After a year of speculation, the dust has finally settled on Blizzard's return to China. Blizzard China and NetEase have reunited and started to cooperate again to bring the Battle.net national server back to players. The published games covered in this partnership include: World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and other franchises based on the respective game universes of Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo, and StarCraft. The game is expected to return to Chinese mainland in the summer of 2024.
For old players of Blizzard's national server, especially players of "World of Warcraft" and "Hearthstone", the player's game progress is the most critical, after all, there was an "electronic urn" at that time. At the same time that Blizzard and NetEase reconciled, the major Blizzard game national server social accounts, including the official of the "World of Warcraft" national server, said that they would ensure that the account data of old players will be kept intact when the game's national server server is opened. By the way, there will be another statue of Blood Roar. Of course, as Blizzard's old partner, there should be no problem with game data recovery.
In addition to Blizzard's return, Microsoft, which is now Blizzard's financier, has also announced that it will deepen its cooperation with NetEase, and in the new agreement, Microsoft will try to bring NetEase's games to Xbox and other platforms. Phil Spencer, head of Xbox games at Microsoft, said that bringing Blizzard's legendary game back to China while exploring how to bring more new games to Xbox demonstrates Microsoft's commitment to bringing more games to more players around the world. Although the two have reconciled, fans and players who have been tossed for a year have also been polarized, and how many old players can be saved by keeping game data. After all, many of the players who insisted on playing in groups every week back then are now middle-aged, and the national server was closed a year ago, perhaps Blizzard helped these old players stop their pace. In the face of the pressures of life, I don't know how many players still have time to log in to Battle.net.