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Blizzard Games in China: Potential Revival Through Server Leasing in Korea

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It appears Blizzard plans to bring back WoW in China by renting servers in Korea.

On January 22, 2023, World of Warcraft was shut down in China, giving players the chance to download and save their account data in the hope that the service might be restored in the future.

Nico_oq, a trusted Blizzard news source in Asia, shared an update stating that Blizzard is considering leasing the operating rights for its games to an unspecified company.

A source knowledgeable about the situation mentioned, "experts are already setting up servers independently, and with Blizzard's approval, they believe they could run Blizzard games in China by renting servers from Korea."

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Is it even allowed? Afaik, China requires every foreign company to operate through local partner company and also to store all user data locally in China. If they are planning on renting servers from Korea and to operate externally, there is a risk that Chinese side could block their access.

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20 hours ago, Arcling said:

Is it even allowed? Afaik, China requires every foreign company to operate through local partner company and also to store all user data locally in China. If they are planning on renting servers from Korea and to operate externally, there is a risk that Chinese side could block their access.

If the Korean company already has a local partner and an established reputation operating in China, that would solve that angle. Blizzard loses a little bit more of the revenue by paying an additional middle man, but its better than no revenue.

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2 hours ago, SidonisAntares said:

If the Korean company already has a local partner and an established reputation operating in China, that would solve that angle. Blizzard loses a little bit more of the revenue by paying an additional middle man, but its better than no revenue.

True, but some issues still remain, like censorship and laws to publish games are getting much harsher (the reason they left in the first place, also because they would earn less money). So it sounds like they would be returning into the worse deal, perhaps even worse one than the one rejected before.

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16 hours ago, Arcling said:

True, but some issues still remain, like censorship and laws to publish games are getting much harsher (the reason they left in the first place, also because they would earn less money). So it sounds like they would be returning into the worse deal, perhaps even worse one than the one rejected before.

It's also possible that the government has had time to actualize the revenue they lost from Blizzard pulling out, plus taking away a wildly popular MMO goes against the "bread and circuses" required to complement the totalitarian leadership style of the ruling party.

Edited by SidonisAntares

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5 hours ago, SidonisAntares said:

It's also possible that the government has had time to actualize the revenue they lost from Blizzard pulling out, plus taking away a wildly popular MMO goes against the "bread and circuses" required to complement the totalitarian leadership style of the ruling party.

This would be a reasonable thing to do. For now, it doesn't seem like China's current leadership is very reasonable, they are all about tightening the control. China's internet is already quite isolated from the rest of the world, with a lot of sites being blocked. For example, they do have very strict limits on how many hours per day an underage person can play online.

Funny thing about Blizzard leaving China: it's possible they left due to mistranslation during negotiations. Something about Netease telling them about laws getting stricter, so no matter where they would go, same rules would apply. They might have misunderstood it as something that Netease demanded. At least this is one of possible reasons, I remember there was an article about it here on Icy Veins. So in hindsight, it seems like they messed up and now they would probably have to return with a worse financial arrangement.

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Well, the Chinese government has a big problem right now with all these young graduates not able to get jobs, so "pressure valves" like online gaming that keep them off the streets and out of political rallies might suddenly seem more appealing?

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