I like what your model is attempting, however the problem is one of starvation. If this happened, then it would be in any addon-maker's advantage to make their addon take up as much of of the share as possible. You'd start to see mega-addons (why download and separately maintain Blork, Flaffle and Gabing when you can use my addon that gives you all of them at once!) and poorly-made mashups that would try to gobble up more and more of the market. I think in general this would make for a lot of very bad addons.

This could also choke out new people. Since they just don't have the name visibility and current capital intake that a big-name addon would have, they would be discouraged against putting any real time into their addon to make it good, since they're competing with people have have possibly millions of subscribers and substantial cash coming in to support development.

Not to mention the fact that addons could become big money overnight. Even a thin slice of 11 million WoW subscriptions is some huge cash if all you have to do is keep a popular addon updated. People would immediately try to obfuscate their addon code and a lot of helpful mod sites would likely close their doors. Since there would be actual money on the line, fewer people would be likely hand out coding tips, especially those people with the best addons, who arguably are the ones that know the best coding practices.


I like the spirit in which your idea came about, but I think offering actual money paid from WoW user subscriptions based on popularity may be a very bad thing to do for the addon community. However, please do keep making suggestions, we may just come up with something.