Wonder when the store will start having loot boxes and gear sets for sale. Losing Chinese players is going to be a HUGE financial hit.
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Good riddance, now Blizzard can stop focusing so much on the Chinese audiences and their stupid censorship requirements, and focus more on western audiences.
Them constantly having to go through and make everything twice to satisfy china’s stupid censorship and regulation nonsense could not have been helping with the already slow turn out of content.
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Most Chinese players that are super good play on US servers anyways.
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More likely Blizzard doesn’t want to enter new contracts with the Microsoft acquisition on the horizon, or at least without bringing Microsoft into the conversation. Highly doubtful they don’t have something signed or at least agreed upon before the NetEase agreement expires in January 2023.
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Now blizzard will capitulate even harder to back into the market.
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The problem is that China controls access to the internet. They monitor everything of their citizens. They won’t be able to route to a US server without being jailed.
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The whole “you can’t VPN” thing isn’t really enforced at all, it just exists so that IF Winnie the Pooh ever wanted to arrest you, he’d have an excuse to do it. There are actually a lot of “laws” like that in mainland China lol, but the average game-playing 30 year old virgin won’t ever become important enough that the government would want to arrest them, so it all works out in the end. It does suck for the big streamers though, even though it’s technically just a rule with no support, they still wouldn’t want to broadcast that they’re using a VPN to access foreign games.
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That is true.
3% of ActivisionBlizz net earnings last year, if it was “huge” they would have come to terms.
Probably make more from Diablo Immoral which will continue to be supported under a different license agreement.
I’m sure they aren’t sweating the deal. Especially with the company changing hands with Microsoft most likely.
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It hasn’t been decided yet. China is still getting Dragonflight, and negotiations will be underway to get them patch content beyond the base release.
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inaccurate. Chinese folk use VPNS often it’s not really enforced law.
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Interesting.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/11/17/blizzard-ybarra-email-netease/
Some highlights:
NetEase’s expiring contracts constituted approximately 3% of Activision Blizzard’s net revenues in 2021
comes out to $264 million
NetEase sent out an email blast Wednesday evening informing media that “there were material differences on key terms,” and that the two parties could not reach a deal. The press release noted that the licensed Blizzard games “represented low single digits as a percentage of NetEase’s total revenues and net income in 2021 and in the first nine months of 2022.”
NetEase’s head of partnerships Simon Zhu wrote in a LinkedIn post Thursday that “one day, when what has happened behind the scene [sic] could be told, developers and gamers will have a whole new level understanding of how much damage a jerk can make.”
Seems like there’s financial and personality disagreements in the mix.
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imagine losing over 200 million a year because people don’t know how to play nice 
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hope chinese players will come to US servers. more diversity is great
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Think more information needs to come out before a judgement like that can be made. Im reading Simon’s linkedin comments and someone posted this:
Here AB is cliaming that NetEase was asking for “unacceptable level of control of the games’ intellectual property and how games were launched and operated”
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Genuine question but why DID they have to do that with bones and what-not? Do they think we’re some weird bone-worshipping barbarians or something?
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I can tell you one thing, theres going to be less Gold Sellers spamming it up.
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China uses “protecting the poor children from violence and death and boobies” as an excuse to also censor any potential political commentaries. Obviously, not everything will have something that they’ll want to censor for political reasons, but they want the POWER to censor everything should they need to. So, what they do is they make their censorship laws for foreign entertainment so comically tight that they are technically within right to censor absolutely anything. The bones thing is really just an excuse.
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…So we can we start discussing Winnie the Pooh again, without offending his clone?
Wonderful! I’ll start.
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