Bot-maker Bossland’s legit game flops, Germany rejects Blizzard’s US court victory and won’t enforce damages

April 17, 2018 11:00 AM

Are you surprised to be hearing about Bossland again? We’re surprised to be reporting on it. The German-based botmaker made headlines for the last few years thanks to ongoing litigation provoked by its sale of cheat, bot, and hack programs for multiple Blizzard games. Blizzard had pursued Bossland across multiple continents in an attempt to shut down the cheat programs, which Blizz argued violated its copyrights and cost it significant amounts of money to fight – money it was therefore not spending on its own games and customers. The drama finally culminated in 2017 with victories for Blizzard in a German Supreme Court ruling and a California federal court case that awarded Blizzard $8.5M in damages.

Though the German courts recently ruled not to enforce the US court’s decision (on the grounds that it considered the minimum statutory damages awarded to be excessive and punitive), Bossland ended sales for almost all of its hacks at the end of last year; as of today, the only ones remaining are for non-Blizzard games, specifically Final Fantasy XIV and Path of Exile, though according to the group’s latest newsletter, there’s a PUBG one tucked on the forums too.

That newsletter is what prompted this piece, as it was sent to us in full by an MOP tipster. It’s… despondent. The hack vendors are lamenting the loss of their audience, income, and communication channels, as well as the poorly received debut of their apparently legitimate game, Epic Car Factory on Steam, which currently sits with “mostly negative” reviews. We’ve tidied up the punctuation and formatting slightly and included it below.

“News in short. Unknownbuddy was changed to work only with Windows 10, which reduces bans a lot. The Hashing service is still not availiable, we will announce when it is working.

New game released by Bossland and Hawker, and no one likes it. Epic Car Factory. Epic Devs – Imagine you spend years in making a game, you released it and no one likes it, while this email was written, the Steam score was at 10 %.

Honorbuddy & Demonbuddy are gone. Bots gone, Game fails. Imagine, you try everything to statisfy the needs of people and you fail. While the bots market is being destroyed by the game publishers, we thought, making own games would give us the freedom of money to be able to compete with game publishers and still have some nice bots for sale, but times change.

Loosing the fight. Even though we beat Blizzard over the $8.6 Million case, as the German court found it not enforceable in Germany, this makes our lives as bot publishers not a step easier. The case in the US – The German decision. We still are in a situation where at least one of our products needs to sell. And this mammoth task was supposed to be done by Epic Car Factory.

Discord Channels deleted. And if that was not enough, recently most of our discord channels where deleted, even though the Discord TOS does not forbid bots channels. Creating a new one for the game, seems like a good idea, even though i suppose it will be always empty.

Conclusions: There is not much to do. With that said, the only thing we can ask you for is, to if you like, grab our game and give it a honest review, no matter if positive or negative, we’d like to see how big our base still is, because we think it is gone. Once Honorbuddy and Demonbuddy where gone, the support from the users was gone.

Yours, Bossland. Have a nice life.”

Wow.

Further reading: