Video of World of Warcraft on an iPhone Appears, Spurs Controversy

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 27 Apr 2009

A video showcasing popular MMO (massively multiplayer online) game World of Warcraft has appeared online, causing quite a few gaming enthusiasts to ask themselves: “is this for real”? It is not the first time that we see fake World of Warcraft on an iPhone videos, but this one might very well be the real deal. The reasoning behind this claim is this: according to the video, the game is running in the Vollee client, which works in pretty much the same fashion the OnLive cloud service does (the game is being run on a server, not on the iPhone; what you see are streamed images of the app running on the server).

The company behind this client has been set up with the goal of developing software that would allow mobile 3G phones to play CPU intensive PC apps over the network. Now so far, Vollee has publicly showcased “Second Life” on a smartphone and has publicly announced that it entered a partnership with Activision Blizzard in order to port Word of Warcraft to mobile phones. Vollee has also announced that it will support the iPhone (the announcement was made back in 2008) – so all these signs point to the fact that the video is genuine.

There are also signs that the video is nothing more than an intricate hoax – like the fact that the video, which was originally posted on YouTube, has been set to private and copies have been removed (you can still watch it here and here).

There is one other interesting piece to this puzzle: the Vollee website has been down since yesterday (at the time of writing this article the site was still down). There is a lot of room for speculation here, like perhaps the site went down because so many people are trying to get the company to validate the authenticity of the video, or perhaps the site is down because the company went out of business altogether. The bottom line is that Blizzard is keeping mum about it, the Vollee web page is down, and the video has been removed.


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