Blizzard has been engaging in metaphorical war with German cheat group Bossland for quite some time. Blizzard has made the next move, demanding Bossland to pay them $8.5 million for their cheat programs for Blizzard name-sakes Overwatch, World of Warcraft and Heroes of the Storm. Bossland has been at this for several years now and their response to Blizzard’s demands with crickets.
According to a Torrentfreak report, Blizzard’s lawyers approached with freelancer James “Apoc” Enright with a deal “under which he agreed to hand over the source code for the Stormbuddy software.” Stormbuddy is Bossland’s cheat bot for Heroes of the Storm.
Bossland CEO Zwetan Letschew made the following statement about the lawsuit:
Today Blizzard acted in a manner as shady as possible for a multi-billion-dollar corporation. We were informed that the deal compelled Apoc to submit the entire source code of Stormbuddy, which is actually the intellectual property of Bossland GmbH, to Blizzard.
Letschew says that they have lost sales thanks to Blizzard taking the code for Stormbuddy and plans on taking the popular game developer to court in Germany. Bossland says that they want the code for Stormbuddy back, because Enright was only a freelancer working with the company and did not have permission to give its code out.
Blizzard and Bossland have had legal fights before; they’ve been fighting as early as 2011. Recently, Blizzard had to pay legal fees because of gold-selling in Diablo III.
A Blizzard spokesperson made the following statement to Kotaku:
Bossland’s entire business is based in cheating, and the use of their bots negatively impacts our global player community. That’s why we do not tolerate cheating in our games, and it’s why our players overwhelmingly support that policy. We’ve already won numerous cases against Bossland in Germany (where they’re based), and despite their tactics to delay the ongoing proceedings and the related repercussions, we’re confident that the court system will continue to validate our claims and ultimately stop the distribution of these cheating bots.
We’ll continue to aggressively defend our games and services, within the bounds of the law, in an effort to provide the best possible experience for our players. We want to use this as an opportunity to remind players who might not be aware—using bots, such as those distributed by Bossland, to automate gameplay in our games will result in a loss of access to those games.