The World of Warcraft servers you can buy on eBay, and why Blizzard sold them

Search eBay for World of Warcraft this week and most of what comes back is from BlizzCon: pet codes, plushes and pins listed within hours of the show closing in Anaheim on Sunday. Among them are 15 listings for something much older. They are server blades, the boards that ran the game's realms in its early years, and their sellers are asking from $1,100 up to C$500,000, about US$360,000, apiece.

None of them came from BlizzCon, and nothing about them was announced there. The show's big World of Warcraft news was WoW Forever, a new version of the game built around its first year, which is the same nostalgia these blades sell on. But every one of them has been in private hands for years, and none of the listings went up this weekend: the newest dates from 28 August. Blizzard sold these blades itself, for charity, in 2011 and 2012 and again in 2019.

It had thousands to sell because of a hardware refresh. From 2005, World of Warcraft's realms ran on HP ProLiant BL25p blades with AMD Opteron 275 processors. Six or seven years later Blizzard replaced more than 10,000 of them, and the new machines paid for themselves in about 13 months. The awkward part was the old ones. According to an account ServeTheHome's Patrick Kennedy published in 2024, having them hauled away would have cost several hundred thousand dollars, possibly as much as a million. Signing the blades and selling them to players began as a joke and became, as one person involved put it, "the only realistic option to keep the project on track". Selling them for charity also brought a tax deduction that offset the cost of pulling them out.

Blizzard announced the first sale on 13 October 2011: four weeks of charity auctions on eBay, with a new set of blades each week. Every blade came with a commemorative plaque naming the realm it had served and its dates of service, carrying the signatures of the World of Warcraft team. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital received each winning bid less $50 for packaging, handling and insurance, PayPal fees and about 1 percent in eBay listing fees. Blizzard was plain about what buyers were getting: a bare retired HP blade that did not work, with no game or Blizzard data on it, sold purely as a collector's item.

The auctions ran into 2012. More than 350 blades went up on eBay from 23 to 30 January, and in a January post Blizzard's European site announced what it called the last batch of retired EU blades, from its English, German, French, Spanish and Russian realms. In all, about 2,000 were sold. That is the number to trust: a widely shared 2024 headline said Blizzard sold 10,000 servers to fans, but 10,000 is roughly how many it replaced, as the article under that headline says. One of the 2,000, from the North American realm Barthilas, which served from 9 June 2006 to 9 June 2010, is now in the electronic games collection of the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York.

The second wave came with the game's 15th anniversary. In two sales, on 13 and 17 September 2019, Blizzard's own Gear Store sold a small number of retired HP blades from the hardware that ran the game between 2010 and 2016, each in a decorated clear case with a 15th Anniversary plaque. The sale price, less manufacturing, freight and tax, went to the charity Pencils of Promise. More anniversary blades were auctioned on eBay for St. Jude, at least 27 of them by January 2020, and one was offered in the BlizzCon 2019 charity auction.

The blades went to players, and some went a long way. According to the Warcraft Wiki, the streamer Sodapoppin owns the blade from the Aegwynn realm, and The Yogscast own the one from the European realm The Venture Co. One buyer took a Cenarion Circle blade home in 2011, sent it around their guild to collect signatures, and gave it as a wedding present to two players who had met in the game.

They have been changing hands ever since. A Bloodscalp blade resold on eBay for $3,950 in 2018. This week's listings ask far more, and they are asking prices, not sales. Nine of the 15 belong to one seller in the Toronto area, including Ursin at the equivalent of US$20,178, Grizzly Hills at $14,418 and Darkspear, listed as serving from 2004 to 2010, at C$500,000, which 133 people are watching. A seller in Germany wants $13,370 for Frostwhisper, and an Altar of Storms blade is at auction from $7,500 with no bids so far. The 2019 anniversary blades ask between $1,100 and $3,100.

Whatever the price, it is the same kind of object. Blizzard sold every one of these blades empty, with no game data and nothing on it that will run World of Warcraft. What a buyer pays for is the plaque, the realm name on it, and whatever years they spent there.