It's been almost a year since Blizzard and NetEase broke up, with Microsoft's successful acquisition of Blizzard. Recently, there has been gossip on the Internet claiming that Blizzard has signed a domestic **, and it is only a matter of time before the national server is restarted. However, as of press time, there is still no official news from the relevant parties, and the reopening of Blizzard's national server is still full of doubts.
A number of news points to NetEase Blizzard's continued edge.
On December 7th, a well-known anchor said in the live broadcast room that Blizzard's national service was about to restart and would be officially announced on December 15th. On December 18, the anchor publicly apologized and called the incident his "mouth and failure to clarify the misunderstanding in time".
But in fact, the return of Blizzard's national service is not groundless, for example, Huang Xudong, a well-known figure in the industry, recently broke out, "Blizzard has signed a new **, new ** is two words, and in the new ** business, Blizzard's family bucket is not a big business." It is worth noting that Huang Xudong has a certain coffee position in the Blizzard game circle, and when Blizzard NetEase broke up before, "Blizzard proposed to renew the contract for another half a year according to the existing conditions, but was rejected by NetEase" was what he first broke out, and then it was confirmed to be true.
In addition, there are also people on social media who claim to be former NetEase employees, and now they have been recalled by the company to prepare for the reopening of the national service. In addition, according to the information on the official website of the Shanghai High People's Court, there is currently only one case left between NetEase and Blizzard, which will be in January 2024**, while there were four cases NetEase suing Blizzard before (all in January 2024**), which means that NetEase and Blizzard have settled or withdrawn the lawsuit in most cases.
All the current news points to the continuation of NetEase and Blizzard. For the reopening of the national server, Blizzard should be said to be more positive (the surging news previously reported that Blizzard has been negotiating with a number of game manufacturers, including NetEase and Tencent, about the return of the national server), but domestic manufacturers may not be so active.
Not making money is still the main reason.
Blizzard's games "World of Warcraft", "Hearthstone", "Diablo" and so on have a good reputation in the industry, and its game "Overwatch" has also won the "Oscar of the game industry" TGA annual award, and it also has quite a lot of loyal players in China. But it must be emphasized that Blizzard games are not very profitable.
Unlike the recharge amount of domestic mobile games, the semi-annual card of "World of Warcraft" is 360 yuan, and players can't play it for a year to recharge 648 in mobile games. The rest, such as "StarCraft" and "Warcraft", are still buyout games, and their ability to attract money is quite average.
Looking at the major domestic manufacturers, whether it is Tencent's "Glory of Kings", "Peace Elite", or NetEase's "Egg Boy Party", "Against the Cold", etc., the ability to absorb money is probably far more than all Blizzard games, before NetEase Blizzard broke up, NetEase said that "Blizzard games only account for a small part of revenue", according to NetEase's 2019, 2020 and 2021 annual reports, revenue from ** games accounted for its total revenue respectively1% and 95%, while NetEase ** many games, of which Blizzard games account for only a part.
"Don't make money" was the confidence of NetEase to refuse Blizzard's price increase to renew the contract at that time, and it was also the difficulty of Blizzard's national server reopening now.
Yangtze Evening News Purple Cow News reporter Jiang Tiansheng.
Proofreading Tao Shangong.