Chao News client reporter Zhang Feng
After a year, NetEase and Blizzard, which had "broken up unhappily", came to the news of "reunion". On the evening of December 25, as soon as the news of "NetEase and Blizzard restarting cooperation" came out, the discussion of related topics quickly rushed to the hot search on Weibo.
According to the Financial Associated Press, in the past period, Blizzard, a well-known American game production and publishing company, negotiated the "return of the national server" with a number of domestic game manufacturers, and finally chose to re-cooperate with NetEase. However, as of press time, neither NetEase nor Blizzard have made a direct response to this matter.
Eleven months ago, with the "breakup" of NetEase and Blizzard, Blizzard Entertainment's national game service was also suspended, which caused an uproar at the time. In the nearly a year since the service was closed, many major domestic manufacturers have reported news of cooperation with Blizzard's national service, "I found Tencent, I found Byte, and I also found Station B, but there was no result." ”
NetEase's previous team responsible for operating Blizzard's national server has been disbanded at the beginning of this year, and it is unlikely that the team will be reorganized for Blizzard in a short period of time. If the two do reach a cooperation, NetEase and Blizzard will need to rebuild the national server operation team and test the servers and related systems, so the games that players are looking forward to may have to wait half a year or more for the game to go live again.
In response to the news of the re-cooperation between the two, NetEase said that it would not respond, and Blizzard China also said that there is no information to share at present.
But it is worth paying attention to the signs that the World of Warcraft community in NetEase's gamer forum APP "NetEase God" has recently resumed the update, adding new content including the Battle of the Center of the Earth and the Warcraft Exploration Server. After the previous breakdown of the cooperation between Blizzard and NetEase, the last news in the Warcraft section of this APP was the announcement of the suspension of the service. At present, the suspension announcement has disappeared, and the community update has begun to resume. There is an opinion that this is to prepare for the return of Blizzard's national server.
In this regard, netizens have turned on the ridicule mode.
The news rushed to the hot search, although netizens questioned and complained about Blizzard's practices and "character", but everyone had high expectations for the cooperation between the two, after all, in the previous 14 years of cooperation, Blizzard's games attracted hundreds of thousands of users in China, and the previous breakdown of the cooperation between the two also caused an uproar on the whole network. After the game was suspended, many players switched to the Asian server, and if the two cooperate again, I believe that many old players will return.
A retrospective
Blizzard and NetEase announced a partnership on August 13, 2008 to operate World of Warcraft, Warcraft III: Remastered, StarCraft series, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch and Diablo III in Chinese mainland.
On November 17, 2022, Blizzard issued a unilateral statement saying that it would suspend most of Blizzard's game services in Chinese mainland due to the expiration of the existing licensing agreement with NetEase on January 23, 2023.
Subsequently, NetEase responded that NetEase has been doing its best to negotiate with Activision Blizzard, hoping to promote the renewal of the contract. After lengthy negotiations, it was still unable to agree on some key terms of the partnership with Activision Blizzard.
From 0:00 on January 24, 2023, all Blizzard games on the national server will officially cease operation, and all games cannot be logged in to play.
On October 13, 2023, Microsoft officially announced the completion of the $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which is widely regarded by gamers as the hope of Blizzard's national server restart.