Blizzard Entertainment |
Blizzard Entertainment is a computer game video game developer and video game publisher. Since its release of Warcraft in 1994, it has been one of the most successful game development studios in the world. Its headquarters are based in Irvine, California. The company has a history of largely overshooting release dates. However, many Blizzard fans see this as somewhat of a blessing in disguise, as Blizzard has a reputation for producing classic games that are played for years to come. Blizzard also has a reputation for taking fierce legal action against anyone who reverse engineers their software, copies their game concepts, or publishes third-party server software that is compatible with their games.
=Overview=
Blizzard Entertainment was founded in February, 1991 as Silicon & Synapse by Mike Morhaime, Allen Adham and Frank Pearce. The company developed games like Rock & Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings (published by Interplay Productions). In 1994, the company briefly changed its name to Chaos Studios, before finally settling on Blizzard Entertainment after it was discovered that another company with the Chaos name already existed. That same year, they were acquired by distributor Davidson & Associates for under United States dollar10 million. Shortly thereafter, Blizzard shipped their breakthrough hit Warcraft .
Blizzard has changed hands several times since then: Davidson was acquired by a timeshare company called CUC International in 1996; CUC then merged with a hotel, real-estate, and car-rental franchiser called HFS Corporation to form Cendant Software, in 1997. In 1998 it became apparent that CUC had engaged in accounting fraud for years before the merger; Cendant s stock lost 80% of its value over the next six months in the ensuing widely discussed accounting scandal. The company sold its consumer software operations, including Blizzard, to France publisher Havas in 1998, the same year Havas was purchased by Vivendi. Blizzard is now part of the VU Games group of Vivendi Universal.
In .
Blizzard launched their online gaming service Battle.net in January of 1997 with the release of their action-Computer role-playing game Diablo .
On May 16, 2005, Blizzard announced the .
On August 1, 2005, Blizzard announced the consolidation of Blizzard North into the headquarters in Irvine, California.
=Titles=
= Bnetd =
A group of gamers reverse engineering the network protocol used by Battle.net and Blizzard games, and released a free, GNU General Public Licensed battle.net emulation package called Bnetd. With bnetd, a gamer is not required to use the official battle.net servers to play Blizzard games.
In February of 2002, lawyers retained by Blizzard threatened legal action under the DMCA against the developers of bnetd. Blizzard games are designed to operate online exclusively with a set of Blizzard-controlled servers collectively known as battle.net . Battle.net servers include a CD key check as a means of preventing software piracy.
Despite offers from the bnetd developers to integrate Blizzard s CD key checking system into bnetd, Blizzard claims that the public availability of any such software package facilitates piracy, and moved to have the bnetd project shut down under provisions of the DMCA. As this case is one of the first major test cases for the DMCA, the of Battle.net.
This decision was appealled to the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which also ruled in favor of Blizzard/Vivendi on September 1 2005.
[http://www.eff.org/IP/Emulation/Blizzard_v_bnetd/ Details on the EFF website]
[http://blizzard.com/press/041008.shtml Blizzard s Press Release]
= FreeCraft =
On June 20 2003, Blizzard obtained a cease and desist order against an open source clone of the Warcraft engine called Freecraft . This hobby project had the same gameplay and characters as Warcraft II , but came with different graphics and music. It was written from scratch and no Blizzard code was used.
As well as a similar name, Freecraft enabled gamers to use Warcraft II graphics, provided they had the Warcraft II CD. The programmers of the clone shut down their site without challenge. Soon after that the developers regrouped to continue the work by the name of Stratagus .
= Warden Client =
Blizzard has made use of a special form of software known as the Warden Client in order to detect game cheaters and botters. The warden client opens all currently running processes and windows on a computer and reads data and text strings. Even sensitive programs, such as those that contain credit card numbers (like, for example, Microsoft Excel, or PGP), will be opened and read. However, only Hash_function memory footprints of potentially malicious software are transmitted over the network.
Only with their latest game, World of Warcraft, they download this warden client and run it several times per minute in order to detect software which violates the EULA. As such, the warden client arguably represents one of the first attempts to use spyware to enforce a EULA. Although it is announced in the Terms of Use, and no personally identifiable data is sent, this is a potential act against the Privacy of computer users around the world.
[http://www.wowsharp.net/forums/viewtopic.phpt=7024 Technical description on a hacker forum]
[http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspxfn=blizzard-archive&t=33&p=1&tmp=1#post33 Official Blizzard post regarding the issue]
[http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/legal/termsofuse.html World of Warcraft Terms of Use] (note the section 13.a)
=Trivia=
= See also =
= External links =
*[http://www.blizzard.com Blizzard s website] *[http://www.battle.net Battle.Net website] *[http://www.worldofwarcraft.com World of Warcraft community website] *[http://www.blizzard.com/press/acquisition.shtml Press release announcing their acquiring of Swingin Ape]
== The Bnetd case ==
*[http://www.battle.net/support/emulationfaq.shtml Blizzard s official statement on battle.net emulators] *[http://www.visi.com/~tneu/blizzard.html A rebuttal to Blizzard s official emulation statement] *[http://research.yale.edu/lawmeme/modules.phpname=News&file=article&sid=149 Yale LawMeme s analysis of the case] *[http://articles.filefront.com/The_EFF_Continues_to_Fight_for_BnetD/;321;;;/article.html The EFF Continues to Fight for BnetD]|
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