The dust has settled, and the time to say goodbye has arrived.
On January 17, Blizzard China officially issued an announcement, saying that due to the failure of negotiations with NetEase, it will follow the announcement of NetEase's suspension of servers and suspend the national server game service on January 23. This means that in a few days, Blizzard games such as World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Diablo 3, and Overwatch: Homecoming will be completely suspended in Chinese mainland.
For the ending of the shutdown, Blizzard threw the pot to NetEase in the announcement, saying that Blizzard took the initiative to negotiate with NetEase last week, hoping to avoid the fate of the shutdown. "Unfortunately, NetEase is reluctant to extend the game service for six months based on the existing terms of cooperation while we are looking for a new partner, so that everyone can continue to play during this time."
NetEase also fought back that night, responding to Blizzard's behavior as "giving and taking, riding a donkey to find a horse, and divorce without leaving the body." ”
The two sides put down their dignity and tore each other apart, so that the melon-eating masses were addicted, but there was no way to imitate millions of players behind them.
Although a month ago, Blizzard and NetEase successively issued statements saying that they would terminate the cooperation after the expiration of the agreement, many players still had luck. This announcement completely cuts off the last possibility of continued cooperation between the two sides.
As for the question of "who is the next successor" that players are most concerned about, it is still a mystery - although Blizzard said that it is "working hard to find national service partners, has opened talks with a number of potential partners, and will share new developments in the future". But players still smelled the ominous omen of "uncertain prospects" from the announcement.
Since landing in China in 1997, Blizzard Games has not been the first time that it has faced a suspension of service, but this time, no one knows whether to temporarily leave or see you forever.
01 Why does Blizzard change agents repeatedly?
It is regrettable that even half a year ago, no one expected that Blizzard games such as World of Warcraft would fall, because no one took over the fields that had to be stopped.
In the more than 20 years since entering China, Blizzard has changed agents three times in its history.
The first agent was Ogilvy Electronics, and in 1997 Blizzard signed an agency operation agreement with Ogilvy Electronics, introducing more than a dozen Blizzard games and their expansion packs.
The second agent was Kyushi. It obtained the World of Warcraft agency in 2004, and during the Nine Cities agency, World of Warcraft players grew rapidly, and by June 2009 Chinese mainland it had nearly 5 million World of Warcraft paying users, accounting for about half of the total number of players in the world.
However, strangely, in 2009, Blizzard suddenly changed agents, and NetEase became the third agent.
After 14 years, in 2023, Blizzard once again chose to change agents, this time which really surprised most people, because NetEase's cooperation with Blizzard has been very high over the years.
An industry insider He Jin analyzed that Blizzard has repeatedly changed agents over the years, and the main reason is because of "money". According to the data, every time Blizzard changed agents in the past, it greatly increased the agency fee and sharing ratio.
During the Nine Cities era, Nine Cities paid Blizzard $13 million a year in agency fees, plus a 22% profit share. When Blizzard later handed over the agency to NetEase, the annual agency fee increased by 5 times to more than $70 million per year, and the share ratio increased to 55%.
According to media reports, the main reason for the breakdown of the cooperation between NetEase and Blizzard is that Blizzard "opened its mouth", requiring further increase in the share ratio, increasing the pricing of national services, allowing NetEase to work for nothing and paying performance deposits.
But unlike previous times when game companies lined up for cooperation, Blizzard now has no choice.
On the one hand, Blizzard's games, especially World of Warcraft, have already entered the sunset era, and the charging mode and game rhythm are no longer suitable for the appetite of young people after 95 and 00, and players lack fresh blood.
"Acting for World of Warcraft requires a lot of money, and those who can afford it must be large domestic game manufacturers", He Jin believes, but the problem is that Blizzard's 7 games have to change agents, which means that the agency has to contribute 7 version numbers. In today's expensive game version, almost no company can handle it.
Moreover, he thinks that Blizzard is too ugly, so that partners are also very concerned about this and are not willing to ask for trouble.
02 Compete for millions of players
With less than a week left before the service, World of Warcraft player Li Xing obviously felt that the atmosphere was becoming more and more tense.
On December 17 last year, Activision Blizzard and NetEase announced the end of their partnership, which set off a huge wave among players like a bombshell, and the discussion on this topic swept the screen for many days at the "Azeroth National Geographic" (NGA forum) where players gathered.
In the following month, Li Xing saw a variety of news: first, Blizzard was negotiating with potential recipients and making optimistic progress; One is that Blizzard intends to launch a game progress data saving feature; Later, it was discovered that NetEase was still recruiting Blizzard Games anti-cheat engineers; Then came the news of the major layoffs of the company in charge of operations.
The intertwining of contradictory news made the hopes in the players' hearts ignite and extinguish, "Everyone was looking for all kinds of clues, trying to deduce that the game would not be closed. Li Xing said, "But now everything is irreparable, whether they want to accept it or not, the players have no way." ”
On the forum, players started discussing half of the topic of spraying Blizzard or NetEase, and half of the discussion about what alternatives are available after the shutdown.
