Curse Gaming is a site that hosts and manages user interface addons for Blizzards astoundingly popular World of Warcraft game.
They recently announced that they were changing the nature and type of their advertising. Previously, the site was slathered in Google Text ads offering (not suprisingly) ads for buying in-game Gold, exploits, hacks, etc. for the game itself.
Blizzards Terms of Service and End User License Agreement forbid these actions and it’s a big grey area with whether or not “supporting” them through having their ads on your site is a reasonable thing. The post does not mention whether they were contacted by Blizzard, or if they came to the decision on their own.
I find the tension between Blizzard’s, Curse-Gaming and Google’s interests in this fascinating. Google and Curse-Gaming are (in a certain sense) being penalized for being too good at matching people with what they are searching for. A bigger question is: When will Blizzard start suing Google?
[tags]Blizzard, WoW, WorldofWarCraft, Google, Gaming, AdWords[/tags]