No World of Warcraft in China for A Few Weeks
China is one of World of Warcraft’s biggest markets, and Blizzard knows this. But they need to take a risk to secure their IP, even if only 53% of players are guaranteed to stay with the game.
The9, the company responsible for WoW’s Chinese servers, was reportedly caught by Blizzard developing World of Fight, a blatant WoW rip-off, back in May. In response, Blizzard decided to switch the servers to another company called Netease.
The Chinese World of Warcraft servers went down on Sunday, but according to the Wall Street Journal Netease isn’t prepared and the servers won’t be back up until later this month.
According to an online poll on Chinese news side Sina.com only 53% of players plan to continue playing, while 21% were going to quit and another 23% was going to wait and see. This could mean the game will lose at least a million players.
In the meantime, The9 is falling back on World of Flight to make up for Blizzard’s cash cow. The whole debacle probably won’t affect players in other regions of the world in the least, but it is an interesting tidbit.
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yep, I was playing Chinese WOW, since I have been living in Southwest China since 2006. It’s a bugger, we had to wait a long time for BC and we all knew we would wait for WOTLK, but we didnt expect not beeing able to play at all.
Who knows how long we will have to wait until servers are up.
Personaly I think it could be a long wait and it’s not only that Netease isnt ready (not even sure if that is true, think about the Data that needs to be transfered, cant upload that in 1 day).
What I am worried more about is that The9 has sued Blizzard and I guess as long as the trial isnt finished, we wont see much of the game
As for loosing players, I would like to quote from an article (http://www.worldsinmotion.biz/2009/05/wow_china_transition_to_spell.php):
“Asia accounts for about 50 percent of WoW’s global userbase, suggests Sebastian — but contributes less than 10 percent of total revenues because of its licensing structure and timecard-based payment model.”