The CurseForge Official API is Now Live
TL;DR:
- For the players, we now have a standalone Windows client for World of Warcraft. A Linux client was released last week.
- Get our updates in our official roadmap board and our monthly newsletters.
The Road to Releasing The Official CurseForge API
We are excited to announce that the official CurseForge API is now available. Docs can be found here. In October 2020, prompted by community feedback, we explored offering an official well-documented API for CurseForge mods and we addressed three core concerns in a Medium post. The three areas where we needed to find sustainable solutions in order to move forward with the API were:
- Authors’ consent when it comes to third party distribution of their creations
- How to address the impact on Authors’ earnings
- How to lessen the impact on CurseForge’s servers and CDN
We’re excited to be giving back the control of project distribution to the authors through the new API. Authors’ consent and the impact on earnings were solved by releasing a toggle that enables creators to choose whether or not they want to allow distribution of their mods outside of the CurseForge ecosystem.
Downloads originated from 3rd party services rely on CurseForge servers and CDN, incurring substantial costs and bypassing monetization which is used to fuel the Authors Rewards Points system. As a workaround, along with the official API, we created a Terms of Service (TOS) agreement with the goal of providing stabilization and allowing us to scale. The TOS enables essential community projects, like Discord bots, mod managers, updates, news and stats to access the API in order to grow and support gamers.
So far we had a total of 170 approved applications including:
- 62 Mod managers
- 35 Bots
- 23 Analytics tools
- 30 Server related tools
- 9 General modding tools
- 11 Modpack creation tools
Standalone Version of CurseForge App is Available
We take community feedback seriously. Many of the community members voiced their preference for a leaner approach to managing mods. We’ve taken this into consideration and developed a standalone version of the CurseForge app on Windows, based on Electron, which you can download here (be sure to scroll down to “more download options” and click the drop-down on the windows option to see both versions) .
As with the Linux version, it currently supports World of Warcraft only. We plan to keep this version in feature parity with the Overwolf version in the future. Please note, this is fresh from the oven and currently on Alpha.
If you have any questions or feedback about this, please join our Discord and let us know.
We want to thank the community for helping us push this through and improving the CurseForge experience for everyone! The API is, at heart, a service that empowers the community to create more tools and expand the modding workspace. As always, we would love to hear if there are any issues encountered with the new API that require our attention. Please let us know via a support ticket or in our Discord.
