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FreeCraft Cease and Desisted by Blizzard
mandreiana writes "As of June 20th, FreeCraft is shut down. The development team received a cease and desist order due to the name 'FreeCraft' causing possible confusion with the names StarCraft and WarCraft, and also some of the ideas within the engine were too similar to WarCraft 2. There will be no more updates to this game, and it is no longer available for download." Way to go, Blizzard, now the only competitors to worry about are the ones who can afford lawyers and actually hold competing market share. Of course, not using a *Craft for a game project might have kept it under the radar a while longer.
Perhaps if you spent some of this money buying or donating to Freecraft not only would we have better games, we'd have free games. Free games would hurt Vivendi Universal and Blizzard more than anything else. Free Games that are good would kill them.
Why, exactly, does the purpose of supporting a game/company need to be to hurt and kill another?
Even if you hate them personally, or they (or their parent company, more likely) do nasty things sometimes, admit it- Blizzard makes kickass games that LOTS of people love. Starcraft is 5 years old, and yet there's still around 10,000 people playing it on Battle.net at any given time.
Imagine what could be done? But we first need a way to fund enough games to get millions of people interested. The best way to make these greedy companies pay is to setup a whole open source PC game movement, on a large scale, and let the gamers fund it.
Imagine what could be done? But we first need a way to fund enough games to get millions of people interested. The best way to make these greedy companies pay is to setup a whole open source PC game movement, on a large scale, and let the gamers fund it.
Starcraft Battle Chest: $20
Diablo II: $20 each for the main game and expansion.
Warcraft II: $11.99
Battle.net: Completely free.
Yep, they're sure being greedy alright.
It makes no sense for us to use the outdated old business model for open source products. Its proven that it doesnt work, the transgaming model is proven to work.
So you're saying that games without monthly fees are outdated? Thanks, but no thanks. I have enough monthly fees to pay already.
No, Blizzard was an extremely litigious and scammy company right from the start. I remember an interview in boot magazine (circa 1997, before they were bought by anyone) where people complained that their games uploaded tons of information about their computer to battle.net without their permission. Supposedly, it was a tactic to stop pirates. They later stopped doing it after being criticized by virtually everyone in the gaming community.