Blizzard seeks $8.5M from cheat software company Bossland

March 16, 2017 10:00 AM

It’s all fun and games… until you start selling software to help players cheat, then it’s all lawsuits and court dates.

Blizzard is asking the California district court to pronounce a judgment upon Bossland, the maker of cheat software for World of Warcraft and Overwatch. The game company filed a lawsuit last year against the cheat maker for copyright infringement and unfair competition. Bossland stopped responding to the court, and Blizzard is now asking the court to make a default judgment.

Blizzard claims that Bossland sold over 42,000 hacks in North America, which the studio considers to be worth $8.5 million in damages. “In this case, Blizzard is only seeking the minimum statutory damages of $200 per infringement, for a total of $8,563,600.00,” the studio posted. “While Blizzard would surely be entitled to seek a larger amount, Blizzard seeks only minimum statutory damages. Blizzard does not seek such damages as a ‘punitive’ measure against Bossland or to obtain an unjustified windfall.”

The history between Bossland and Blizzard goes back a few years. In May of 2015, Bossland convinced a German court to deny Blizzard’s request for an injunction, which prompted Blizzard to sue Bossland’s American contractor in a California federal court. That suit was ultimately dismissed, but when said American contractor cooperated with the authorities, Bossland absurdly accused Blizzard of copyright infringement for its acquisition of the Heroes of the Storm StormBuddy bot’s source code. Then in 2016, Blizzard sued Bossland again in a California court over its many hacks, including the Watchover Tyrant for Overwatch, accusing Bossland of “attempting to destroy or irreparably harm that game before it even has had a chance to fully flourish” and pulling in potentially millions of dollars in profit.

This past January, Blizzard actually scored a win against the botmakers in a German Supreme Court ruling, which overturned the earlier lower court rulings to determine that Bossland’s HonorBuddy bot program for World of Warcraft is in fact in violation of anti-competition laws. At the time, Bossland boasted there were an additional five suits lodged against it.