If you want to see what the total capture of games journalism looks like, you need look no further than the recent, fawning coverage of Daybreak Games’ legal victory over The Heroes’ Journey. Outlets like MassivelyOP and The Ancient Gaming Noob have offered up not analysis, but obedient stenography—a masterclass in how to confuse access with integrity and corporate press releases with news.
Their headlines gleefully declare “Daybreak Wins!” as if a multi-million-dollar corporation lawyering up to crush a volunteer passion project is something to be celebrated. They are not reporting the news; they are cheering at the funeral of gaming preservation, hired mourners for a corpse the corporate undertakers themselves created.
Let’s dissect the cowardice and correct the record.
The Lie of “Piracy” and the Truth of Preservation
The central, unquestioned premise of these sycophantic articles is that The Heroes’ Journey is a “pirate server” illicitly stealing Daybreak’s property. This is a lie so profound it either exposes the technical illiteracy of these writers or their deliberate complicity.
A clean-room reverse-engineered emulator is not piracy. It is an act of archaeological love. It does not use a single line of Daybreak’s code. It is built from the ground up by fans to replicate the experience of a game that Daybreak itself has left to rot on the vine. To use it, a player must already own a legitimate copy of the original game client. This is not theft; it is the highest form of flattery and dedication.
These projects do not compete with live servers. They serve a completely different master: the preservation of digital history. Official servers are temporary commercial products. When Daybreak’s parent company EG7 finally pulls the plug—a date accurately termed the “Death Clock,” acknowledged in their own lawsuit filings—EverQuest will vanish into the digital ether. Poof. Gone.
Except it won’t. Because of emulators.
Daybreak isn’t suing to protect its property; it is suing to ensure its property has no legacy beyond its own greedy, neglectful control. They are the man who, unable to tend his own garden, instead pours concrete over it so no one else can enjoy the flowers. And the gaming press is writing articles about what a fine, smooth slab of concrete it is.
The Real Motive: Extorting a Captive Audience
Why now? Why attack a project that has existed for years? The cheerleading articles don’t ask because they dare not speak the answer.
This lawsuit is the death rattle of a failed company.
As EG7’s own quarterly reports show, EverQuest revenues are flat to declining. The player base is aging and shrinking. The cash shop is a desperate graft on a dying body. Even Daybreak’s lawyers admitted in filings that the official product is in a state of “inevitable decline.”
Emulators represent an existential threat to this final, pathetic business model. They are a living reminder that a better way exists—a way not based on milking whales for digital baubles, but on community, shared memory, and pure love for the game itself.
This legal action is not a defense. It is a warning shot to every other emulator team: Stop, or we will bury you in legal fees you cannot hope to match. It is a move to reassert a monopoly over a player base they can no longer satisfy, aiming to force these passion projects into oppressive licensing deals or eliminate them entirely. It is the behavior of a vulture, not a steward.
A Failure of Press and a Betrayal of Gamers
The most damning indictment is not of Daybreak—we expect corporations to act like soulless corporations—but of the press that cosplays as their critical foil.
MassivelyOP postures as the voice of the MMO community, yet in this case, they printed Daybreak’s framing wholesale without challenge. TAGN, while a hobbyist blog, nevertheless echoed the same corporate narrative. Together they illustrate how both “professional” and “independent” coverage can be captured by the same gravitational pull: parroting the corporate story instead of interrogating it.
They had a duty to ask the hard questions:
- Why is a company suing its most dedicated fans?
- What does this mean for the long-term preservation of this foundational MMORPG?
- Is this really about IP protection, or about stifling a superior community-led experience that highlights Daybreak’s own failures?
They asked none of them. They simply copied, pasted, and applauded. They are not journalists; they are PR assistants working for free, trading their spines for the fleeting illusion of insider access.
This is why dissident voices are not just alternative perspectives; they are the only perspectives that matter. When the entire establishment narrative is designed to protect power and crush community, speaking truth is a revolutionary act.
