For quite a while, World of Warcraft has been a pretty easy game to find private servers for, and the private servers have been quite secure and successful. Lately, however, it appears as if Blizzard is trying to crack down on the owners of these private World of Warcraft servers.
In case you’re not completely familiar with what private World of Warcraft servers are, these are servers that aren’t owned by the actual creator of the game, but are instead owned by anyone who wishes to purchase a server from another source and put the game on it for others to play. The original creator does not profit from the server, however, they do still get the game sale, because players will still need the disc to play the game.
Blizzard obviously is going to try and absorb every penny they can get out of the creation of the World of Warcraft, and therefore is going to do everything in their power to eliminate the threat of the private realms out there. If you didn’t already know, there are easily over 200 private World of Warcraft realms active to date, and they are constantly increasing.
What is Blizzard going to do about this? They clearly don’t want to lose money, even though they already have millions of subscribers all paying 15 dollars per month of playing time. So what do they do? They go and attack the only way players will be able to play without having to give their heart-earned money to Blizzard every month.
Most recently, Blizzard has attempted to attack the biggest private servers out there, with several thousand players on them. Blizzard has been sending a DMCA lawfirm, or “Digital millennium copyright act”, and these lawfirms basically enforced that the private realms are immediately shut down. The servers which have already been affected by the DMCA notice are chaoscrusade, toxic-wow, Ani-wow, wowfusion, wowgasm, burningwow, and wowscape. All of these servers were amongst the biggest, and now players are either completely unable to play, or are constantly searching for the next best private realm.
It’s very possible that some of these players decided to go and purchase the retail version, as well as start paying the monthly fee for the game. However, these players might not even be as satisfied as if they were to be playing the private World of Warcraft servers that they were already playing.
Is it wrong for Blizzard to do this? Well, I think it is, however, under copyright law, this is to be expected. What Blizzard has over all of these gamers is practically a monopoly. Once you play World of Warcraft, you’ll do almost anything to play, even if it requires paying the high sums of money Blizzard now asks for the games, and monthly gaming fees.
I hate the fact that Blizzard can’t just allow people that purchase the retail version of the game to have fun and play on private servers, but whatever they need to do to get more money is what will happen. I suggest playing on a very down-low server, or paying for retail, if you must.