Text/A white demon on Star Annihilation Mountain
In the past year or so, everyone should have heard countless times such as "Blizzard is returning", "Blizzard is going to be ** agent" and other news, 135 returns 246 to refute rumors, and Blizzard's return cycle law on Sunday has also been generated.
It wasn't until April 9 that the news was finally confirmed.
On April 10, Blizzard China and NetEase Games officially announced that Blizzard games will return to the Chinese mainland market this summer.
As of today, Blizzard games have been out of operation in mainland China for 442 days - but there is finally an approximate point in time, isn't it? In other words, the series of memes about Blizzard's return can finally come to an end.
This diagram has to be replaced with something like this:
Looking back, when the news of the breakup between NetEase and Blizzard was just announced, some people scolded Caldecott because of his already bad reputation, and Zhu Yuan, the general manager of NetEase Games in charge of investment cooperation, said at that time that "developers and players will have a new understanding of how much damage a bastard can do", which made the outside world point the finger at the most suspicious former Activision Blizzard president.
After the chaos and noise, a large number of players began to help find a "pick-up man" for the Blizzard family bucket after the breakup, after all, most players did not want to lose them so suddenly.
Tencent: They have a basis for cooperation with Action on COD. In Beijing, which itself has a channel of a steam platform and a state-owned enterprise, ByteDance, which has abundant funds and intends to enter the game industry, is regarded as the most powerful takeover......
But in the same way, although most players couldn't imagine it at that time, they desperately hoped that after this farce, NetEase and Blizzard would abandon their previous suspicions and re-cooperate.
Obviously, players don't want to see the 2009 Endless Crusade happen again. As a former agent, Jiucheng as a domestic "World of Warcraft" agent, the news of the change of agency rights made Jiucheng's stock price plummet by nearly 25% on the day it was announced, which was obviously unacceptable to Jiucheng, and what followed was the difficulty and bumps in the process of agency transfer.
"NetEase" has been repeatedly reported by it, claiming that the company is a Sino-foreign joint venture and is not allowed to operate online games independently. You must know that according to national regulations, after the change of online game agents, it is necessary to re-apply for copyright, and this series of reports also led to NetEase being approved to continue operating "World of Warcraft" in February 2010, a full half year later - but it does not include the key "Wrath of the Lich King", because it did not get a version number, and this version was not launched until two years later. It is precisely for this reason that everyone has been quite worried about the matter of "changing agents".
Fortunately, the idea in the player's mind finally came true, and NetEase Blizzard chose to reunite.
It's just that after more than a year of hiatus, the return of these games will also face a lot of problems.
In the latest announcement, "when the server is opened, we will ensure that your account data is kept intact", which also shows that NetEase has indeed fulfilled its original promise. In the "Letter to Blizzard Players" released when it was about to stop running, it said: business belongs to business, games belong to games, value the voice of players, value everything players pay for the game, and properly protect everyone's game assets and memories.
But how many players are there in the original place?
After all, Blizzard's entire family bucket is an online game, aside from the "StarCraft" series, which has not been updated much, the missing version of "World of Warcraft" in the past two years, and the card decks that Hearthstone players have not been able to get...... To sum it up: how should the version be chased?
Of course, for me personally, it's relatively simple, and for a player who has only been exposed to Blizzard since Overwatch, it's hard for you to tell me too much of the heartfelt, so-called sentimental stuff. Today, two years later, all I have of is "5V5", "the second generation shooter feels a little strange", "Tekken has become a T, and the new hero Sojen is too hungry to aim and not brainless" These can be called ancient stereotypes.
On the other hand, after the official suspension of Blizzard games in January last year, many friends who have feelings for Blizzard games choose to switch to Asian servers and Taiwanese servers, but there will also be many relatively light players like me who have new games as daily entertainment.
Players who have abandoned the pit and switched to other games, players who have taken root in the outer server. Regardless of the part, it will take a while to get back started and keep up with the version.
But for those of you who have been waiting, it's a happy ending, isn't it?
They waited until the day they re-entered the game, and the "cyber urn" (the player's own local backup of game progress and data) was not used at that time, and that was enough.
The re-cooperation after more than a year, combined with NetEase's original sentence "I believe that people who meet can always meet", has a different kind of romantic flavor in it.
The only thing that's a little funny is that if NetEase and Blizzard broke up because of the uneven distribution of benefits, and it was the players who were injured, then now NetEase and Blizzard have chosen to get back together, and it is still the players who are injured.
Time may heal everything, but it's definitely not that fast. At least I still remember how much abuse Blizzard attracted when the operation of wanting to "ride a donkey to find a horse" and "divorce without leaving home" was announced, and NetEase's domineering move to dismantle the blood roar sculpture made a group of players applaud in the live broadcast room of "Naraka: Bladepoint".
So, sometimes life experience is useful: couples and couples quarrel, and other people don't get involved in helping out. How righteous people looked back then, and how much they look like clowns now......
Oh I almost forgot, I still have a small question about Blizzard's return:
While the announcement does mention the "Game Universe series", why is there only one game that doesn't have a name, is it definitely dead?