In the face of the upcoming suspension, players have their own ideas. According to his observation, except for a small number of game hardcore players who plan to switch to Asian servers or US servers, most players' ideas are to temporarily find some game transitions after stopping the server and wait for the national server to resume.
And game companies are also moving to attract players to stop.
One of the most anxious is Blizzard, because the shutdown means that players must avoid churn. In 2009, during the suspension of World of Warcraft, the loss rate of magic players exceeded 25%, which is still the peak period of Warcraft, and the current player churn rate will be even higher.
Therefore, in order to retain these players as much as possible, at the end of November, Blizzard split off the global server from the Asian server, and some players found that the recharge page of the Asian server battle network added WeChat and Alipay payment channels, which is undoubtedly a convenient door for national server players.
NetEase, Tencent and other manufacturers are not idle.
NetEase's "Against the Water and Cold" and "Heavenly Oracle" have launched point card suits to cater to Warcraft players. Tencent also launched a domestic MMORPG of "Taris World", which highly imitates World of Warcraft in terms of game art style, scene elements, and world view. Even Tencent found a large number of original World of Warcraft cast to voice the game.
Games such as Sword Net 3, Guild Wars 2, and Final Fantasy 14 have also ushered in a lot of fresh blood. It is reported that after Warcraft announced the suspension of the server, 300,000 players poured into Kingsoft Games' Sword Net 3.
According to the data, the largest number of World of Warcraft national server players was in the Panda Man era in 2012, and the number of active players officially exceeded 3 million. So far, the number of active people in World of Warcraft is still over 1 million.
Li Xing believes that behind the competition of game companies is the outstanding payment ability of World of Warcraft players. On the one hand, World of Warcraft is a pay-for-time game, and players have cultivated good paying habits and willingness. On the other hand, most of the main players of Warcraft are around 30 years old, professionals with stable incomes, and strong ability to pay.
According to the "2021 China Game Industry Report" released by the Game Working Committee of the China Phonological Association and the China Game Industry Research Institute, the actual sales revenue of the Chinese game market in 2021 will be 296.513 billion yuan, and the scale of domestic game users will be 666 million, and according to the above data, the per capita game expenditure is 445 yuan.
According to the World of Warcraft game 180-day half-year card 360 yuan, the cost of playing for a year is about 720 yuan, which means that the annual cost of Warcraft players is 160% of the per capita expenditure of domestic games.
This is still just a basic game expense, in fact, Warcraft players also have a strong payment potential in terms of game peripherals, props, etc. In recent years, Blizzard has also tapped into paid capabilities, such as launching paid upgrades and paid mounts.
In the Spring Festival at the beginning of 2022, NetEase launched a "Swift Ghost Tiger Special Package" priced at 1688 yuan for the nostalgic costume "Burning Expedition" version, although the price is not cheap, but there are many buyers, and even some players spent nearly 40,000 yuan to buy 20 gift packs in one go, allowing the outside world to see the super payment potential of players.
03 It's hard to find a home
Although manufacturers have done their best, it is difficult for Li Xing to find a satisfactory place to live.
Whether it is going to the international server or moving to other games, Warcraft players have encountered unsatisfactory encounters.
In order to solve problems such as network acceleration and binding international mobile phone numbers, players who go to international servers have to pay twice the game cost equivalent to national servers.
More importantly, the rules of the international server game and the discomfort of the community atmosphere gave them a blow.
For example, the common behavior of many national server players is not allowed or even banned in international servers.
Recently, Zhang Hongsheng, co-founder of ImbaTV and the host of the BlizzCon Chinese for many years, revealed on Weibo that his Asian server account was suspended, speculating that the reason was to get the mount of the 60-level Stansom tail king Rivendell, who often entered this dungeon with the role of a death knight, and was mistakenly judged to be a studio violation and was mistakenly blocked. "According to players who were mistakenly blocked, submitting complaints is basically a robot response, and there is no hope of unblocking."
Therefore, Li Xing also judged that because the operation mode, network delay, charging price, game atmosphere, etc. of the foreign server are quite different from the national server, he believes that there will not be many players who really play in the foreign server.
The products launched by domestic game companies are also difficult to meet the appetite of Warcraft players.
Just like no social product in China can shake WeChat's status, although the so-called World of Warcraft killer games have followed, no game can satisfy the critical eyes of World of Warcraft players who have eaten and seen.
Many players have found it difficult to accept other games, whether it is the later Sword Network 3, FF14 or the development of "Taris World" in 2022, the picture quality and special effects are far beyond the World of Warcraft of that year, but the sense of realism and heaviness is still far inferior to Warcraft.
"World of Warcraft is my game terminal." Another player lamented that he has played in Warcraft for ten years, and now playing Warcraft is completely an inertia, and the sunk cost of more than ten years is difficult to replace. "Even if there is a game that can be 100% recreated of World of Warcraft, there is no energy to do it all over again."