This is a monumental blow to Blizzard and its tens of millions of Chinese fans. Due to the extremely messy breakup of Chinese-run developer NetEase and Blizzard, World of Warcraft is one of the many Blizzard games now shut down in China.
You really have to feel bad for the Chinese fans.
Not only have they lost out on all of their save data, character builds, and the hundreds of hours spent in the World of Warcraft and other Blizzard game worlds due to a disagreement between the developers, but they also have lost out access to all Blizzard games with the way the Chinese gaming model works.
For those who don’t know, all gaming companies that wish to do business in China, whether they are from the West (USA, Europe, etc.) or East (Japan, South Korea, etc.), they need to “partner up” with a local Chinese game developer as that local developer will be the one who streams, localizes, and operate the servers in China.
Naturally, that requires the foreign game developer to give access to all source codes, server information, etc. to the Chinese developer for free, which obviously leaves it unguarded against theft, hacking, and blatant copying by the Chinese developer side.
And, as one might expect, that law is a big reason why so many games are not advertised in China, while it also is a reason why messy breakups between the foreign and local developers can result in entire games going offline or being banned outright by the Chinese government.
So, that’s exactly what has happened in this case as Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft and Overwatch, and the Chinese developer NetEase’s 14-year partnership has run out. However, unlike most cases of when these types of partnerships expire, Blizzard was unable to find a new “partner” and NetEase was unwilling to extend the license agreement that would have allowed Chinese players to continue playing for another six months.
Therefore, over 10M+ players in China had to either download their save profiles, character builds, etc. from Blizzard games before today or else they would irrevocable lose all of their progress.
It’s honestly an unfortunate thing to see millions of innocents, everyday gamers lose all of their progress and devotion to their most beloved games just because of a ridiculous dispute between two game studios (mainly NetEase) that couldn’t set aside their greed.
I hope Blizzard finds a new partner soon and is able to get the World of Warcraft, Overwatch, and all the rest of their games’ serves back online in China as soon as possible.
Images Source: Featured Image: (Activision-Blizzard) (World of Warcraft: Shadowlands Cinematic Trailer – YouTube)
