“It seemed like a crazy idea”: Tech expert gets inside story on how Blizzard saved millions by selling 10,000 old WoW servers to fans in a charity auction — one even became a wedding gift
On the plane to SC23 (2023 International Conference on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analytics) in Denver, Serving the Family On the plane, I happened to meet a guy who told me an interesting story about Blizzard's decision to auction off their servers to fans.
World of Warcraft was released in November 2004 and became hugely popular, still boasting over one million logins per day. Each player's character is tied to a specific realm, requiring a server to continually track the state of all players and NPCs.