Antipwn

Slashdot reported on the case of a company running an unauthorised WoW server who got flattened by Blizzard to the tune of 88 million dollars and change. The case was not contested and the judgement boils down to 63K for legal expenses, 3 million as the estimated earnings of the WoW freeshard and the other 85 million is statutory damages. To put that into perspective, that’s about as much money as would be required to build an entirely new game on the scale of World of Warcraft with a team of experienced and motivated veterans.

Freeshards aren’t new of course and neither for that matter is Blizzard’ s itchy legal triggerfinger. When I was working for Dark Age of Camelot, there were many unofficial servers that I was aware of for that game that all changed the game in fundamental ways according to the whims and technical ability of their owners. The usual claim is that the server code is reverse engineered rather than being copied thus there is no copyright infringement, having seen how complex and expansive the code for an AAA MMO is I’m not convinced that this is possible within the timescales that these servers generally begin to pop up. I think there probably is some reverse engineering going on, but I’d be prepared to bet that the first wave of freeshards for a game are accomplished with leaked code. That would be piracy which I am fairly heavily against.

Most of these freehsards of course aren’t making anyone any money Ms Reeves on the other hand netted 3 million dollars or so from her private server which rather changes the terrain a bit and makes it a hard sell to defend her as a figurehead for how code wants to be free.

I was in Leipzig all last week. A crazy time made doubly so by the rapidly approaching launch of the game.

We had an awesome booth and a fantastic crew, Mythic sent a sizeable contingent across too and over the week, we had about 7,500 people play the game on our stand. Pretty awesome!

I got to meet some of my fellow CMs and hang out with some of the coolest people in this industry which is always ace.

Here are my pictures, I’ll go through them over the next day or so to give them titles and descriptions. Have fun browsing!

Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green has an interesting discussion going on at his place based on a post by Scott ‘Lum’ Jennings about PvP games and how to design them. I’ve put my tuppence into the ring which I may expand on here later. In the meantime go, read and comment.

I’d be polishing up my CV about now.

Rumour the first.

Followed swiftly by a press release to the kidneys.

Come on? Did anyone seriously believe there would be a Bioshock MMO?