A pretty big bombshell was dropped a couple of days ago, as Blizzard announced the end of their partnership with NetEase and a possible end of their games being available in China. We’ve seen the official posts and responses, but there’s a lot of context missing there. Luckily for us, however, well known Chinese WoW community figure NasDa has jumped in to explain things and add some new information and even rumors.
There’s actually quite a few new elements presented below, from a rumor of an (unlikely) potential new partner for Blizzard, an explanation on how exactly publishing and certification work in China and how long it takes, the potential Microsoft involvement, the fact that the last time Blizzard did something like this China got WotLK almost a year later, and more.
The below is from a TwitLonger by NasDa:
All the base knowlegde you need to know about this Blizzard-NetEase CATASTROPHE.
– Foreign game companies must work with a domestic game publisher who will operate the game in China. That’s why you never see CN region on Blizzard’s map when a new patch is about to hit the live servers. CN region is basically in another “parallel universe”. It’s like peeing in a dark rainy night, you know it’s definitely there, but you can’t really tell where.
– The publishing partner for Microsoft in China is NetEase, ironically.
– Chinese law requires all digital games to receive a license from the regulator to be published in China.
– In the past getting a game license is not an issue. Since last year it’s been extremely difficult for any game, domestic or foreign, to receive a license, even more so for the latter. Last time a foreign title received a lisence was over 500 days ago. Popular ones like PUBG, Fortnite, Apex and Valorant still don’t have their Chinese publishing licenses yet. All Tencent games.
– China has resumed issuing new game licenses since April, for dometic games.
– Changing a publishing partnership means re-applying for game licenses even if the games are already approved by the regulator and it could take months or even years.
– This is the second time Blizzard changes their Chinese publishing partner. 14 years ago, Blizzard ended the partnership with their first partner, The 9, and then started worked with NetEase. Combining the process of re-applying for new game license for TBC expansion due to changing the partnership from The 9 to NetEase and the difficulty of getting a game license for WotLK expansion, the original Burning Crusade exapanion in CN region lasted for a total of 1090 days. Chinese players were forced to play LK pre-patch for 19 months. Imaging playing TBC for 3 whole years.
NetEase launched WotLK expansion in CN region on 31/08/2010. Just giving you an idea of how late that was. Paragon killed Arthas on 26th of March 2010. LOL. This is one of the reasons why LK classics is so popular in China.
Now you can see why Blizz and NetEase’s “divorce” is widely considered to be a BLOODY CATASTROPHE by the Chinese community.
– Potenital buyer or interesting parties:
miHoYo, the developer of Genshin Impact, has denies the rumors of licensing deal with Blizzard;
Tencent replied that there was no relevant news internally for the time being;
Perfect world is another hot candidate according to rumors;
My source told me(and it’s a good source), ByteDance, the parent company of Tiktok will be the successor or at least in the lead.
“Does ByteDance have any experience of operating a game before?” Ye, that was my first question but I guess time will tell.
– NetEase has promised that they will be issuing refund for all the players that still have remaining blizzard bucks and active game time in their accounts.
– After 24th of Jan. all Blizzard services in China will be shutting down. I still don’t know what to do after that and where to play wow yet.
Thanks a lot to NasDa for all this information and I really do hope something can be done before January 23rd, as I cannot even imagine simply losing your entire WoW account, not to mention other Blizzard games – even temporarily, and especially with the potential of it being permanently gone. There are so many Chinese players who are part of the WoW community it would truly be a tragedy to see them lose everything they worked, a decade+ of time invested into the game could simply disappear.
