[RugnirViking]

are you aware that people do regularly run private servers of world of warcraft? It might pose problems for their monetisation model, but nobody says they have to release the server code on launch day, just that it should be released eventually, before they shut everything down. Though note that games like TF2 are famous for pioneering loot boxes etc yet have large cultures of private server hosts.

Similarly, counter strike was famous for having a thriving community of private servers before they released cs:go

[aurareturn]

I'm aware. So you're proposing that Blizzard should legally allow alternative servers to their own? That doesn't seem like a good idea.

I get what problem you're trying to solve. But it's honestly a much more difficult problem than you think it is. It's not as simple as just allow others to run servers.

[skotobaza]

> you're proposing that Blizzard should legally allow alternative servers to their own?

Nobody is proposing that. Subscription based games are not the covered by SKG and never were. Even if WoW was not subscription based, it would still be required to do something only when Blizzard decides that they don't want to keep WoW online anymore. Not before that. Nobody asks to voluntarily allow competing servers.

[RugnirViking]

it's really not. Thousands of game companies have already done this for decades. As I said, theres no need for blizzard to allow competing servers, this is about what happens after they don't want to run or pay for their own official server. The game just needs to be built such that they can release the server source (or even just a built image) at that point