I am a long time player of WC3 and I know it may be lame, but my by far favorite game is wintermaul in the custom games section.
What happens after WC3 inevitably fades to dust? Can the custom games not be taken out of WC3 and offered independently? Is it reliant on the engine in use?
I only ask becauase even after all of these years, i still find myself wanting to play wintermaul every single day lol.
Once Blizzard shuts down the Warcraft III servers, the way to play the game at that point will be to buy a third party CD of the game and put it into a computer. I would estimate this might happen around 2025 or 2030.
Some years later – and this might be a while but I don’t know, so let’s put it at 2060 – there will be a time when Microsoft updates the Windows Operating System to run on some new kind of computer chip that is not backwards compatible with the Intel x86 instruction set. You might not know what that means, but essentially even if it takes 100 years at some point the world will stop making computers that would be capable of executing the code that is stored on a Warcraft III CD.
Some day, although I couldn’t say when, new computers will be blocked from running old programs. We already see this in the Macintosh world; as far as I know, no Macintosh computer for sale today is capable of playing the Warcraft III game in the form that the old “Mac Warcraft III CDs” were stored.
At that point, either:
You seem to be interested in the worst case, so let’s assume the #2 possible future happens above. In that case, on some kind of future computer that can’t run present day programs, someone will probably make an emulator for Intel x86 programs because we have so many. At that point, you would be able to play Wintermaul on the emulator, but it will be really laggy. Also, keep in mind that all of this is only single player. Multiplayer would most likely die when Blizzard shuts down the servers in the 2030s, unless you are OK with pirate or hacky unofficial servers. The unofficial servers will most likely continue to exist, but some users might choose not to use them, for obvious reasons.
So, that is what I expect will happen “after WC3 inevitably fades to dust”, and even in the worst case, you can still work around the problem with an emulator.
As for your other question, “Can the custom games not be taken out of WC3 and offered independently?” the answer is no to you, but yes to Blizzard. Blizzard could take out the game and offer it independently, but per the License Agreement, you are probably prohibited from doing that.
Sorry, true, I was referring to ActiBliz King corporation that exists in 2022 onwards.
Third party mods already exist to play the game on other servers, even if Activision went away tomorrow, things like this would allow you to continue to play them.
My question is: The original Wintermaul map was created before the update to the EULA. Does this mean that maps created before the intellectual property ownership clause in the new EULA can be spun-off ala DOTA and be their own game entirely?
I guess so, since laws don’t usually work backwards (unless they apply to politicians and other people with money)
The old EULA is basically the same, and also says that it can update whenever Blizzard wants to a new version and you agree to that version too. Or at least, I’m pretty sure it does. I think almost all the legal documents do that. [Edit: It may be less clear, such as if the old EULA from 2002 says that you ALSO agree to the Battle.net TOS, and the Battle.net TOS says it can be upgraded at any time by Blizzard, but in a roundabout way you probably end up agreeing to whatever Blizzard wants.]
It was basically never allowed for you to publish a game called Wintermaul that was a standalone, exact replica of the map. However, if you look at Dota 2 and others, it has pretty much always been legal to make your own game that isn’t exactly the same as some Wc3 map.
This is a pretty ridiculous distinction and its not worth worrying about. If you make a video game, DON’T put trademarked Blizzard characters like Arthas or Illidan into your video game, and you’ll probably be fine. Obviously there are some stupid chinese mobile games with “Reject Prince” and “Demon Blade Blindfold Man” or whatever that I have seen pictures of, and I think there is an obvious line you can cross if you WANT to get sued.
But there would be no reason to do that if you were making a tower defense video game. Unless if you WANTED to get sued.
This is why they could not use taurens as heros and they had to change them all.
The reality is Blizzard always had a right to custom content created with its tools, people are misrepresenting the EULA changes to suggest that this is something new, when in fact it isn’t. The only thing that’s really different now is that Blizzard stores copies of played custom maps on its servers, and thus it has the power to ban or block maps for having inappropriate content or whatever.
It’s also true what everyone else said that when you use the software, you acknowledge the nature of the agreement between you and the company can be changed at any time, and continuing to use the software after such a change occurs means you agree to the changes.