The deal between Activision Blizzard and China - NetEase

Community General Discussion
1

According to Activision Blizzard, they’re just having disputes on business related matters.

China reports that Blizzard has asked them 4 unreasonable demands in hope to break their own contract.

First, the share ratio of Blizzard was further increased compared with more than 50% of revenue and net profit during the contract period from 2019 to 2022.

Second, NetEase will develop other IP mobile games of Blizzard for global distribution, but only enjoys the revenue share of the Chinese market, and NetEase must pay a deposit.

Third, regarding the game approval problem in China, Blizzard put forward binding clauses that cannot be guaranteed.

Fourth, when signing the renewal contract, NetEase has to pay two-years of cooperation money in advance, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.

So to me, if we were to believe China, this looks like Blizzard put forward unreasonable demands in hope that NetEase themselves were going to break contract, to which they did.

But one thing that failed was to find another publisher in China that is willing to come to these terms.

So Blizzard tried to go back to NetEase before the deadline by the Chinese government, but they instead declined, and now every Chinese player is unable the game.

So far, I think this is the only “source” available as Blizzard so far has not made a comment or be clear on the situation themselves.

2

Poor Bobby won’t be able to buy a new yacht. An American company is learning they have no power to dictate terms in China which is the next superpower. We are moving to a multipolar world.

1 Like
3

Enough said.

1 Like
4

Must really suck losing all their progress :frowning:

1 Like
5

The key phrase here being “If we were to believe China”, US companies are far from clean, but the stuff Chinese companies get up to (Backed by a “Our own companies first” court system) is also not kosher.

And to top it off, a day or so away from the shutdown, a Chinese WoW-clone showed off a trailer, bits of which were 1:1 copied from WoW, that’s a bit too well-timed to be a complete coincidence, IMO…

2 Likes
6

To be fair, we do that every expansion.

7

never trust american companies

2 Likes
9

Not even close in the same sense. You get to keep all your mounts, mogs etc. that you’ve farmed over the years. They lost everything they put years into.

10

Don’t mind if I disagree with every of those facts.

11

Call me racist if you like but in the land where copyright is ignored maybe Netease will put up their own WoW servers.

12

China is not a race, you are being xenophobic in that case.

13

That’s what China says yes, what actually happened is that NetEase wanted to increase the amount of microtransactions in all Blizzard games (and probably fought hard against the removal of loot boxes in OW2). They then threatened to end the contract with Blizzard if they wouldn’t budge on refusing to increase microtransactions, and now they have to live with it.

Do you genuinely think Blizzard would try to sabotage their relationship with China, knowing it brought them millions of dollars every year? No, they wouldn’t. People can’t keep claiming they only care about money, and also that they would intentionally sabotage their relationship with China (again, costing them millions of dollars every year).

TL;DR: Believing anything from official Chinese sources is like drinking sewage water and trying to convince yourself it’s champagne.

14

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.