It Is The End Of Blizzard Games In China
So it begins.
— Peter Yu (@Peterodox) January 18, 2023
It's funny that here we call this file 'electronic urn', and the process of generating this file 'cremation'.
Sadly, players won't be able to gather in the city and wait for that final moment together like last time, b/c this service will go down with the servers. pic.twitter.com/k04HqDfiMF
It is a real sad news for gamers in China as Blizzard games like World of Warcraft and Overwatch will be unplayable in China for the foreseeable future. This drastic measure has taken place after Activision Blizzard and China’s NetEase Games failed to renew their licensing agreement, so now the Chinese WoW Servers will finally shut down after 14 years.
This is not something that has happened for the first time as in 2009 WoW shut down in the region, for a few months but this time it’s going to be a long wait. The two companies had been partners for 14 years, with Blizzard’s MMORPG having operated in the country for a few years under a separate company prior to Blizzard and NetEase’s partnership.
This news broke out late last year as Activision Blizzard announced that it would not be renewing its contract with NetEase, with game services set to end on January 23. Now the time has finally come, but the WoW players are still hopeful. They are now forced to download nearly two decades worth of character data in the hope that the game’s servers will one day return and their characters can be restored.
But it is still unclear when Blizzard games might return to China due to all the bad blood between Blizzard and NetEase, but in the midst of it all the real victims are the players in China who live and breathe in these worlds followed by the Blizzard developers who have spent all their passion and talent to build these amazing worlds.
