Why is Blizzard partnering with NetEase?

General Discussion
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I’m hoping someone can clarify why Blizzard would do such a thing. I understand they were partnered with NetEase in China previously, but why not find someone new after NetEase released Marvel Rivals?

To me, it feels like they have sold out to their competitor, because wouldn’t this mean NetEase now owns Rivals and the rights to Overwatch in China? How is OW expected to succeed in China when its being handled by its competition?

Additionally, with NetEase releasing Rivals before Overwatch was running in China again, did they always plan to do this to Overwatch?

If anyone could explain why Blizz would still use NetEase and not find someone new, it would be appreciated, as it makes no sense to me :+1:

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There literally is not another partner for China that blizzard could use. Swapping to another partner could also be expensive. There is a lot of logistics and data sharing going in to it.

Obviously blizzard wants some of that China drip as well so they’ll bend the knee no problems. Thank god a lot of companies are moving away from China thou, especially since there is no neutral zone like Hong Kong left either.

For electronics production I would personally move my business to Vietnam or Taiwan. For software engineering and games I would go to Japan/Korea/Singpore for Asian based studio.

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Because they’re stronger together!

#StandInSolidarity!

:muscle:

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Why not? Having a quick look on Google seemed to show quite a few other companies in China that Western companies have partnered with before. There’s even Tencent that owns Riot Games :person_shrugging:

Not changing cos of logistics sorta sounds lazy too

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There are business agreements. NetEase will not run the Chinese OW the way they like. They follow the contract

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Logistics aren’t unimportant. Starting with another company means that Blizzard have to start from scratch.

NetEase knows how Blizzard works and vice versa. This means that getting the games back up in working order is more efficient and saves significant amounts of money.

The fact that Rivals is also a netease game is of zero relevance.

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Why and how is it zero relevance?

Like they follow patents?

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To get hired by them to work on rivals .

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Why would it be relevant? NetEase make more money if Overwatch is successful. And they’d lose out on other Blizzard games, which is not an unimportant market in China, if they deliberately sabotaged OW in favour of rivals, though I’m unsure what mechanisms they would even have in place to do that.

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Also the other option is tencent riot games ,it’s better for them with netease than tencent.

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How would they?
Wouldn’t OW success mean it takes away from Rivals? So wouldn’t they make less money seeing they have full ownership of Rivals?

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What patents? And what has that to do with the topic of this thread?

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And you call me a shill. A-aron Keller wants to bring us the coveted Tracer skin (with a butt pose MVP) to Starlord.

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China doesn’t mind competition. It’s basically a capitalist country when it comes to business.

NetEase allows OW to operate under local conditions and they take a share of the profit. The contract is purely driven by mutual profits.

NetEase gives the Chinese customers the choice between OW and MR, and whatever people decide they win money.

And Blizzard is allowed to get some cash from China. Blizzard tried to find another better partner but they couldn’t. They were forced to renew the contract with NetEase

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Well you see, when someone buys something on Overwatch on the CN servers, NetEase gets money from that.

Only if you believed their playerbase was mutually exclusive. People can (and will) play both games.

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You say that like it was succeeding without Netease lol

I actually take this as a very good sign. It shows that Netease also sees value in keeping Overwatch around.

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It was a jk obviously :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: would be funny though.

They can Collab like capcom though i don’t know if it’s feasible.

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There are a lot of VA working for them that work on OW. I can imagine a lot of the freelance artist also work on it as well

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Basically NetEase will use now the success of OW to invest in Rivals. The more OW succeds the more Rivals improves :rofl:

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i’m just surprised they don’t go through a better third party like Russia. they should be able to deal in China like a mediator. of course the war and stuff but still, it could work as a better solution.

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