According to an exclusive report from the South China Morning Post, the NetEase team currently located in China has almost disbanded, and a number of companies have traveled to the United States to negotiate with Blizzard, but the new agent should not be able to negotiate before it is closed.
Foreign media reported that the NetZhiyi team was basically disbanded
According to the South China Morning Post, according to sources, most of the employees of NetEase's Shanghai NetEase Network Technology Shanghai branch have left. The dissolution of the Shanghai team dispelled speculation on Chinese social media that Blizzard and NetEase could strike a last-minute deal.
Chinese gaming giant NetEase is dismantling the local team responsible for running U.S. game publisher Blizzard Entertainment's licensed games after the two sides ended one of the most lucrative and enduring U.S.-China businesses, a partnership in the world's largest gaming market, according to three people familiar with the matter.
According to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity, Shanghai-based subsidiaries of NetEase, a subsidiary of NetEase, China's second-largest gaming company, have laid off staff or arranged for "most of its employees" to be transferred internally. The information was private, and NetEase did not make an official response on Friday.
According to a person familiar with the matter, the team had no more than 100 people before it was disbanded, and most of them left in November after NetEase and Blizzard made it clear that they would not renew their 14-year licensing agreements. A small number of technicians were transferred to other teams in Shanghai.
"There seems to be no hope of extending the agreement," said another person familiar with the matter, adding that the team is not a big division at NetEase, and most of the members are operations staff, because the game development is handled by Blizzard in the United States.
About 10 team members stayed to handle logistical work around various game pauses, such as technical and customer service issues, but their stay was unlikely to exceed six months, a third person said.
A number of companies traveled to the United States to negotiate with Blizzard, but negotiations were not reached before closing
NetEase's agreement with Blizzard, a subsidiary of video game holding company Activision Blizzard, expires on Jan. 23.
Online services for seven Blizzard games, including World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Overwatch, Diablo III, StarCraft II, Warcraft III: Remastered and Heroes of the Storm, will be suspended the following day Chinese mainland.
But there is a Blizzard game that will continue to be offered. The mobile game Diablo: Immortal, co-developed by NetEase and Blizzard, will remain operational under a separate agreement. A source added that the team running the game is based at NetEase's Hangzhou headquarters and is not affected by the layoffs.
The dissolution of the Shanghai team dispelled speculation on Chinese social media that Blizzard and NetEase could strike a last-minute deal.
Blizzard said in December that it was in talks with some potential partners in China. But one of the sources said that while several Chinese companies have sent representatives to the U.S. to negotiate, none of them appear likely to reach an agreement with Blizzard before Jan. 23.
NetEase founder and CEO Ding Lei owns all of the company, but he resigned as legal representative and executive chairman at the end of 2022. According to online job postings, the entity is still hiring for various positions such as game developers and software engineers as it seeks to expand into other businesses.
Little O said
As time passed, the days of national service slowly decreased. There are still 10 days left before the scheduled closure date, but Blizzard China has not announced any exact news, even the "electronic urn" system that was previously told to players has not been followed up.
At present, the negotiations of the new agent have progressed, but it seems that the time for finalization is relatively far away, and it seems that the closure of the service is inevitable, and we can only look forward to the time of reopening the service.
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