Blizzard, who some people mistakenly think "have lost it", when in fact, they have always been greedy arrogant motherfuckers, continues it downward spiral of negative fan-backlash with another oddly colored stool left in stew on the middle of the floor.
Your ‘Warcraft 3: Reforged’ Custom Games All Belong To Blizzard Now
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the launch of Warcraft 3: Reforged has not been a very smooth one. Blizzard has not been the darling studio it once was, thanks in no small part to the recent Hong Kong controversy and, prior to that, its popularizing of loot boxes in modern AAA games.
While there are a number of things upsetting fans at the moment, the most controversial thing about Warcraft 3: Reforged is found in its acceptable use policy.
As PC Gamer pointed out Wednesday, the policy not only gives Blizzard ownership of any custom games made in the game’s editor allowing the company to delete them at will, it also gives Blizzard copyright over those games preventing them from being replicated elsewhere. In other words, if someone were to make Dota in Warcraft 3: Reforged, Blizzard would own the copyright for that custom game, preventing companies like Riot and Valve from creating their own profitable spinoffs.
On the one hand, you can hardly blame Blizzard for wanting to clamp down on that sort of thing. After all, Blizzard created Warcraft 3 and then Valve’s Dota 2 and Riot’s League of Legends went on to become huge successes based on the Warcraft 3 custom game. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?
The problem is that there really wasn’t anything preventing Blizzard from capitalizing on the original DotA (Defense of the Ancients)mod to begin with. If Blizzard had been smart, they would have hired the modders who created DotA to make a AAA sequel and reaped all those juicy profits. DotA had been around for years before Valve hired IceFrog to come create a sequel in the Source engine. At any point in time, Blizzard could have done the very same thing. They chose not to.
Clamping down on creativity in order to protect IP might seem like the smart thing to do for Blizzard, but it ultimately hurts everyone, Blizzard included. Just look at the MOBA market. Out of DotA sprung not only Dota 2, but also League of Legends and plenty others as well. You can’t copyright a game genre. If you could, Blizzard would be in dubious waters with Overwatch, a hero shooter clearly based off of Valve’s Team Fortress 2. Ideas and creativity should be free to share and adapt in a healthy market. It’s great that Blizzard has created tools for modders to use to create their own content, but the ideas that users come up with should not only benefit Blizzard.
If Blizzard had this policy back when Warcraft III originally launched, it’s entirely possible that the modding scene would never have flourished for that game. It’s possible that DotA itself might never have been made. If it had, it’s entirely likely that it would have remained a mod forever and that no sequel would have been created. This would have been a pretty major loss to the gaming community and industry. (I’m personally not a fan of this type of game but there’s no denying the important role these games have played over the past decade).
Blizzard should worry less about its modders creating new user-generated content that they can’t capitalize on, and more about their own dearth of new games. For one of the most valuable studios out there, Blizzard has put out staggeringly few new titles in recent years. Overwatch is years behind us now and Diablo IV is years away. Updates to Hearthstone and World of Warcraft are all fine and good, but the past is the past.
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