

World of StarCraft modder shut down, pleads for Blizzard approval - abraham
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/01/world-of-starcraft-modder-shut-down-pleads-for-blizzard-approval.ars

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mcantor
The game-maker's attitude really frustrates me. I understand that creating
something in an existing universe that you enjoy is very gratifying and gives
you instant exposure and fame in the fan community. But for chrissake people,
just take 20 minutes and come up with your own intellectual property! If your
game is really worth playing, it will stand on its own even if Samus and
Raynor and Mario and Sonic are nowhere to be found.

Look at one of the most popular indy platformers ever created: Cave Story. I
mean, it's called Cave Story! It's about a guy on a floating island, and his
nemeses are a doctor in a funny hat and a _bar of soap with eyes_! The
developer himself has explained that he came up with the entire plot during a
commercial break of a Nip/Tuck re-run. It's not hard, and the game still
contains _dozens_ of homages to its predecessors like Metroid and Castlevania.
In fact, if you Google "metroid castlevania indy game", Cave Story is on the
_first page_. How's that for fan exposure? Not only has this guy created a
game in the spirit of his favorites, and gained the respect and adoration of
the existing fanbase, but he is also conveniently _invulnerable to cease and
desists_.

Quit yer bitchin'!

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zarify
You make it sound like they're making their own game and ripping off the
Blizzard characters/mythos/etc, rather than using Blizzard's own content
creation tools which they release in order to promote modding...

What are they going to do, give you modding tools and then tell you you're
only allowed to use them completely out of context of the game they came with?

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mcantor
That's a good point. Blizzard is kind of feeding with one hand and slapping
with the other in that respect.

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ztan
For those who are interested, here's another copy of the removed video. Not
sure how long it will stay up though.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roIOpHq0vUc>

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Aaronontheweb
Why on earth would Blizzard-Activision want to stifle this? It makes two of
their biggest franchises look awesome at the same time!

Edit: actually, this could be used as grounds for trademark deprecation down
the road. EA could make a game using Warcraft in the name and use the
existence of this as grounds for a defense if B-A didn't try to defend the WoW
and SC trademarks. They should just license the rights to this guy imho.

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kevin_morrill
I don't think this guy can afford the millions the rights to the franchise are
worth. Blizzard is being completely reasonable here, and I think they've gone
out of their way to encourage fan participation and usage of their material.

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endtime
Can't he just change the name and keep working on it? Surely the name isn't a
big deal.

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ztan
The interesting thing is there are plenty of SC2 maps/mods that use the word
"Warcraft" in their name. There are even ones with "World of Warcraft" in
their name. Yet Bliz only chose to go after this guy. None of the other maps
seems be getting this kind of attention. The practice of Bliz fans making mods
using other Bliz IP has been going on for years. Even the original Starcraft
game had Diablo maps. Something really struck a nerve with this one and showed
up on the Bliz legal dept's radar.

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Joakal
I think you mean Activision. They own Blizzard.

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ztan
No, I do mean Blizzard Entertainment. Besides the fact they have total
independence from Activision in terms of operation. They've also had a long
history of doing stuff like this. They shutdown the open source project
Freecraft in 2003 long before the Activition merger.[1] Yes, Vivendi owned
them at the time. But they have done some equally sketchy things before the
Vivendi acquisition as well.

The original StarCraft client silently snooped through the players hard drive
and sent the gather information back. They later patched out the spyware
"feature" after being hit by a class action suit.[2] I see a lot of fans with
the idea that "Bliz is this innocent goodie good game dev who was forced to do
evil by their giant greedy parent publisher corps". Trust me, I worked for
them. That is absolutely NOT the case. All of these decisions came from with
in.

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratagus>

[2]<http://attrition.org/errata/company/blizzard01.html>

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giberson
Rename to Empire of StarBuilders and move on.

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hybrid11
The trailer looked amazing, I really hope he just changes the mod's name, and
continues with its development.

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ddmf
I'm sure that trademark law specifies that you have to uphold any
infringements to be allowed to fight for the trademark at a later date.

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electromagnetic
This is stupid, they should have just let the guy mod out the game and then
buy it out if the guy is making good headway.

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aik
This is Blizzard we're talking about. Their production values and the amount
of years they spend perfecting their games is incredible. I can't imagine them
doing such a thing.

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electromagnetic
Precisely, it took _forever_ for Starcraft 2 and it's little if any
improvement over Starcraft (No LAN IMO made multiplayer a pointless feature in
the game). The story is a great progression, but so was Brood War and that
came out 6-months after SC1.

One step further and SC2 would have been Duke Nukem forever level of
"perfection" - IE we've all retired and just don't have anywhere better to be.

