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News Video Games

Halo4.com story sparks lively discussion about domains, squatting at video game news sites

XBOX Halo 4

My Wednesday night story on Microsoft acquiring the domain name Halo4.com from Scott O’Reilly sparked discussion about domains across a number of video-game news sites and blogs.

Kotaku, part of Gawker Media’s “Gawker” network of sites, was the first to publish this story with proper credit to this blog.

After the story went online at Kotaku under “The Annals of Cybersquatting”, almost 24 hours later and thousands of page views here, more video-game news sites and blogs from around the globe wrote about the acquisition including MeriStation, 3D Juegos, Gamers.fr and more.

Discussion among readers got lively.

Here, I selected some of the best comments.

The Owner of halo4.com Probably Made a Lot of Money, but He Isn’t Saying [Kotaku]

Vondruke:  Things like this shouldn’t be allowed and I wonder why it is. I mean if you own the IP you should be able to own the URL.

Kimochi Sama: you’re just jealous because you couldn’t snap the domain first to sell it for sizable cash

Microsoft obtains Halo 4 domain via secret dealings [ComputerAndVideogames.com]

Nitramuse:  Probably rubbing his hands watching his bank account increase. If MS was herassing him, he’d say it…I’m sure.  And now, he receives a s**tload of money, under the condition to “not talk about it, or we want our money back and we’ll keep the domain name. Sign here, please”.

StonecoldMC: *lightbulb moment*  Goes off to register the domain of halo5.com

Microsoft Obtains “Halo4.com” Domain from Man in the US [VGChartz]

scat398: it’s actually against the law to squat on domain names now…so more than likely his rights to the name were taken…with little or no money changing hands.

KylieDog:  In other news, a side character going by the name of “O’Reilly” was just revealed in Halo 4.

Categories
Disputes News Video Games

ModernWarfare3.com, site taken down; domain not owned by Activision

Modern Warfare 3 reveal trailer

The website had reached over 7,000 Facebook Likes in the weeks following the announcement of Modern Warfare 3 and looked confusingly similar to Activision’s official MW3 site.  And the site even added new features in the past couple weeks including a newsletter for announcements, videos, pre-order links, and a forum that was slated to launch.

But now the site ModernWarfare3.com (which is currently not owned by Activision), returns a “404” not found page on the web — a move that may have been prompted by Activision’s lawyers after witnessing the site’s growth and similar look to its own official site, which can be found at callofduty.com/mw3.

Although it’s difficult to tell whether the site is just down for something as simple as maintenance, this is the first time since Activision’s newest title was leaked that ModernWarfare3.com has been offline for a significant time period.  In this case, days not hours. 

Activision and ModernWarfare3.com

The big question is whether Activision is even trying to acquire the domain.

The company doesn’t have a strong trackrecord of buying domain names on the aftermarket, at least publicly.  Nor has the company ever filed and won a formal domain dispute, according to a quick query at UDRPSearch.com. 

As an example of Activision’s poor track record with domains, last year the company registered several names for possible future game titles including: callofdutyfuturewarfare.com, callofdutyfuturewarfare2.com, callofdutyfuturewarfare3.com, and a number of variations including codfuturewarefare.com, codfuturewarfare2.com, and codfuturewarfare3.com.  The company also registered secretwarfare2.com, secretwarfare3.com, spacewarfare2.com and spacewarfare3.com.  But what you might notice about the list is not what the company purchased, but more so what the company didn’t — generic domains like futurewarfare.com or spacewarfare.com.

Regardless of the company’s history with domains, this time though when it comes to a domain it doesn’t own, the company may finally be honing in.

Considering Modern Warfare 3 is set to be one of the company’s biggest launches to date in November 2011 and will coincide with the launch of its own online social network called: Call of Duty Elite, the registrant information could be changing soon, just like Halo4.com did yesterday – as reported here on Fusible and covered by Gawker Media’s Kotaku.

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News Video Games

Microsoft Corporation acquires the domain name Halo4.com, price unknown

HALO 4

Just a little more than a week ago, in a post on this blog I asked the question whether Microsoft would broker a deal for the domain name Halo4.com, after Microsoft had revealed Halo 4 at E3 without owning the domain. 

You read it here first:  The company now owns and re-directs the domain to its official Halo 4 site on Xbox.com.

The domain literally just changed hands today.  Yesterday, it was still registered to Scott O’Reilly (the seller), who I’ve contacted for comment and will update this post if I hear back.

