And thus the saga comes to a close(or does it?), the fiendish villain that is communist China has been thwarted in its efforts to aid the burning legion's campaign to destroy the Chinese dimension of Azeroth. Rejoice ye heroes! The Blizzard has returned to China to blanket it in a snowfall that shall last a lifetime /epilogue Now if you'll excuse me I need to go wash the stank of fanboy of my body. | |
Cool, I guess. While I'm not in China, and don't play WoW, I don't care, but I'm glad to see Blizzard get a victory .I love Blizzard. | |
How is that even possible? | |
Well I, for one, can sleep well tonight knowing their economy is back up and running. | |
IIRC a lot of it is pay-to-play but just dirt cheap. | |
Was that picture meant to be a joke about how china doesn't allow skeletons or was that unintentional. | |
Is the above true? Because I don't see much of a point in playing an MMO like WoW if you can't run around with a group of friends or a guild... | |
only 6.7 million? pfff, blizzard could make that in just a booster pack, add in some paid mounts and BAM! all the kiddies will be stealing their dads credit cards in mere seconds, and blizzard makes 12 million before the days through. | |
why are stories from china always so boring? i want a story from japan. they are the crazy ones. | |
In China almost all videogames cost next to nothing. Which is also about the amount people over there make; not a lot of money... I hear a game over there costs about 1/50th of normal pricing... | |
In China people are paid a few dollars a day to grind characters up to level 80 or to make online gold; both to sell to the West. And they "stole" those illegal jobs from eastern European peeps ;-) | |
We missed ya, China. I guess. I don't play on Chinese servers. | |
I agree, WTF? My head just exploded. | |
Let me put it this way. In china WoW is dirt cheap, same with many, many things, because many people there earn next to nothing when compared to here. And I love how they admitted (Indirectly) that AT LEAST 25% of the userbase they brag so much about having is just gold farmers XD | |
" http://www.destructoid.com/china-ends-electric-shock-treatment-for-internet-addicts-139746.phtml " Sorry China.. but you make Japan officially, no longer the kookiest country. (Though Japan is kooky in a good way more then often XD) | |
Also a lot of money may come from sever transfers, sex changes, name changes, ect. I'm guessing my cheap ass people in China don't want to spend a penny more than they have to. | |
This should be interesting to see how many actually come back... this downtime may have broken the addiction for quite a few players. It's amazing what having to do without something for a couple of weeks can do to habits, particularly bad ones. | |
Hey welcome back China. We missed you...even though we never talk. Love Europe. | |
And then, the people of China rejoiced in the return of their favourite pastime. | |
By people you mean also bots that simply destroy the economy so that gold is worth nothing? | |
Ah, I see what you mean. | |
...And there was much rejoicing. And deaths caused by nonstop WoW-playing, but that's a small price to pay, right? | |
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World of Warcraft Returns to China
World of Warcraft has finally returned to China, but not before costing Chinese operator NetEase a truckload of money maintaining the game during its downtime.
Activision dropped The9, the original Chinese operator of World of Warcraft, in favor of NetEase in June, in what Gamasutra says was an effort to bring in a higher royalty rate on the game. Unfortunately, the changeover also brought some rather serious side effects: Heightened scrutiny from the Chinese government, which demanded changes to the game's content, followed by an extended closed beta test that ran from July 30 to September 14.
That's been an expensive proposition for NetEase, which was reportedly forced to spend more than $146,000 per day to maintain the servers during the testing period. For those of you without calculators, that translates into well over $6.7 million down the crapper. Making things worse, NetEase forked over an estimated $25 million payment to Activision Blizzard for the rights to the game and also agreed to the company's demand for higher royalty payments than The9 was paying.
It may still prove to be a profitable maneuver, however; a Morgan Stanley report issued last months predicted a 30 percent growth in game sales volume at NetEase and a four percent growth in its market share by 2010. However, according to "industry insider" Wang Menglong, content in the Chinese version of the game lags behind the Taiwanese and U.S. editions, which could ultimately drive users away, a situation the extended downtime certainly isn't going to help.
As for Activision, it's not expected to suffer unduly from all this nonsense: Analyst Colin Sebastian of Lazard Capital Markets estimated in late July that despite providing nearly half of the World of Warcraft user base, China accounts for only six percent of the total revenues generated by the game.
Source: Alibaba.com
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