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Blizzard Going After WoW Related iPhone Apps
An anonymous reader writes "Apparently Blizzard is going after developers making iPhone apps for World of Warcraft (free and otherwise) by giving them cease-and-desist orders. As Mike Schramm says 'Blizzard may be planning to do more with the iPhone,' but 'It would be a real shame if Blizzard legal was simply going after fans who have invested a lot of time and effort into these apps even when there's no clear reason for them to do so.'"
It's interesting that they're doing so around the same time a video for a (rumored, alleged, unconfirmed — take your pick) iPhone client for World of Warcraft has been floating around.
Less focus on this crap, MORE focus on Star Craft II. The fscking game has was announce over two years ago. I'm still pissed off about the cancellation of Ghost. There is enough revenue coming in on WoW now. Please don't forget about your customers who don't give a damn about WoW. Thank you.
Milking WoW for all it's worth is a fine strategy for a company. But there comes a time when you want to play the game and enjoy it but you can't because fan-based stuff gets shut down, bugs, crashes, oh god the bugs and crashes, lag, and general lack of updates make you sit there waiting in Dalaran all day until you are allowed to "have fun".
2007? WoW has twice as many subscribers as it did at the start of 2007.
From Blizzard's point of view, is it really worth going after? If they put out an official iPhone client, a lot of people are going to drop the (at worst) buggy and (at best) unsupported unofficial clients for the latest and greatest Blizzard one. It's worth more to them to keep their customers happy then to be The Source for an iPhone ap that they'll like;y not even break even on developing and maintaining (since clients themselves are usually, what, free?), unless they plan on charging an arm and a leg for it (above and beyond the other arm and leg it costs your for your monthly fees).
Judging from my past experiences with WowArmory.com, I'd hope they let the alternate sites/software stay up. WowArmory seems to break itself on scripting and suffer lag/loading issues over the years. Whenever it acts up, I just use armorylite.com or other sites that take snapshots of the real WowArmory. It's not "cheating" or "hacking server/character data". But it's a lifesaver when I need to lookup info on a character and the official site is sluggish. Same thing can be said for the offical WoW forums. The search function rarely worked in the past. Everyone I talked to also shared the same experience in that their forum software worked poorly. Why is it that people choose 3rd party mods for displaying Raid Frames, quest trackers, and other things that Blizzard assimilated/copied from older mods? Even though I have to update 3rd party mods myself, they do the job better.
40-Year Old Virgin: "But officer!! I was two hits from leveling up my Wizard and I didn't have time to stop for the light!!!"
Blizzard has said that the licence has been moved from The9.com to NetEase.com. I don't know how they handle character migration across servers but the game won't disappear completely.
Read about trademark laws.
Read about nominative use. If you have developed a product or service Y that is compatible with another company's product or service X, it's OK to say Y is compatible with X as long as you don't imply that the maker of X endorses Y.
In order to maintain their rights on the WoW & Warcraft trademarks, they have to enforce it. That generally leads to Cease & Desist letters.
Not always; it could be a proceed and permit letter.
It's the old story of open approach vs closed one.
I like WoW because it allows me to play it the way I want, but other players hate me because thanks to this I have an advantage over them.
WoW is trying to balance this, but in the pursuit of making more people happy they are limiting others.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Does it matter? I thought all Chinese players already moved to EU/US servers to gold farm.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Being goth is still relevant? Kind of a stupid statement since it is a game that has had continual development over those years.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Some of my friends who still play admit to spending more time playing Peggle or Bejeweled inside of WoW than actually farming or PVP.
Karatechop's story was interesting.
My favorite e-drama was with Nihilum/SK-Gaming:
http://serbandsteel.dingblog.com/?loadblog=524&cm=
Karatechop == Banned for knowingly and repeatedly cheating. Not that interesting IMO.
Not actually true, they did this to the very first app that came out (it was just a simple app for fetching character info off the armory) and it was free -- that was some time ago. I remember the app's author posted that he was asked by Blizzard to remove the app (not sure if they actually used a C&D letter) and he complied.
Hi. What's your hobby? It sounds like a fucking waste of time to me though, just a preemptive FYI. (No, I don't play WoW, I quit, but I don't use my old WoW time being productive, I entertain myself with other also useless things).
Is the Apple silo so vaulted for the iphone? Isn't this what the Android model can help avoid? Sure, you won't get the program in the marketplace, but you sure can host it in another country where the C&D doesn't mean much and keep on innovating. Umm... Unless Blizzard forgot, these are people who are making free publicity and advertising for their pay application. Wouldn't you want to "integrate" the app into someone's life to ensure that when the time comes to cut the budget in the household, that is one of the last things to be cut? I would figure a better way to do it would be to say "listen, thanks for the free pub... We want it to look a little more like things, OK?" Do that, you get good will AND you get a more readily integrated subscriber who is less reticent about removing the Blizzard line item from his/her budget.
One Token Ring to Rule them All, One Search Engine to Find Them, One WAN to bring them in, and TCP/IP Bind them...
Before I quit I was playing almost exclusively for mount collection... Then they took two reward mounts out with the last patch so I quit. :-/
Well, you seem to forget that this is actually normal for Blizzard. They'll tweak the game until they consider it to be right, and that sometimes means 2 years past the planned release date.
