Blizzard is seeking a whopping $8.5 million in copyright damages from a company responsible for creating video game cheats and hacks, stating that they have allowed many users to gain an unfair advantage over regular players.
Blizzard, developer of games such as World of Warcraft and Overwatch, has filed a motion for default judgement against the company Bossland. According to Blizzard, Bossland stopped responding to the game developer’s correspondence, with the Court giving the company a 24-hour ultimatum that it also ignored.
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Bossland has created a number of cheats and hacks that have raised the ire of Blizzard. Around the time of Overwatch‘s launch, the German company promptly debuted an “ESP advantage” that allowed players to see all enemies on the map, along with having their whereabouts pin-pointed on the game’s radar. The company was also responsible for creating World of Warcraft bots such as the Honorbuddy, which would effectively play the game for users in order to quickly level up their characters, obtain resources and more.
An example of one of Bossland’s products.
Several of these bots have been banned since the court case, with Bossland amending its business model in order to accommodate for its legal costs. According to an article from PCGamesN, Bossland amended “lifetime” licenses for WoW, Hearthstone and Diablo 3 bots, forcing players to renew after two years of usage in order to rake in more cash.
According to Blizzard, the prevalence of these cheats has cost the company game sales, accusing Bossland of copyright infringement, unfair competition, and violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision. Bossland admitted to selling 118,939 products to US users since July 2013, with Blizzard estimating that 36% of these products were cheats for its games. This totals to 42,818 copyright infringements, estimated at $200 per infringement, totaling in at $8,563,600.00 in damages.
Bossland has routinely been criticized by gamers for ruining their experience by way of distributing cheats and hacks, with Blizzard games being the most prominent developer targeted by the company as a result of its hugely popular multiplayer games. There’s no saying how much money Blizzard will eventually manage to take from Bossland, but it seems that the company has at least been dissuaded from providing tools allowing players to cheat for the foreseeable future.
(H/T Torrent Freak)
