Somehow, I don't think this is going to end well (h/t WSJ blog):
Is a battle brewing in China over “World of Warcraft?”
Last week, the Web site wofchina.com went online, advertising a familiar-sounding game called “World of Fight.”
“WoF (World of Fight), a new game by The9 Ltd., is soon to come,” the page reads. Web site registration data confirm the site is owned by The9.
Casual viewers might be forgiven for mistaking it for the Web site for “World of Warcraft,” the popular U.S.-based online sword-and-monsters game that keeps hundreds of thousands of Chinese players in the country’s Internet cafes awake into the wee hours of the night. Its Web site address is similar to WoW’s wowchina.com. The layout looks similar too.
That set China’s media speculating that The9 is gearing up to get back at World of Warcraft, which it currently hosts in China, though not for much longer. On April 16, Activision Blizzard Inc., which owns World of Warcraft, said it instead awarded Netease, owner of the wowchina.com address, the license to host the game in mainland China for the next three years. The9’s contract officially expires in June.
Classic licensee behavior. I wonder how long WOF has been in the works, and whether develoment predated the falling-out between Blizzard and The9?
This will be fun to watch. There is a huge technical gap of course between operating a game and developing one, even if you are just doing a knockoff. I can't say that I'm impressed so far — "World of Fight"??? That's a horrendous name.
Obviously there are not a lot of details out there on the specific content of this game, but all the same, I'd be shocked if any actual intellectual property issues arise. We can call WoF a knockoff, and it certainly looks like an attempt to run a Dungeons and Dragons style MMORPG in order to attract WoW players away from Activision-Blizzard, but that doesn't necessarily mean that any IP is at play here.
You can't protect a general theme, and there are lots of different ways to put together a WoW style game without going so far as infringing copyright — the sword and sorcery RPG goes back to 1974, and there have been countless imitators, both in print and online, since the original Gygax (may he rest in peace) and Arneson game. Without an IP right at issue here, I think this will end up being a pure business fight.
On the other hand, there is one other thing that occurs to me. If I was licensing something like WoW to an operator in China, I would certainly want a non-compete, albeit a narrow one, so that this sort of thing would not happen immediately after the license was terminated. I wonder what happened in this situation? Maybe if we're lucky, there will be a fun series of lawsuits based on the license agreement — that would be cool.
Tags: China Law, China News, Intellectual Property, Activision-Blizzard, online games, The9, world of warcraft
© Stan for China Hearsay, 2009. |
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