I'm not even saying this as a bad thing. In the end, that's their main secret sauce. They're the guys who would agree with you that balancing the races and the game mechanics isn't just details, it's the game. Most others would (be bullied by the publisher to) shove it out the door now, and maybe patch it later.
I mean, think about it. What did WoW have that, say, EQ2 didn't have, as both launched in the same year? I can't think of anything major that Blizzard invented, other than the "rested xp" bar, and we could debate all evening if that counts as "major". Blizzard simply took the time to polish the turd, so to speak, and it paid off.
What set their RTS apart, since you mention Starcraft II? Make no mistake, Starcraft came out in an age where there were about as many "me too" RTS produced by everyone and their grandma, as there were "me too" FPS. There was everything out there, from fantasy to SF to historical. Again, it seems to me like all Blizzard did was actually give it a good long tweak and polish before it got released.
So I wouldn't be praying for them to do a rush job this time. If they feel that it still needs more tweaking, so be it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
IP is still a blanket evil with the small exception of company names and logos (a la trademark).
Say I write an app that does not use or distrubute any Blizzard content, nor does it use their API. The app does not use "Warcraft" in the name. It might store, calculate or reproduce information related to Wow that I have originated or collected solely from non-Blizzard sources that have already OK'd my use of it.
I cannot see how Blizzard can have any legal case to stop me selling my app.
That would be like McDonalds having a legal right to prevent me from selling my own original hamburger recipe, even though I have never worked for, or signed anything with, McDonalds.
The day Blizzard dies (all companies eventually fall to newer, better competitors) I will not shed a tear. It's sad to me that such an arrogant, litigation happy, customer-bashing company has succeeded as well as it has to this point.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When the title is "Warcraft Arena Calculator"
This implies that the maker endorses it.
In which case, the proper response is "cease and desist using our trademark in a confusing manner", not "cease and desist developing your product under any name".
why is blizzard so cold? With all the open source development whether it be googles sketchup, or microsoft xna free developing resources, open source is def the way of the future. But blizzard is obviously retarted like many big companies today. can someone please slap me cause im going crazy with all these big companies doing what they want?
Blizzard does not have a clue about customer relations. I play Eve Online and there are a number of player developed applications such as Evemon and Eve Fitting Tool which not only have the name of the game in their title but make use of an API system developed by CCP that allows these apps to connect to the servers and get information such as currently training skills, assets and their locations, the status of research or ship, module or ammunition building jobs, etc. CCP also release a database which contains information on all the ships, modules, etc so that people that create the player made apps can have the correct information for the modules and ships, such as their bonuses, etc. The whole idea is to work with your player base rather than be a bunch of whiny bitches like Blizzard. Players will always try to create apps based around their MMOG. Blizzard should wake up to this and work with their player base (although I bet most of the "players" are nothing more than gold farmers), instead of against it.
The first person that manages to multi-box 5 iPhones running Shamans through arenas wins at WoW.
"Blizzard should wake up to this and work with their player base (although I bet most of the "players" are nothing more than gold farmers), instead of against it."
Oh yeah, that makes perfect sense. There's a small base of legitimate players paying the salaries of millions of gold farmers.
Let's guess 30 cents an hour per worker (just a guess), and the account is used 24 hours a day in shifts, so... $7.20 in wages per day. I'll assume by "most", that you meant 75% of the players are gold farmers, and by players I assume you mean accounts.
75% of 11 million is 8,250,000 accounts. So daily wages will run you $59,400,000.
That means that the remaining 2,750,000 accounts have to pay $21.60 to the gold farmers each and every day.
Naturally that can't be true. So you begin to peel back your variables until you admit the math doesn't work.
Most of the players cannot be gold farmers. Most of them have to be legitimate players.
So how is an iPhone app different from any one of the 3rd party Armory/Talent replacements? Hell, wowhead.com has had a talent calculator up for years, and it's *still* better than the official Blizzard one, and I haven't heard anything about them getting C&D'd. ArmoryLite.com has likewise had characters' profiles cached and displayed for ages.
Perhaps not surprising given the size of the company now, but Blizzard's legal team is getting as inconsistent and stupid as Microsoft's.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
I find it really sad, I would have liked to have tried glidder, it would have made my life simpler, but now I can't even get an Iphone app that at least let's me know when my AH item has been sold...or when I should log on, before I lose that email someone sent me a while back....sheesh.
I think it's a means by Blizzard to make sure the general public isn't making money off of any of their products, especially WoW. I don't agree however with their decision and I believe that fans making iPhone apps would only increase the overall popularity of WoW or other Blizzard games.
The difference is that Blizzard doesn't make money off having a talent calculator on their site. Yes, it's useful, but ultimatley if you use their's or someone else's, they don't care.
On the other hand, if they release an iPhone app (which it seems they will), any competition will lose them money because that's not money going into their pocket from app sales.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
Good point, actually - sort of like J.K. Rowling and her endorsement of, then subsequent legal action against, that online Harry Potter encyclopaedia. It's cool to offer a free service that complements a popular product, but if it's something they could get around to charging for then they don't like it quite so much.
Also, as someone pointed out below, it may be more to do with the fact that the app actually (I believe) had the name 'Warcraft' in the title, which is a clear copyright issue. Blizzard's always been very proactive about protecting its trademarks.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.