If you’ve ever downloaded a Minecraft mod, then you’ve undoubtedly heard of CurseForge. For years, they’ve had a near monopoly on mod distribution. With other websites being plagued with theft, fake mods and malware, CurseForge was basically the only legitimate option. But, as with any company that doesn’t have much competition, they started treating their Creators terribly, causing some of them to leave. And that’s exactly what’s going on with CurseForge right now, as some its most important mod makers have now left the website, and more creators will likely soon follow. The most recent ones being Mod Menu, Iris, and Sodium. Now if you haven’t heard of Sodium, it’s basically optifine on crack. It’s no secret that Minecraft Java edition has performance issues, particularly with low framerate, even on high end computers. And Sodium fixes that by doubling your FPS. It’s the backbone that makes so many other things possible, like extremely high render Distances, ridiculous terrain generation, shaders, massive modpacks, and custom 3D models. Without sodium, these things would make your game run like a slideshow. And CurseForge’s actions have been harming these very important mods.On 15th April, the iris shaders Twitter account tweeted the following. “Starting with Minecraft 1.20, Iris and Sodium will no longer be uploaded to CurseForge. Please use Modrinth or our installer.” Modrinth being a relatively new competitor to CurseForge, with many of the same features. And when people asked why the sudden change, Iris posted this bombshell of a screenshot From their discord going into more detail on how CurseForge was treating them. They started by saying this: “CurseForge’s website continues to have massive technical issues when it comes to project management. We’ve been hoping for the longest time that something might improve with the situation, But the new site’s design is catastrophically broken (with even basic edits to the description not working)”. For context, managing and updating mods on CurseForge was already a nightmare, and CurseForge recently updated their website to a new design, which made things even worse. So, it’s no surprise when the mod’s developers get fed up of having to deal with the website’s technical issues, just to release the latest version of their mod. And CurseForge has shown no intention of fixing the problem. They went on to say “The newest development is that they’re now prioritizing modpacks That rip off our mod’s branding in search results, despite our repeated attempts to report the projects.” And for context here, the makers of Sodium have another very important mod called Lithium, which makes Minecraft servers run much smoother. The problem was that some random person decided to upload a modpack that was also called Lithium, and they used the exact same icon so that people would confuse it with the real one. And this fake Lithium always appeared above the real one in search results because it was a modpack. The makers of Lithium tried to report this impersonater, but CurseForge did nothing, and allowed the fake modpack to stay up for several months. They only updated their terms of service to crack down on impersonation after the developers had left. In their next point, they said “One of the biggest reasons we continued to publish on CurseForge was because of their author’s rewards program, which gave us a share of funds from ad revenue on the project page. But over the past few months, the revenue we receive has continued to decline, despite The fact that our monthly downloads have increased steadily month-to-month. So, they’d been putting up with CurseForge because in the past, it had no competitors. So, if Sodium and Iris left, they’d have nowhere else to go. And ultimately, CurseForge was paying them for their hard work, so they just dealt with it. But as they mentioned, “Modrinth has introduced their own rewards program which pays out 100% of the ad revenue generated on an author’s page, and they’re doing so with much less invasive advertisements! Case in point, we’ve waited long enough for the situation to improve, and it hasn’t. We are not interested in continuing to support the CurseForge platform when objectively superior alternatives exist, which respect both authors and users.” So, in summary, with CurseForge cutting their pay at a time when it should’ve been going up, and Modrinth offering much higher pay, without treating mod developers horribly, They decided pull the plug on CurseForge. Modrinth was just a much more enticing option. Now, this announcement only said that they would stop updating their mods on CurseForge. All previous versions of the mods that were already on CurseForge would stay, so that existing modpacks didn’t break. And at the top of each page, they put up a notice saying that any future versions of their mods must be download from Modrinth or Github. However, in response to this, CurseForge deleted Sodium and Iris’s mod pages for encouraging people to use Modrinth instead of CurseForge. With the official pages gone, this left them open for anyone to reupload unofficial copies of these