Tuesday, January 24th 2023
Blizzard is Closing its Servers in China Today. China Market Future Uncertain
Blizzard is about to shut down its services in China today, as it was unable to reach a favorable partnership renewal with NetEase, the Chinese company handling Blizzard's business in the Chinese market, including local regulatory compliance, geographic localization of servers, and accepting payments. NetEase CEO William Ding said the partnership renewal negotiations fell apart due to "material differences on key terms." This means gamers in China no longer have a means to play the genre-defining MMORPG "World of Warcraft," "Starcraft," and other popular titles. A lot has changed in China's domestic gaming industry over the past two decades, and there are dozens of popular game studios with their titles in the MMORPG genre.
Source:
PC Gamer
33 Comments on Blizzard is Closing its Servers in China Today. China Market Future Uncertain
Seeing blizzard fall apart just got that much more enjoyable.
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/blizzard-servers-in-china-shut-down-today.303987/
but evidently an impending trainwreck doesnt makes as much of a headline than when it actually does happen so ...
'Don't you have
phonessense?'Reorientation onto the original business plan in 3...2...1...
Better start unfreezing Starcraft Ghost and a real WoW successor now that there's still money in the bank, or you will be eaten, Actizard. Because that CoD fanbase is dwindling, and you basically pissed all over Diablo already, unless you have some magic sauce in IV I don't know of.
They really need to haul ass. Producing a real game takes 3 years at least in any Blizzard timeframe for a decent title. Good luck Kotick Their entire fanbase and history is in Western markets. They'll be a nothing in China.
Also odd is NetEase seems to have a very cozy relationship with Microsoft. Why wouldn’t they come to an agreement?
If we can’t talk about governments though, than maybe it’s permissible to speculate Microsoft is up to shenanigans in trying to arrange a better buyout deal … if we’re allowed to say anything bad about corporations ;p
As fun as the coop section of Starcraft II became, they basically abandoned everything else when they realised they had a source of micro-DLC to keep selling