Blizzard Wins $88.5 Large In Lawsuit
By Jason Joseph at August 16, 2010 | 7:33 pm | Print
Blizzard Entertainment, home of the MMO juggernauts that are World Of Warcraft and Starcraft 2, have won a lawsuit against Scapegaming, an online “company” run by an Alyson Reeves. The judgement was a default judgement, meaning that Reeves declined to defend herself, rendering the verdict automatically in favor of Blizzard. Scapegaming had been charging WoW players for items on a private server that were not sanctioned by Blizzard. Considering the company and Reeves have dropped off the face of the earth, it is unlikely that Blizzard will ever see a dime of this money, but their point has certainly been made.
Many people may feel this is another case of the big-bad machine going after the little guy, but I think everyone needs to keep in mind that Blizzard is a company in business to make money. The fact that they have a product that makes them a metric shit-ton of money on a monthly basis does not mean they don’t have a right to protect their product. Every player that signs up for WoW or Starcraft 2 signs a user agreement that basically binds the player to the terms and conditions Blizzard puts forward. While I haven’t read the user agreement myself, I am pretty confident that somewhere in there, it says you can’t create things for the game and sell it for profit.
I completely agree with Blizzard protecting their product. They are completely entitled to every dollar made off the game unless they decide otherwise. That is kind of the way business works. While they may have actually lost more money by pursuing the lawsuit then they actually did through whatever Scapegaming was doing, they have made their message heard and I am sure Blizzard is hopeful this lawsuit will at least serve as a deterrent to similar actions moving forward.