Blizzard Entertainment, part of Activision Blizzard, has announced that it will “suspend most Blizzard game services in mainland China, due to the expiration of current licensing agreements with NetEase.” The end of services is scheduled for January 23, 2023.
Blizzard had partnered with the Chinese company since 2008 for publishing and managing its games in the country. This agreement allowed the American publisher not to come up against China’s strict content guidelines and rules.
Partnerships of this type are common in the video game industry. Riot Games, for example, had a similar deal with Chinese gaming company Tencent to help it distribute League of Legends in the country, before Tencent bought Riot in 2015.
Major consequences for millions of players
According to Blizzard, when the current agreement expires, nearly all of the games it operates will be taken offline in China. Among them, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Warcraft III: Reforged, Overwatchseries StarCraft, Diablo III and Heroes of the Storm. The only exception will be mobile gaming Diablo Immortalwhich will continue to operate under a separate agreement, according to NetEase.
Not only does this announcement obviously have major implications for the millions of people currently playing the aforementioned Blizzard games in China, but the fallout from this disruption could also impact Blizzard’s core businesses, such as the Overwatch League, including a fifth of the teams is currently based in China.
It also remains to be seen what the impact will be on Microsoft’s current efforts to acquire Activision Blizzard.
More details to come
Blizzard has been vague on how it will wind down operations in China, saying only that it will “pause new sales in the coming days and Chinese players will soon receive details on how this will happen.” is going to happen “.
The company said new releases planned for the end of the year, including World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, Hearthstone: March of the Lich Kingand season 2 ofOverwatch 2 will still be marketed in China.
Players who have already purchased these games will not have much time to enjoy them before the impending discontinuation date of January 23, 2023, but Blizzard has promised that it is “looking for alternatives to return our games to players at coming “. Blizzard therefore plans to return to China one day or another.
Divergent visions
The two companies did not provide many details on the reasons for the failure of these negotiations. Blizzard merely said it had not reached an agreement “consistent with Blizzard’s operating principles”, while NetEase cited a “material difference on key terms”.
However, statements on LinkedIn from Simon Zhu, President of Global Investment and Partnership at NetEase, shed a whole different light: “One day when what happened behind the scenes can be told, developers and gamers will have an understanding a whole new level of the amount of damage a jerk can do… I feel bad for the players who have lived in these worlds. »
It would appear, at least in this executive’s opinion, that there was a lot more tension behind the scenes than the boilerplate text of each company’s respective announcements suggests.
Source: ZDNet.com