Author | Akagi Jarko
Edit| Mia
After 443 days of suspension, NetEase and Blizzard officially announced their "reunion" on April 10, and Blizzard's games will return to the Chinese mainland market this summer.
The "steps" seem to have been given by Microsoft. After the two sides joined forces again, in addition to recasting the glory of the past - facilitating the return of "World of Warcraft", "Hearthstone", "Warcraft", "Overwatch", "Diablo", "StarCraft" and other "national server family buckets", Microsoft Games also reached a new agreement with NetEase: try to bring new NetEase games to Xbox and other platforms.
On the compound day, NetEase's U.S. stock price rose 3.76%, and Hong Kong stock price rose as high as 2.41%. The day after the compound (April 11), the official Weibo of "World of Warcraft" in China announced that as of April 10, 2024, the number of pre-orders for the "World of Warcraft" national server has reached 2 million.
After Blizzard NetEase broke up, the "Blood Roar" statue (a tomahawk in "World of Warcraft") in the NetEase park, which had been demolished live in the live broadcast room of NetEase's "Naraka: Infinite", announced that it would be recast, and a separate "Recast Blood Roar" section was opened on the official website of the "World of Warcraft" national server, calling on players to leave messages to participate in the co-creation. The letter to players released by both teams also has the title "Work hard to heal, and then recover in excess".
After a year and a half, this long-awaited reunion has long been not only an exchange of interests between Microsoft Games and NetEase Games, but also a new boost to the domestic and international game market. In addition to feelings, the return of Blizzard and NetEase Games, which have opened up new channels, are the beautiful visions of "excess recovery" of both parties really easy to realize?
An undignified breakup, a win-win ending
The last breakup between Blizzard and NetEase was not decent, let alone a win-win situation.
After the two parties officially announced their "breakup" in 2022, Blizzard Entertainment pointed out in the announcement that the two parties did not reach a renewal agreement that was in line with Blizzard's operating principles and commitments to players and employees. The de facto reason for the breakup has been tacitly understood by the industry. In addition to agency fees, according to media reports, one of the important differences between the two parties in 2022 is that the agreement stipulates that NetEase will assist in the development of Blizzard's other IP mobile games for global distribution, but will only enjoy a revenue share in the Chinese market. Blizzard's harsh agreements were attributed to Blizzard's current CEO Bobby Kotick, which directly contributed to the breakdown of the 14-year "marriage".
Blizzard's withdrawal from the Chinese market did not go well. Not only have the veteran executives changed drastically, Activision Blizzard President Mike Ibarra, Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick, and Blizzard Chief Design Officer Alan Adem have left one after another. Blizzard's year-long "no one to take over" in China has also made it bear the "infamy" of players and the embarrassment of the industry.
After Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion in October last year, Blizzard's situation gradually recovered. In its financial report for the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, Microsoft included Blizzard's performance in the Xbox business unit for the first time: Xbox business revenue increased by 61%, making it Microsoft's third largest business unit.
It was also after being taken over by Microsoft that the news of Blizzard's reunion with NetEase became more and more frequent. You must know that NetEase is also the agent of Microsoft's well-known game "Minecraft", and the two sides have successfully renewed the contract in the past two years.
On the other hand, NetEase Games, which lost the agency right of "Blizzard Family Bucket", is not doing badly. The industry generally believes that the loss of the agency rights of games such as "World of Warcraft" and "Hearthstone" will bring challenges to NetEase's agent status, but in fact, agency services are not NetEase's main "nuggets", and self-developed products, especially self-developed mobile products, are its main territory.
In the fourth quarter of 2023, NetEase's net revenue was RMB27.1 billion, and the net revenue from games and related value-added services reached RMB20.9 billion. In the past year, "Against the Water Cold Mobile Game" arrived as scheduled, "Egg Boy Party" continued to seize the casual game track, with more than 500 million registered users, the number of simultaneous online users on Chinese New Year's Eve in 2024 exceeded 40 million, and the song adaptation on Chinese New Year's Eve appeared on the online Spring Festival Gala and other actions, all proving its national temperament. After reaching an agreement with Microsoft to enter the Xbox platform, NetEase has an additional distribution channel advantage, and Microsoft can continue to promote its mobile game business strategy.
Broken mirror reunion, Microsoft sword pointing at mobile games?
The memory of 14 years of cooperation is now a new beginning in another sense. First, the operating studio needed to be reorganized, and the team of about 100 people responsible for Blizzard's game operations in Shanghai had been disbanded. After this re-cooperation, the daily operation of the game will be handed over to the NetEase Interactive Entertainment Operation Center in Guangzhou, and NetEase's Leihuo Studio will be responsible for marketing.
