Most of what gets called a new format in online play is an old game under a new permission. Blizzard’s Hardcore realms gave World of Warcraft Classic characters a single life in 2023, and its 20th Anniversary realms put players on fresh servers with new economies the following year. Both ran the original game. What changed was the rulebook, and what mattered was who had the right to write it.
That second part matters more than it looks. A private server, an official classic realm, a sweepstakes casino, a cloud library and a licensed fan server each rest on a different permission. The permission decides who can change the rules and who can switch the world off, and the five answers sit further apart than the games on the screen suggest.
The rules players click through became the case against emulators
A private server has no permission at all, and the law around it took shape early. In the bnetd case, a group the court described as “non-profit volunteer game hobbyists, programmers, and other individuals” built an emulator of Battle.net, Blizzard’s online service, so owners of Blizzard games could use their multiplayer features without connecting to it.
Battle.net’s terms of use banned emulating its protocols. In 2005 the federal appeals court for the Eighth Circuit held that the developers had accepted limits on reverse engineering when they agreed to those terms and the game’s license. It found they had broken the anti-circumvention rules in federal copyright law and upheld the judgment for Blizzard.
So the agreement players click through had become the case against the servers players build. In April 2016 the same pressure arrived as a letter. The team behind Nostalrius, which Polygon called one of World of Warcraft’s largest private servers, said lawyers acting for Blizzard had served formal notice and were preparing to take the team and its hosting company, OVH, to court. It closed days later, with 800,000 registered accounts by its developers’ count.
Turtle WoW drew a lawsuit instead. Blizzard sued in federal court in August 2025, alleging that Turtle WoW ran emulated servers for specially modified copies of the game and raised money through payments it called “donations.” The complaint also took aim at a rebuilt version billed as Turtle WoW 2.0. Those are allegations, and Blizzard later reported a settlement.
The judgments are firmer ground. On April 15, 2026, the court entered consent judgments barring two defendants, one of them a Hong Kong company, from developing or running any private or emulated server for a Blizzard game, Turtle WoW included, and from soliciting donations for that work.
On official classic realms, Blizzard writes the deadlines
Blizzard’s answer to the demand behind those servers came from inside its own license. Weeks after Nostalrius closed, the game’s executive producer, J. Allen Brack, wrote that the company had explored running classic servers, and World of Warcraft Classic launched in 2019. Blizzard’s complaint against Turtle WoW spells out the condition attached: to play, a player needs a licensed copy of the game client and an active account.
That license is what lets the publisher rewrite the game’s rules on its own servers. The Hardcore realms made death permanent, and Blizzard’s launch note told players who died to create a new character and try again. Season of Discovery, launched late in 2023, started everyone on new characters with rune abilities the original game never had, under a level cap of 25 that Blizzard planned to raise over time.
The fresh Anniversary realms showed the publisher’s calendar at work. Blizzard opened them in 2024 and kept their first raids shut for a few weeks after launch. Its fresh Hardcore realms added a Self-Found option that cut a character off from trading, most mail and the auction house. In early 2026 the company moved all but the Hardcore realms on to The Burning Crusade. Each character on those realms had to advance or transfer to a Classic Era realm, and the free transfer window closed on January 12, 2026. Characters left in place went on to the expansion.
Jagex built the same kind of format earlier. Old School RuneScape launched in 2013 from a 2007 snapshot of the game, and Jagex says major changes to it need player approval by vote. Official formats can be generous with players, then. They still run on the owner’s calendar.
Sweepstakes casinos built their format on promotional law
Sweepstakes casinos took another route to permission. They offer casino-style games online without a state casino license and rest instead on the law of promotional sweepstakes. A player gets two currencies: one sold for play that never converts into a prize, and a second that can’t be bought, arriving as a daily bonus, a giveaway, an extra with a coin pack or a mail-in request, which the operator’s rules let a player redeem for prizes.
That split is what the format’s claim to permission rests on, and each state decides for itself whether the claim holds. The question it weighs is whether selling one coin while giving the other away really separates payment from the chance to win. For the groundwork behind that question, Legal Sports Report’s sweepstakes casino analysis explains which of a lottery’s three elements, prize, chance and consideration, the model is built to remove, and how the format compares with a real-money online casino.
