As many of you know, the official UI forums have been pretty active with discussions about the effects of Blizzard’s new UI policy (if I were a real blogger, I would have put an inline link to those rules, just FYI). After the rules were posted, I started back-channeling some folks I’ve gotten to know at Blizzard through my blog about the justification for new rules, and the results were rather surprising. 

Several folks have indicated that Blizzard is disappointed with the general greed authors have displayed. One source said in an email that profits from sales and donations were almost “grotesque,” going on to say that addon authors were “piggybacking off of our hard work.” Apparently, as some new people have left active development on World of Warcraft for the new Blizzard MMO, the new replacements just aren’t friendly to opensource modifications, claiming that addons “fundamentally alter the game in unpredictable ways, slowing down development.” 

The most interesting part of this, though, was that Blizzard wants to implement a system like the iPhone app store with some slight differences. One source said “It’s more like the inverse of the iTunes app store, we’ll make the bulk of the money off of addon sales not the developer. The corporate guys think it will be a great way to maximize revenue.” Aparantly the store will include this special tag with the addon which will contain the purchaser’s name, street address, credit card and account information – much like the Apple DRM system. This will be a deterrent to piracy, I guess.

Each addon will have to go through a review just like apps for the iPhone. One of my sources said this was meant to “maintain consistent quality of the addons.” It will also keep them in line with development, eliminating unnecessary components. The main source of this information did indicate that updates would be free, and each app would cost no more than $2.99. They will also provide a free iTunes-like management scheme for the addons, that automates updating and keeps track of your addons. 

In my opinion, this all sounds really neat! I like the idea of centralized Blizzard hosting, and updates for addons so that they all work with the patches. Hopefully this will stop all the author crying about not getting paid (hey, if you’re making like $0.25 on each download, eventually it will add up!) The sources indicated that this feature would go live in a few months, but might take a while to get up and running. I can’t wait!