This petition is started on behalf of CAU, a group of mod & modpack authors, which includes both big studios and independent authors, with billions of accumulated downloads. We do not represent the whole community, but are giving our point of view.

Most popular modpacks are a part of this CAU, namely MC Eternal, DeceasedCraft, Prominence II, Better MC, RLCraft / RLCraft Dregora, Beyond Depth, Soulrend, and a lot more.

We're asking for the community to help us reach a petition to CurseForge, as their new feature can potentially end many modpack studios, as many of those have employees to pay to.

Disclaimer: We do not mean to antagonize CurseForge on this, we know companies must have profits, but we are being directly struck with this, as it affects many studios' income. We think that it is okay for companies to seek to have more profit, but in the case of CurseForge, when that profit is at the cost of the money of other creators, we don't think it's a good idea. We want a civil change so we don't lose our revenue.

What happened?

Curseforge introduced a new feature that lets people buy their own server through their launcher, which promises to give "20% of revenue" to Creators. However this is not the entire story, as the 20% is not gross but the net revenue they make. Normal hosting partnerships offer much higher percentages based on gross revenue, meaning no hidden costs and actual transparency of what's being paid out to modders.  

In addition, that revenue is also split up between Modpack Devs and Mod devs, at a 75%/25% split, meaning that the split plus the commission coming from net revenue make the amounts be extremely small, fractions of a cent per server in the case of mods in big modpacks, adding little to no value at the expense of overshadowing current affiliates that modpacks drive traffic to, essentially stealing their traffic, giving the authors a very low percentage while CurseForge takes the bigger cut.

Mod creators will thus gain less than a penny for every server bought, and many Modpack Developers have way better deals with their own providers (With some defaults being up to 65%).

Many Modpack Devs and Studios make Modpack Development their living off the affiliate money they make from their partnered server banners. Losing out on a large percentage of this money will put many Studios and Devs at risk of losing most of their current income. and we think a platform that is meant to support their creators shouldn't play with their money, considering many people live off this, so it could ruin lives.

Why should you care?

When the Modpack Developers revenue drops, this means they won’t be able to update as frequently, have bigger updates as often, or even drop in quality. Many Modpacks will be forced to maximize their Revenue by removing mods, or making their own to even stay afloat, while they're still losing on most of their revenue.

CurseForge should have never released this addition without telling the community and seeking a conversation first. This entire situation could have been avoided if the people affected by it would have had a say in it.

What we're asking:

Our petition is simple: An opt-out feature and transparency.

For the opt-out, a similar feature has existed for ages, where mod authors are able to toggle if their Mod is allowed on 3rd-party launchers such Prism, ATlauncher, as those launchers do not generate any ad revenue. This opt-out would allow modpack creators that already have much higher rates to continue with their own hosting providers, while allowing the CurseForge Servers feature to exist for modpacks that either don't have a current affiliate or that want to support that feature.

As for transparency, we want transparency with revenue. Whilst competitors are already fully transparent, Curseforge lacks any info about their Revenue since 2023. We would love to see info on revenue be transparent once again. We get that some parts of Curseforge are none of our business, but when it comes to the revenue they give to creators, there is no need to not continue to be transparent, as they were before.