[UPDATED] Playtime over for You Play or We Pay
In what seems to be an inevitable move, Blizzard has ordered the controversial and too-good-to-be-true services of You Play or We Pay to stop operations. According to their website, Blizzard found YPOWP's offering to be a violation of their intellectual property rights. You Play or We Pay, which stirred up a bit of controversy and a lot of skepticism when it first launched, aimed to compensate players whenever the World of Warcraft had unscheduled downtime. Essentially, it was insurance for WoW game time.
Initially, the site planned to charge for their service but eventually moved to a free model after some mysterious downtime of their own. It was such a novel idea that WoW Insider even interviewed the site's founders, George Tung and Milos Golubovic. It seems that this bizarre saga has at last come to an end, and questions of whether the site was for real or not (did anyone ever get compensation?) will never be answered.
[UPDATE: Several readers chimed in to answer that question -- apparently YPOWP sent its members 30-day game cards as compensation for lost play time. This indicates that the service, even after going to the free model, was for real. It also isn't against the TOS. That service was frowned upon by Blizzard legal, though, and YPOWP was taken down because of intellectual property rights issues instead.]
