Overwatch returning to china

General Discussion
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IRVINE, Calif., REDMOND, Wash., AND HANGZHOU, Zhejiang [April 9 PT, April 10 CT] / – Beloved video game titles from Blizzard Entertainment that captivated millions of players in China will return to the market sequentially, beginning this summer, under a renewed publishing deal Blizzard Entertainment, Microsoft Gaming, and NetEase (NASDAQ: NTES and HKEX: 9999) announced today.

After continuing discussions over the past year, both Blizzard Entertainment and NetEase are thrilled to align on a path forward to once again support players in mainland China and are proud to reaffirm their commitment to delivering exceptional gaming experiences.

The renewed publishing agreement will encompass games Chinese players had access to under the previous agreement: World of Warcraft®, Hearthstone®, and other titles in the Warcraft®, Overwatch®, Diablo®, and StarCraft® universes. Building upon more than 15 years of past collaboration, Blizzard and NetEase are working diligently on relaunch plans, with further details to be shared at a later date.

Will be interesting to see how this effects the game in the long term.

On one hand, China likely accounted for a sizeable portion of the game’s total playerbase, and not having that region playing the game could be a large part of why Overwatch 2 drastically undershot revenue targets. From that perspective these players can come back and start spending again and give blizzard and microsoft more reason to care about this franchise. Then again, the damage may already have been done. A spending player can’t just take a year long break from a live service game. People are a lot more apprehensive to spend once they already missed out on hundreds of items permanently and your government can randomly lock you out of the game for again at any time.

Of course this also re-opens the possiblity of censorship in the western version of the game, though considering that possiblity was there for most of Overwatch’s existence, I doubt much will change

Fun fact: The great Overwatch 2 steam review bomb was mostly done by chinese players who were angry about not being able to play the game anymore. The review score still would’ve been very bad without them, but not worst game on the history of steam levels of bad

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I don’t think even if everything goes well and the games is back in China, they are just gonna log into steam just to delete their reviews.

OW2 will be in history the most reviewed bomb game in a game distritubor platform, ever.

Also, I think even if like 90% of just the chinese comments are deleted, you are still gonna see the “p**n better” review for the #5321351 time in a row, and people actually wasting their steam points just to give them a badge for the review.

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Those guys extremely skilful aren’t they? If so it might be game salvation

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I guess there will be no more of those “controversial June event” then?

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AFAIK, some countries also had censorship about that event, probably the same.

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They just won’t have the event active in that region, same as they did in the the middle east and Poland last year. It is why every shooter only does icons and profile banners and junk like that for those events, because it’s easy to hide

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Ok, interesting to know that.

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Unsure how the CCP will handle that. Some games / anime did the same and still got banned because ppl are complaining about those events being held even outside of their country.

Well because OW2 is huge I guess it shouldn’t be a problem.

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it’s less about skill and more about revenue that can save the game

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Ftfy

But steam does a really smart thing and separated recent reviews from all reviews. It doesn’t matter if they don’t as long as reviews overall trend upward. And they have been. If I see a game with negative overall and positive recently I think the game made changes and improved even knowing nothing else. That’s all that matters.

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It was active in Poland after like 2 weeks

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I think this is absolutely great news, multiplayer players are essential regardless of country of origin, and they’re just people who want to play the same game as you.

However, what may discourage Chinese gamers from returning to playing is certainly not having been able to experience the various seasons which had multiple free contents (especially the old Battle Passes, which now have a power to purchase/obtain skins much lower than ours) and events that we do NOT know when or IF they will return (catch a mari, community map atlases, April Fools patch 2023-2024, etc.). or they missed all the technical evolution of the old and new characters, and this is really sad and discouraging for a Chinese player. the only advantage they would find is that they don’t experience the first (disastrous) months of overwatch in its unacceptable bugs. but nothing else.

I don’t think to have seen Apex, Valorant or League of Legends banned in China despite the themes they bring :sweat_smile:. there will simply be an adaptation between dubbing and lyrics, it wouldn’t be the first time this has happened.

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Good news

It was a matter of time before they reached an agreement

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will they rebuild blizzard statues again :joy: i would like to see a tracer statue but if they fall out again i dont want to see her statue pulled down.

I think they should suggest mei statue it would cute and wholesome and i doubt they will have the heart to take down mei if something falls apart again between the two.

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It will be hilarious if they don’t get their old accounts back.

The game just became 10 times better.

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the accounts are all safe and active, they can still login to other servers like kr sg etc
We were just getting used to having them around in sg after the initial competetive toxicness they mellowed down to sg standards overtime, now our q times will probably go up a bit when they go back not much i guess.

Anyway its good to see china back that was a huge playerbase and they love overwatch to bits.