News Blizzard sues private WoW server operator

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2010/08/17/blizzard-sues-private-wow-server-operator/1

 

They must have been insane to think they could get away with it.

 

Uh Oh got your hand caught in the virtual cookie jar. Good for Blizzard!

This is a perfect example of Piracy because "money" was involved on cracked Wow games.

Once Blizzard gets paid will they give their loyal gamers a free month of WOW?

 

I'm not agreeing with this in either way but how did this effect Blizzard since it was run independently from the online version. I understand the loss of income angle but other than that what else have they done wrong?

 

Wait - they're suing them for competing? Doesn't seem very fair to me.

 

if i buy a game for £30 and it has a £5 subscription fee every month i expect at least
6months free

 

Competing using a product they don't own nor have any rights too. Seems fair to me.

Not sure if i fully understand, as i doubt there was 400k players. I tried private servers whilst i was still playing on the real servers. And from my experience they were terrible.

 

from my experience of private servers on other mmo's most of the time companies will look the other way as long as money isnt involved IE the bedroom hosters putting a server up for a couple of mates isnt usually going to attract a swarm of lawyers but in this case a substantial sum of money was being generated

oh and agree with Unknownsock just about every private server ive played on has been awful

 

i wonder how much their server costs were
running a server, with thousands of users, smoothly for three years cant be cheap

must have been a big dent in that $3mil revenue
though not as big as an $80mil payout for copyright breach

 

Forgive me for sounding stupid but where did they even get the server software?

 

I feel no pity for the parazyte. They knew the risk and if they thought they could get away with it...serves 'em right.

 

@ Mr T these things are usually leaked, a mate of mine ended up with a copy of the alpha server code for TBC before it came out and we were exploring all the new zones minus npc's just having a look around

 

Alls fair in love and wow.

I think its very fair that Blizzard should be allowed to protect the game that they've spent all their time and effort on creating. Did this start before or after Activision got involved?

 

My bet is if they didnt charge for the service, blizzard would have probably took it easy on them. lol

 

Are you serious? They are making money off of Blizzard's game. They are not competing they are stealing.

If they developed and published their own game then they would be competing.

 

So, let me get this right:

Blizzard is suing the for (($200*427000)+85.4mil) 170.8 million despite them having a total *turnover* of 3 million.

And everybody thinks that's ok?

Have you stopped to consider how much of the 3mil was actually profit? I would imagine that the costs of hardware + bandwidth + time would eat up most (if not all) of that.

And how is the valuation of $200 per customer fair, when its obvious that Scapegaming were making orders of magnitude less than that per customer. Even Blizzard would have to keep *each one* of those 427000 users for over 3 years to make that kind of money from them.

Whether you take the "ill-gotten gains" or the "lost revenue" approach, the damages awarded are outrageously high.

This reminds me of the morons who claimed that each pirated song was worth thousands of dollars.

EDIT:

That makes it sound like the total amount is $200*427,000 (85.4mil) + 85.4 mil (to a total of 170.8mil. The actual figures are

Still an excessive amount IMO, but not as bad a my earlier calculation.

 

Greetings!

Yep.
As someone already wrote:

 

From the story I can understand the $3 + million based on lst revenue, however I cannot fathom how the $85 million has been calculated. This figures seems extremely excessive given the other figures involved, even if it is for 'statutory damages'.

Its entirely pointless anyway, Blizzard will never see anywhere near $85 million anyway.

 

Correct but how much more impressive does it sound then $3 million revenue + a 50% naughty boy fine. The act of fining the $85million acts a deterrence to others, its much more scary to lose everything then just what you risked in the first place.

 

I was all for blizzard until I read how the sentencing broke down.

I guess it would be nice in a digital age for judges to give more verbose judgements e.g. reasonings and so on, because for the average joe, it just looks like at every turn the big guy ****s the little guy (even if he is absolutely wrong) in the rear.

I just can't see how that was justified.

With the amount of money floating around at the top end, wouldn't be surprised if the judge was under considerable pressure to hand out a ****ing massive fine. Wonder if he's going to some epic loots to say thanks now.

P.s. I should make clear I'm all for making wrong doers pay, but I'm not going to be advocating chopping the hands of off thieves, it's all about being proportionate. But since the judges and high flying executives live in a completely different world to most of us, we are just spectators.

Lets hope it doesn't happen to us if we get caught with our hand in the cookie jar!