Tennessee answered on May 22, 2026, when Public Chapter 1117 was signed and took effect the same day. Its preamble describes sites that “utilize a promotional sweepstakes model,” and its definition of an online sweepstakes game covers play with a coin “received for free with the purchase of another type of currency.” The law makes operating, conducting or commercially promoting such games unlawful and reaches anyone who supports or facilitates them.
Tennessee picked consumer law for the job. A violation counts as an unfair or deceptive practice under its Consumer Protection Act of 1977, so a format that rested on promotional law got its answer from consumer-protection law. Tennessee wasn’t alone, either: Maine and Louisiana each passed laws in 2026 that reach the same dual-currency games.
Beyond those three, each state’s position is its own, and the positions keep shifting. The lists of excluded states in operators’ own rules record business decisions; they aren’t rulings on any state’s law. Real-money and sweepstakes casinos alike are adult products: Michigan’s online gaming law sets the floor for licensed play at 21, and sweepstakes operators write their own minimum ages into their rules.
Buying a game didn’t include the right to stream it
Cloud play looks like the most technical format on this list, yet its limits turned out to be contractual. Nvidia’s GeForce Now left beta in February 2020 with a simple pitch: stream games you already own from stores such as Steam. A week later Nvidia announced it was losing 20 Activision Blizzard games, and it later blamed a “misunderstanding” over permissions.
Then the service lost most of Bethesda’s catalog. The head of GeForce Now wrote that publishers “maintain control over their content and decide whether the game you purchase includes streaming on GeForce Now.” The Long Dark’s game director pulled that game next, writing that “Nvidia didn’t ask for our permission to put the game on the platform.”
Cross-play needed the same kind of permission from the platform side. In 2018 Sony opened a Fortnite beta that let PlayStation 4 players share matches and progress with players on Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. Its announcement called the move “a major policy change” for the company and said it followed a “thorough analysis of the business mechanics required.”
Regulators can move those rights, too. When Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority cleared Microsoft’s restructured purchase of Activision Blizzard in October 2023, the deal handed Ubisoft the cloud streaming rights outside the European Economic Area for Activision’s PC and console games, including everything produced over the next 15 years, to offer under any business model, multigame subscriptions included.
The regulator named World of Warcraft among the games involved. The right to stream the world Blizzard defends in court therefore sits, across much of the globe, with another company.
Permission can come late, and it can be withdrawn
Short of a license, the most a fan server can count on is tolerance. A RaGEZONE piece on why classic MMORPGs keep their private-server communities set out the range in September: rights holders “may tolerate small projects, issue takedown demands or pursue legal action depending on jurisdiction and commercial impact.”
Brack’s 2016 post also explained why Blizzard closed Nostalrius instead of licensing it. He wrote that “there is not a clear legal path to protect Blizzard’s IP and grant an operating license to a pirate server,” as Polygon reported. Two other publishers have since found paths of their own.
Rockstar’s path ran through an acquisition. In 2015 it banned the accounts of several people behind FiveM, the platform behind Grand Theft Auto V’s community roleplay servers, and called the project “an unauthorized alternate multiplayer service that contains code designed to facilitate piracy,” Kotaku reported. In 2023 Rockstar announced that Cfx.re, the team behind FiveM, was “now officially a part of Rockstar Games.”
City of Heroes got a license instead. In January 2024 the community-run Homecoming server announced that NCSoft had “officially granted Homecoming a license to host City of Heroes,” with no up-front or recurring fee. The server stayed free and donation-funded, and the license covers it alone: “Other servers are out of scope.” The same announcement says NCSoft keeps “the right to demand that Homecoming shuts down,” and it described a working relationship with the publisher that had already run for more than four years.
The newest projects haven’t reached that stage. In mid-September RaGEZONE also reported on OPEN//77, a platform for community-run dedicated servers in Cyberpunk, CD Projekt Red’s single-player role-playing game. The report described an independent project with no affiliation to the publisher, still in pre-alpha with no public servers and no release date. Which permission it ends up running on, if any, is an open question.
For a player deciding which game world gets the next few hundred hours, the useful question comes before the patch notes or the population count: who signed off on this world, and what can they take back? A licensed fan server and a publisher’s fresh realm can look identical on the character screen and still give different answers. The screen won’t say which one you’re standing in.
