Originally Posted by honem
Well your first part of your argument is correct - servers don't run on sunshine and rainbows, bandwidth doesn't grow on trees. To be viable websites that will stay up they do need to be run as businesses.
And Businesses do need to have moneey coming in to pay the bills. Curse's estimated bandwidth bill for the month of April ? $75,000 (1) . They need to pay it somehow.
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oh, i'm not blaming anybody or anything. $75k a month in bandwidth costs kind of underscores the issue -- they wouldn't be doing that unless they anticipated making well over $75k a month. what's a guess at how much they make in a year? a million bucks? more? less?
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The second part of your argument isn't very valid - although there is a rivalry there between Curse and Wow interface , it's more of a friendly rivalry more then anything. They do have friendly relations with each other and do share certain things like tips on how to block wowmatrix and other addon site admin stuff.
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the quickest way to ruin a friendship is to throw money into the equation. the more you throw in, the quicker the friendship ends. maybe curse and zam are hands-off enough to not let it affect the folks actually running the sites, i dunno. but business is business. why would curse opt to be nice instead of opting to make more money?
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If they wanted to drive wowinterface out of business all they needed to do would be to not tell this site about how they were going to block wowmatrix. Then all traffic that the WM users would normally be sending Curse would of been sent to this site instead...
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divide and conquer. it's a standard technique. if wowi didn't block wowmatrix, then wowmatrix survives -- heck, maybe wowmatrix and wowi comes to some sort of agreement over bandwidth costs. it's better for curse to make the "sure kill" and see how things pan out later.
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As for the Premium program hording addons ? I don't buy it. There are a ton of other reasons why an author would publish to Wow interface and not Curse or both at the same time. An author makes a decision as to where to publish his or her addon and most of the time it's not where the money is leading them. Author tools , SVN , ease of publishing , quality of support ticket system, support forums , having more places people can download it from .... all are more valid reasons then getting a monetary cut out of it. And please note that with Curse's Premium program you can still download your addons for free through the client and through the website. They aren't preventing you from getting addons at all.
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i know the premium service isn't mandatory -- that's probably against blizzard's recent addon policy and would be a bad move by curse even if it wasn't. and in truth, the author rewards program isn't so much money that people would be really swayed to host there instead of here, but i have to imagine the formula for the rewards must include d/l count and visits. authors who are already there would be serving their own interests by removing their addons from other sites (to increase their curse traffic) or even hosting older addons elsewhere so people would be exposed to the addon but still need to go to curse to d/l it.
if curse wanted to play nice with wowi, they'd give me the option to syndicate my addon to other sites (like wowi).
and let me be clear here, i'm not suggesting that curse wants to take down wowi, i'm just speaking from a theoretical standpoint. looking at it as a business, you're always trying to get rid of competition and increase your market share. that's just how business works.