Scapegaming remains Blizzard's biggest private-server warning

The Scapegaming case is still the number players quote when Blizzard's private-server enforcement comes up. In Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. v. Alyson Reeves et al., case 2:09-cv-07621, the Central District of California entered final judgment on August 10, 2010 against Alyson Reeves, doing business as Scapegaming.

The amount was enormous: $88,594,539.00. The docket describes the judgment as including $3,052,339 in disgorged profits, $85,478,600 in statutory damages and $63,600 in attorney fees. A later writ entry repeats the same total judgment amount.

Why the number got so large

The case reached default judgment. That matters because a default judgment is not the same procedural posture as a contested trial where both sides fully litigate every factual issue. When a defendant defaults, the court can accept well-pleaded allegations and then determine damages from the plaintiff's evidentiary submissions.

Even with that caveat, the judgment is important because it shows the scale of exposure Blizzard can seek when a private server is framed as a commercial copyright operation. The docket points to disgorged profits, statutory damages and attorney fees. Those categories can stack quickly when the plaintiff argues that many protected works and many infringing acts are involved.

The long shadow over WoW private servers

Scapegaming became a reference point because it translated a private-server dispute into a concrete federal judgment with a dollar figure. For ordinary players, it is easy to reduce the story to the headline amount. For operators, the more useful lesson is the structure: revenue, copied protected material, service operation and failure to defend can combine into a catastrophic result.

The case is old, but it still helps explain why newer Blizzard complaints spend so much space describing payments, launchers, account systems, modified clients and organized teams. Blizzard is not only saying that a server exists. It is building a picture of a business that benefits from World of Warcraft assets and from player access to an unauthorized service.

That is why Scapegaming belongs next to the newer Turtle WoW and Project Ascension disputes. Turtle WoW shows a modern injunction outcome. Project Ascension shows a broad modern complaint. Scapegaming shows the older damages endpoint that still hangs over the whole private-server conversation.