Though the company doesn’t own Halo.com or Halo1.com, it owns Halo2.com, Halo3.com, and now Halo4.com. 

As of today, here are the WHOIS records for Halo4.com.

Domain name: halo4.com

Administrative Contact:
   Microsoft Corporation
   Domain Admin ()
      Fax: +1.11
   One Microsoft Way
   Redmond, WA 98052
   US

Name Servers:
   ns1.msft.net
   ns2.msft.net
   ns3.msft.net
   ns4.msft.net
   ns5.msft.net

Yesterday, the WHOIS records still pointed to Scott O’Reilly. 

Domain name: halo4.com (as of June 14, 2011)

Registrant Contact:
   –
   Scott O’Reilly ()
   
   Rochester, MN 55901
   US

It’s hard to fully understand Microsoft’s strategy of announcing game titles, then purchasing the domain names after the fact.  

One can only imagine what the effect is on the price.

[UPDATE:  Wednesday, June 15, 2011 08:15 PM EST:  I just received a reply from Scott O’Reilly, the previous owner of the domain.  When I asked about the selling price/negotiations with Microsoft, all Scott could tell me is that the only term of the agreement that he can disclose is that he can’t disclose any terms of the agreement.  So, there you have it.]

Discussion: ComputerandVideogames.com, VGChartz, and Kotaku

Categories
News Video Games

Garry Chernoff: One $45 domain purchase, one $500,000 domain sale

gamegos

When I asked Garry Chernoff to share something special about his latest sale of adnet.com for $60K, he told me he purchased the domain from the previous owner for just $1,000. 

But if that doesn’t blow your mind, then maybe this piece of news will.

You remember the $500,000 domain sale of gamesforgirls.com reported earlier this year, don’t you? 

“Gamesforgirls.com was purchased from a drop catching registrar (Signature Domains) in 2001 for $10. + the $35 reg fee. $45. total,” Garry Chernoff wrote me by email today.

Gamesforgirls.com sold to Turkish casual game producer Gamegos, as I first reported here.  The sale is still in the top 5 publicly reported domain sales of 2011, currently tied for the #3 spot puzzle.com.

Categories
News Trademarks Video Games

Zynga gets smarter with trademarks and domain registrations, more secretive

Hanging with Friends

It finally looks like Zynga is getting a little bit smarter in terms of domain name registrations and trademark applications. 

Normally, a closely guarded secret by gaming companies, many of Zynga’s yet-to-be released and recently released titles are anything but secret.  But that’s now changing, as the social gaming giant has been on a buying spree of late and is planning for an IPO, it’s getting savvier with its domain name registrations and trademark filings. 

Trademark and yet-to-be released game titles

It’s European trademark filing for Rewardville pinpointed the company as the buyer of the matching domain, before the game was even launched to the public.  Other trademarks have backfired, like that of “ville” which broke here. 

For its latest launch of Empires & Allies, a combat strategy game, Zynga was patient.  The company didn’t file for trademarks in the United States until the same day it unveiled the game on June 1, 2011.  Its European trademark was filed June 2.

Before the Empires & Allies trademark filings though, the company filed other trademarks for unknown titles that news sites and blogs have yet to pick up — like the trademark applications for Mojitomo or Patentville. 

Adjusting the timing on trademark applications is one thing, but the company finally caught up on domain registrations too.

Zynga’s domain name hints

When I wrote in early May that Zynga registered the domain name hangmanwithfriends.com and I predicted a Hangman game on the iOS (which it launched a month later), the registrant information was hidden behind GoDaddy’s Private Registration service (Domains by Proxy).  However, the registrant information wasn’t so private after all — as tweeted by Domain Name news in a Twitter message, GoDaddy’s service needs some work. 

After using GoDaddy’s account retrieval system in combination with the domain, a Zynga e-mail address (Email Address:****@zynga.com) was publicly displayed.

It was the same story for farmvilleexpress.com. 

While GoDaddy might not address the issue with its Privacy service, Zynga has.  The company is sticking with GoDaddy to host many of its names, but its now using an email address with a “yahoo” extension.  If you check hangmanwithfriends.com or farmvilleexpress.com today, you’ll see this (Email Address:****@yahoo.com).

If you thought it was hard before to break a Zynga story, things just got a little harder as its more closely guarding its trademarks and domain registrations.