After breaking up with NetEase, Blizzard's national server agency has become the focus of the industry, and the "scandal" with the top echelon players in the domestic game circle has been spread all over the place. From Tencent, Perfect, Byte to Alibaba, and later there were "scandals" with companies such as Bilibili and miHoYo, which were subsequently denied.
Regardless of whether it is true to discuss whether it is true to take over Blizzard. If there is a new company to represent Blizzard games, the version number is obviously the biggest problem. If you change agents, you will most likely need to go through the approval process again, and it is even more difficult to import the version in the tight game version market. According to media reports, the approval speed for imported games is about 20 months, and there are only 109 imported versions that have passed the review in 2023, of which 20 are terminal games.
This cooperation not only strengthens Microsoft Blizzard's development of mobile games, but also establishes the strategic position of NetEase International. Previously, NetEase cooperated with Blizzard to develop the first mobile game of the classic IP Diablo, and Blizzard's self-developed "Warcraft Wars" is also quite popular among players.
Although the former achieved $100 million in revenue in 8 weeks, proving its commercial value in the international market, its krypton metallicness has caused controversy among players. In 2022, the Diablo information website Maxroll team announced the closure of the Diablo Immortal section, and removed all the various data collections and career strategy sharing they had done for a year and a half, just because the team believed that the Diablo Immortal store would cause some players to become addicted to gambling and violate the team's values. Unless Blizzard restricts the infinite Krypton system, and gives Zero Krypton players some hope of playing. Otherwise, the team does not plan to reopen the Diablo Immortal zone again.
The national service "family bucket" has not arrived, and a large number of surrounding posts have been revitalized first?
Frankly speaking, for a long time, "World of Warcraft" and "Hearthstone" have gradually become "emotional games" in the eyes of players, and they cannot be compared with today's mobile products with hundreds of millions of turnover.
Since around 2012, World of Warcraft has entered a period of decline, with an average of between 300,000 and 600,000 online users, far less than the previous million. In the days when Blizzard was going to be lonely, the terminal game market was divided by Riot Games and V Society, that is, "League of Legends" and "Dota 2".
On the one hand, although it is difficult to hit a new high in daily activity, the large number of old players accumulated behind the emotional game should not be underestimated, and interestingly, after the suspension of the national server last year, the Asian server of "World of Warcraft" hit a new high in daily activity, and once returned to the first position of MMORPG, reportedly as high as 1.29 million. This means that after the two parties broke up, they once boosted the game to produce a second curve.
On the other hand, Blizzard games are not only the emotional bonds of players, but also the emergence of a large number of peripheral professions and industries, which has laid the foundation for the domestic market. After the two parties broke up, the café in the NetEase Park took the opportunity to launch two drinks, "Blizzard Green Tea" and "Blizzard No Heart", both of which were quickly sold out and sparked heated discussions on the Internet......
After Blizzard left China, the number of active users of the game also declined, but everyone is trying to grab "Blizzard" to play. The huge topic traffic has also made domestic game manufacturers launch Blizzard-like game modes one after another, trying to absorb these heartbroken core players. "Genshin Impact" launched the "Seven Saints Summoning" mode similar to "Hearthstone", NetEase's own game "Against the Cold" opened the "veteran server", and redesigned part of the content according to the game habits of "Warcraft Player", and "resurrected" the discontinued trading card game "Secret Showdown" as a replacement for "Hearthstone"; Tencent launched "World of Taris", which some players said was similar to "World of Warcraft", etc.
Now, although the "family bucket" has not officially returned, the market is fully prepared. As early as March this year, a number of technical videos of "how to choose a career after the return of the national service" appeared on the video website. According to the observation of DataEye Research Institute: Blizzard's sudden return has fed a large number of COSers, most of these COSers have been dressed up in two-dimensional products such as "Genshin Impact" and "Broken Iron", and this COS "Overwatch" role is the first time.
Entertainment unicorns observed that NetEase has added a large number of new related positions, including operation and maintenance, new media operation planning, etc. There is no shortage of recruitment requirements such as "more than 3 years of game experience in World of Warcraft", "love of World of Warcraft", etc. At the same time, a number of positions around Blizzard games such as "World of Warcraft" have also appeared on the recruitment software, including game boosting, anchors, companions, team leaders and other positions. Some entry criteria include "food, shelter, and laundry." You only need to play a good game", "If you can play World of Warcraft", "It doesn't matter if you can't play, just like it" and other highly targeted "tempting" conditions. In terms of this return to China, what is more important is the surrounding ecology that has been raised after the return of the game, which is a wave of dividends for NetEase Games and related practitioners.