It’s how I played the last Gears of War when I had an XBox, and then how I played the last Halo on my PC.

Aren’t WoW private servers free too?

IIRC you also had to pay for the idle animation. Like if you don’t interact with the game, Gollum would catch a fly and eat it or something, but you had to pay for that.

They put the lore behind a paywall too. The game was just a huge fail overall.