Conclusion
The preliminary injunction is not a victory; it is a confession. It confesses that Daybreak has no future plan but managed decline, no strategy but legal intimidation, no legacy but destruction. The throne sniffing press may play along, but history will not. When the official servers go dark, it will not be Daybreak that preserves EverQuest—it will be the very archivists and fans they tried to bury. And that is the final irony: in suing their own community, Daybreak has already lost.
—Wolfshead
Related Quote
When you’ve got nothing, go for the ad hominem attack.
Wilhelm,
Thank you for reading and for your comment. I appreciate you providing a live demonstration of the very thesis I put forward.
An ad hominem fallacy is an attack on the person in place of an argument. My piece did the opposite: it presented a detailed, substantive critique of the journalistic failures exhibited in the coverage of this lawsuit—failures of critical inquiry, of understanding technology, and of prioritizing corporate narratives over community preservation.
The characterization of this failure as “spineless” and “lapdog” behavior is a conclusion based on that evidence, not a substitute for it.
Your response, however, is a textbook example of what you accuse me of. You have not engaged with a single one of my arguments. You have not explained why my analysis of clean-room emulation is wrong. You have not defended the decision to parrot Daybreak’s legal framing uncritically. You have not articulated a defense of prioritizing corporate IP claims over digital preservation.
Instead, you have focused solely on your perceived insult. You have attacked my tone because you cannot confront the substance.
The record now stands clear for any reader to judge: a detailed critique of journalistic practice on one side, and a one-line complaint about hurt feelings on the other.
I rest my case.
— Wolfshead
I know that guy’s avatar. He’s one of the progressive wokesters from massivelyop. That’s everything that needs to be known.
That website had a much larger community of readers and commenters, but when they became authoritarian woke cultists, and both the authors and owners, and the majority of commenters started ganging on and ridiculing and insulting anyone who has an opinion different from their, as well as people getting muted or banned by the owners without even a warning or indication why or when, the number of people reading the website and those commenting has been reduced greatly.
Now it’s a tiny liberal woke echo chamber, a bit like BlueSky – they can say whatever disgusting things they want without anyone having the right to object or question them. As long as you are a deranged wokester like the owners and authors, you’re in the clear, if you have an opinion that’s different and even opposing, it’s only a matter of time before you are either chased away from the website or banned.
I totally agree with this! Its so frustrating that Daybreak is suing fans trying to preserve a game theyre just abandonning. The press needs to call them out for being greedy instead of just parroting their PR.
The Heroes Journey will lose hard. You know it, too, don’t you? Do you really believe they can win this.
“A clean-room reverse-engineered emulator is not piracy. It is an act of archaeological love.”
The judge would say: OK, very fine. But what do you want? They are still using the EverQuest IP and making money with it. This is insubstantial for the outcome.
At this point the case is lost. That Daybreak does nothing to preserve the, that THJ is pure love, the fanbase… this doesn’t matter. It is about the IP and them making money with it, about nothing else.
I believe you are doing Wilhelm injustice. MassivelyOP was talking a lot about this and that, while he linked the arguments the THJ community brought forward for defense.
“(…) it is sufficient to say that none of the very dumb arguments the THJ fan boys have been throwing at anybody who will listen will work.”
Yeah, this is going to rub you the wrong way, but in a nutshell, this is what is going to happen with extremely high certainty. Don’t shoot the messenger.
The press should indeed call out Daybreak for neglecting and milking the EQ, but this still doesn’t give THJ the right to use the EQ IP and make money with it.
Yes, we can lament the fact that Daybreak own the IP. I can see why people are fleeing to emulators, but that doesn’t make what THJ and others do legal.
I appreciate you engaging on the mechanics of the case, and you make a sound argument from a strictly legalistic viewpoint. I suspect your perspective might be influenced by a very German respect for Ordnung—for the system, the rules, the law as it is written. From that framework, your prediction is logical.
However, I must argue from a different tradition: one where the law is not always synonymous with justice, and where a failure of moral duty can be a greater transgression than a breach of legal code.
