Blizzard Won't Stop World of StarCraft Mod

On Wednesday we discussed news of an impressive-looking mod for StarCraft II that transformed the game into a WoW lookalike, which quickly drew a copyright infringement warning from Activision Blizzard. The company has now released an official statement green-lighting the mod for continued development. "'It was never our intention to stop development on the mod or discourage the community from expressing their creativity through the StarCraft II editor,' Blizzard said in a statement. 'As always, we actively encourage development of custom maps and mods for StarCraft II, as we've done with our strategy games in the past.' Blizzard went on the say that it's looking forward to seeing development of the mod continue, and that it has invited Winzen to the company's campus to meet the game's development team."

So basically...

[Kokuyo]

Blizzard first gets you intimidated by their figurative muscle, before the Don walks up to you, making you an offer you can't refuse?

Re:So basically...

[MartijnL]

Doing your due diligence as an attorney could also mean backchecking this with Blizzard first and *then* firing off the C&D if it is still wanted. I'm sure Legal would have the means to check this quickly with someone like Pardo or Metzen or even Morhaime.

Re:Bad strategy

[thesandtiger]

Except it's cheaper and possibly even better in the long run for their reputation to do things the quick and easy way and then fix their mistakes.

Fire out the C&D letters without spending time & money to investigate - cheap. If one of the C&Ds generates a bit of bad PR, THEN quickly move to respond, showing that you listen, can admit mistakes, and fix 'em. Look at this thread - everyone's pointing out that it was probably the legal department that screwed up and giving kudos to Blizzard's dev team for making things good. Overall that's a huge net win for the entire organization: the lawyers look bad (who cares?) while the people who make the content look great.