World of Warcraft remains one of the most popular MMOs in the world, but plenty of fans have been unhappy with the official version of the game for a while. In recent years, a particularly large community formed around the private Turtle WoW servers, which offered a unique state of the game based on the Classic version of World of Warcraft.
Last August, Blizzard filed a lawsuit against Turtle WoW, claiming that the private server provider was infringing Blizzard's copyright on multiple counts. From the outset, the legal challenge looked hard to overcome, but much of the Turtle WoW community remained committed to the cause. Seven-and-a-half months later, Turtle WoW has now revealed that the end is near.
In a statement posted on Discord and shared by Reddit user evangelism2, Turtle WoW announced that the "final day of operation will be May 14, 2026," with servers going offline at midnight as the day ends. The statement doesn't go into detail on the outcome of the lawsuit, but thanks players for "being such a wonderful gaming community."
The final month of Turtle WoW's operation will abandon the previous monetization framework, which relied on a donation shop that...
