Back in June, we learned that Blizzard was pursuing yet another World of Warcraft emulator in court, this time Project Ascension. The lawsuit accused Project Ascension of infringing on the WoW IP under the DMCA, pirating the game, and raking in “millions of dollars” from selling its cash-shop currency. Notably, the servers were reportedly hosted by a Russian company sanctioned by the United States, a fact that led many players to believe that the server was safe and wouldn’t settle it out the way Turtle WoW did.
However, Project Ascension’s leadership announced last night that it had in fact reached a “mutual agreement” with Blizzard and will indeed be shutting down a week from now.
“All of Ascension’s emulated WoW realms will shut down on September 4, 2026 at 10:00 PP,” the devs write. “Support will remain active up until the very last day of shutdown. All the remaining content on the timeline will release and receive support before shutdown, then at that point all development will fully shift to focus on something new unrelated to WoW or any Blizzard game.”
The playerbase that funneled that “millions of dollars” into the hands of people knowingly exploiting a live IP they didn’t own is acting super normal about it, naturally. “Evil corp closing our beautiful game :(,” reads a thread on Reddit.
