A 14-year partnership has come to an end.
An era is leaving — now these words are relevant in China, where the servers of all Blizzard online games were turned off on the evening of January 23. The news surprised no one: NetEase and Blizzard announced back in November that they had ended a long 14-year partnership. Briefly — about the main thing.
- The corporations did not agree to extend the contract — the matter is clearly in the money and the fact that the Americans did not make concessions. The data of millions of players in China has also become the subject of a dispute that has never been resolved.
- The problems between the companies started even earlier. In August 2022, the World of Warcraft mobile spin-off, codenamed Neptune, was canceled. More than 100 NetEase employees worked on the game, but only a small part of them continued to work in the corporation. According to rumors, the cancellation happened due to disagreements between corporations over the terms of the deal.
- Whether Blizzard is trying to conclude an agreement with another Chinese company is unknown. Without such an agreement, the Chinese government will not allow the American corporation to enter the local market.
- On January 23rd, all Blizzard online game servers became unavailable in China. The exception is Diablo Immortal, which was created by NetEase.
- Players in China logged into the World of Warcraft servers for the last time, where they said goodbye to their characters and to each other. The network already has a sea of photos with pandemoniums of WoW players.
- Chinese players can cheat and play on Asian servers, but the ping will increase many times and will reach 200ms. In addition, they will have to start the game from scratch: the characters have just been reset.