mods. And this was a big security risk, since people could easily put computer viruses inside the mods, and unsuspecting users would unknowingly download these trojans, thinking they were just getting a Minecraft mod. The exact same thing has happened in the past with Optifine, which is also an FPS boosting mod. There were many fake optifine websites that deliberately made it difficult to find the real ones, so they could distribute malware. And literally as I was editing this part of the video, CurseForge had a security problem Where someone created a bunch of CurseForge accounts to distribute malware, and an account belonging to Luna Pixel Studios was also compromised to spread viruses. So, the risk of Sodium and Iris being used for these malicious purposes too is very real. Now, in fairness to CurseForge, and, Iris and Sodium were published under the LGPL v3 license, which fully allows people to redistribute your code and even make money from it, as long as they fulfil some very simple license terms. CurseForge wasn’t legally obligated to take down unofficial copies of the mods, and according To the iris twitter, they only ever do stuff in favour of mod developers when legal stuff is involved. However, the potential security risk CurseForge had created meant they needed to do something, so they did eventually reverse their decision. The old versions of Sodium and Iris are now back on CurseForge. But once again, it just goes to show how little CurseForge cares about the modders who make their website possible, and how much it backlash it takes to get them to do anything. Eventually, on the 20th of April, Iris tweeted that CurseForge had listened to their complaints About plagiarism and explicitly banned reuploads of other people’s work. But Iris maintained that they would not be returning to CurseForge. While this policy change was a very good step in the right direction, it only addressed 1 of the many issues that had been brought up. And this definitely isn’t the first time that CurseForge has pulled some awful business practices. In the past, they had something called an API, which allowed people to easily install modpacks directly from their website into any 3rd party launcher, which was great! It massively streamlined the process of getting modpacks working, so you could simply just play with your friends, without hassling over individually downloading every single mod, sorting out config files, and troubleshooting incompatible mods. However, CurseForge didn’t like people using other launchers like MultiMC ATLauncher, or Prism. So, in 2021, they locked down their API, greatly limiting what people could do with it. They did this to force people use the official CurseForge App, which is in many ways inferior to other 3rd party launchers. And this anti-competitive decision alienated a sizeable portion of the modpack player base, All in the interest of using the CurseForge App to show them more ads. Now obviously, CurseForge is a large business. Their primary job is to make money, so no, it’s not surprising that they’d act like this. However, that doesn’t make it any less dubious or scummy. Now, I shouldn’t have to say this, but I’ll do it anyway. Please do NOT use this video to spread hate towards CurseForge, or the mod developers who want to stay on CurseForge for that matter. Instead, use this video to spread positivity towards the Sodium, Iris and Mod Menu developers, As the work they do for this game is incredible. And also use it to spread positivity towards Modrinth, which is treating them much better, and as a platform, they’re just much more transparent with the community in general. They’re actually working on their own 3rd party Minecraft launcher right now, with far Superior functionality to the CurseForge App. You can help them test out their new launcher right now by joining their discord, which I will link in the description. All you have to do is sign up to be a tester and download the launcher. However, I should warn you, their launcher is still in very early development and not super polished yet, so you should expect bugs and janky behaviour, which you can report to the developers. They also have a Twitter and a public roadmap that you can follow for updates, both of which Will also be linked in the description. This isn’t sponsored or anything, I just want to let more people know about Modrinth, and I want to help Sodium, Iris and Mod Menu have a smooth transition over to Modrinth. Competition is good and CurseForge hasn’t had any for way too long now. Video Information
This video, titled ‘Minecraft’s Most Important Mod Is In DANGER’, was uploaded by Purplers on 2023-06-08 19:05:29. It has garnered 504279 views and 25566 likes. The duration of the video is 00:08:12 or 492 seconds.
Modrinth Twitter: https://twitter.com/modrinth Modrinth Roadmap: https://modrinth.notion.site/Modrinth-Public-Roadmap-fd5eb23e2f87475cb8637993b220f121 I removed the link to the Modrinth Discord at the request of some of its members, as the massive influx of people joining was causing chaos in the server
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