Posts with tag double-bubble

Double Bubble has a good little writeup on a pretty useful WoW-related iPhone application. But instead of the MMO, this app centers on another game in the WoW universe: the Trading Card Game. WoW Lifecounter (iTunes link) is a utility that will (you guessed it) count your life points as you play the TCG -- it tracks both sides' heroes, and you can take away or give life points with just the touch of a button. It's pretty simple -- all you do is punch in the starting health of each character, and then the app will even track wins for each side. Usually, you can just track the points with a pen and paper, but if you don't want to bother doing math in the heat of a battle, the app can be fun to use.

It's 99 cents, which might stop the cheap among you from picking it up -- we won't blame you if you'd just rather have a Junior Bacon Chee and write things down. But if you play the WoW TCG a lot and always have your iPhone with you, it's probably worth the investment.

Blizzard has laid the legal smackdown on two more WoW-related iPhone apps. As Double Bubble reports, both Warcraft Chest and WoW Realm Status have bit the dust, most likely after Blizzard's legal department sent them a cease-and-desist (that's what recently happened to the popular Warcraft Characters app). We don't know for sure that Blizzard went after them, but considering that Warcraft Chest was completely free, there can't be that many other reasons why it's not on the App Store any more.

It's still not clear yet either why Blizzard is doing this -- originally, since they started off going after only paid applications, it was plausible that they just didn't want other people profiting off of their game (similar to the new addon policy). But they've taken down both free and paid apps here so far, and Double Bubble also has a list of both free and paid addons still up. At this point, we have to wonder what Blizzard's real intentions are here -- they're squashing valuable resources that fans have made and are giving away for free. If they were planning an Armory or realm status app of their own, that's one thing, but the only reason we can see so far is that their legal department has decided to act against the company's own loyal fans for their own interests. Not a great strategy for encouraging customer loyalty.

And what about sites like Wowhead or the Firefox realm status addon? Why is Blizzard only targeting helpful applications on the iPhone? We can only guess that Blizzard will eventually go after the rest of the apps on the App Store, so if you're working on one or planning to release one soon, guess you might want to think again about how that time might be better spent.