email/PM they were sent today, we felt that this would be a good time to remind authors of Blizzard's UI AddOn Development policy. It is as follows:
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Accepting 'sponsorship' of your addons in exchange for a popup in game saying that your addon is "sponsored by [X] company" would be in violation of this policy. Blizzard would immediately be asking you to remove the popup in question &/or preventing your mod from working in-game &/or whatever else they felt appropriate. Also, we'd like to apologize for the fact that a number of you were contacted by this particular company through the use of our Private Messaging system. The account has been banned and the PMs all deleted. |
What skeeve sent the message, though?
-Crissa |
If you must know, the message said:
---------------- Hello <author>, I am contacting you to offer to sponsor your addon <addon>. We have recognized how useful your addon is and how much time and work goes into creating and updating it. We currently advise all the members who purchase our <Blah> to download and use <addon>. We are offering to pay you every time you update your addon (our company pulls in a good amount of revenue so we can afford to pay you well). All you have to do is make it so when someone logs in for the first time after updating your addon a window will appear stating that <addon> is sponsored by <Blah2> and have one or two lines of text about our <Blah> with a link to our website. This only has to show up the first time you login after an update NOT every time they login. The sponsorship window was just an idea if you don’t want to do that and have another suggestion I am willing to negotiate. If you are interested at all please email me back with any terms or conditions you might have and also how much you would want to get paid for this sponsorship. <Blah's website address> ---------------- It quite clearly violates the addon policy as it is paid advertising, and thus I applaud the quick action to delete the messages - however, email copies of the message (wowi sends emails on PMs received with the contents) do remain. Can you imagine if 10 addons you use suddenly popped up a box after patch day? Disastrous. |
I wouldn't do it at all, but imho there's a small difference between sponsorship and pure advertising.
What if the title bar or whatever of an addon shows (let's say on first start) something like "Sponsored by clickmeandibiteyou.com"? Quote:
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Now, if you kept your sponsor's branding on the website/page where users downloaded your addon, then that would be perfectly fine. |
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I can't see why showing a company's name on my webpage is considered as sponsoring and showing a company's name inside my addon should be advertising. Imho sponsoring is supporting someone or something with money, services, or whatever to get certain things done and to provide something for the users. Advertising is to purely promoting something without any value for the users. |
It's a matter of semantics. Sponsoring has a positive connotation, and is used to indicate that you support and endorse an event/action/product.
Advertising on the other hand, has a neutral to negative connotation, and is used to primarily raise awareness of an event/action/product. The thing is, sponsorship almost always has the effect of advertising - raising awareness of said event/action/product. |
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It's ok to place advertisements on websites because the AddOn policy only restricts advertisements in game. So, feel free to sponsor and be sponsored, just don't place advertisements / logos / symbols etc in game :) |
Isnt that what GearScore is doing with TenTonHammer or whatever that name is?
Or hell, Bejeweled with Popcap :P |
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True. So obviously there are some edge cases. Blizzard doesn't want to stop you from using WoWhead resources, so banning their logo (icon) would be silly. Nor do they want people's UIs to be bereft of imagery or back links to the source website for support and attribution.
It's a fine line to walk. -Crissa |
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