You are right that the court will likely focus on the letter of IP law. But my argument is about the spirit of stewardship. A corporation that acquires a cultural icon like EverQuest accepts a sacred trust. Daybreak has catastrophically failed this duty, managing not for legacy but for managed decline.
The Heroes’ Journey is not the cause of this conflict; it is the symptom. It is the community’s immune response to the disease of corporate neglect, a volunteer effort to perform the duty the rights-holder abandoned.
The lawsuit, therefore, is not a righteous defense of property. It is the final, grotesque act of a bad steward—using the letter of the law to punish those who fulfilled the spirit of the duty they neglected.
The court may grant Daybreak a German victory—a victory of Ordnung. But it will be a hollow one that forever cements their American loss: the loss of community trust, moral legitimacy, and their rightful place as stewards of a world we built together.
— Wolfshead
There is a group of people, some are players, who speak very ill of private servers. With words that convey disgust, dismissiveness and a sick enjoyment if something negative happens to such a server or insulting the people who play there.
I knew someone like that who for many things was expressing such a behavior when I shared some information about a private server I care about with that person. Instead of saying something like “oh, I see, I guess it’s part of the risk of running and playing on such a server” or try to make a noble lie, like “this sucks”, this guy would outright be happy about it and say things like “haha, serves them right” as if anything that isn’t deemed worthy by him is better off gone and it makes his day better somehow that something that doesn’t even affect him has gone through some trouble. Eventually I stopped communication with that person as this behavior is not normal, whether it’s about a private server or something else entirely – being happy when something bad happens somewhere to someone is in my opinion just sick, psychopathic behavior.
Private servers exist like 3rd party customization tools for Windows, like better start menu or taskbar, because Microsoft haven’t delivered what users want and instead have taken away features that previously existed. And private servers are there, because the official ones don’t do something right, in rare cases private servers are the only way to experience a game, since the official version is long gone.
I can’t accept why should I be forced to play Microsoft/Activision’s WoW Classic if I want to play Vanilla WoW. If I want to play Vanilla, I will just find one of the many private Vanilla servers, whether it’s Turtle WoW or a pure Vanilla server, it doesn’t matter, I will not be paying $15 or more a month just to access something that has better quality for free. Besides, there are server mods where you can host your own server and add bot players that you can group with and control them so you can have a single player Offline WoW experience if that’s what you want. All of these things exist, because Microsoft/Activision don’t care to provide them for players, because they are anti-consumer and just want people’s money while they make little effort.
Microsoft/Activision are now suing Turtle WoW and have invoked some lawsuit that’s been used against drug cartels, hopefully since Turtle WoW is hosted either in Kazakhstan or Russia, it won’t affect them and if the server lives on and releases the Unreal Engine 5 client, it will be a testament what kind of a toothless dog Activision/Microsoft is who can only bark and can’t even bite.
I would like to make a comparison with the Blizzard vs Nostalrius case. It wasn’t a “case” before court, a cease and desist letter ended the server. But it also caused Blizzard to create Wow Classic.
They experienced very much the same animosity and anger in the community that Daybreak will face as well.
Their reaction was launching their own classic Server. This was wildly successful, that it now has again mutated into something non-classic could be subject of another posting. Let met just add, for me personally Classic WoW ends with WotLK, but they decided to continue nevertheless.
So they tried to make good and some profit on top of that as well – and it worked and is still working, even though, see my thoughts above.
For the EQ franchise the ruling will be perfectly legal and disastrous: I do not believe Daybreak/Enad Global 7 is willing to do much for the community anymore but rather wants to squeeze the last bit of money out of the dying franchise.
I am quite surprised that Enad Global 7 is quite stable. They were often criticized already on a business basis how little they make of high value IPs.
Google “Enad Global 7 AB (publ) (0SG.F)” and see their development. They only go down or stable, and I am very surprised that they are not going down harder.
So there is hope that EG7 will one day sell the EQ IP and that it will be acquired by someone who cares about it. It’s not much hope, but as long as EG7 is calling the shots, EQ won’t rise again. They will rather legally smother a community that would throw lots of money at them if they would make an EQ to their liking.