Asia Tech Wire (Apr 10) -- NetEase, Blizzard Entertainment and Microsoft jointly announced Wednesday the resumption of their partnership, with the first Blizzard game set to return to the mainland Chinese market in the summer of 2024.
The updated game distribution agreement will continue to cover World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and other titles based on the individual game universes of World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo, and StarCraft, according to the statement.
Building on a past partnership that has spanned more than fifteen years, Blizzard and NetEase are working on plans for a return, and will announce more details in the future.
Additionally, Microsoft Games and NetEase have entered into a deal to try and bring new NetEase games to Xbox and other game platforms.
In fact, rumors surfaced yesterday that Blizzard would be returning to China through a renewed partnership with NetEase.
The latest statement ends the widespread debate on whether or not the former is returning to China since November 2022, when Blizzard announced the end of its partnership with NetEase.
Analysts believe that a major impetus for the two parties to re-enter into a partnership may lie in Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard.
Microsoft completed its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard in October 2023, and former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick left the company at the end of that year. These facts have raised expectations among Chinese players that Blizzard and NetEase will resume their partnership.
Some sources claimed that Blizzard Entertainment and NetEase did start contacting each other at the end of 2023.
Meanwhile, after this year's Spring Festival the Netease Interactive Entertainment operations center in Guangzhou has formed a closed base for Blizzard games, which is mainly responsible for day-to-day operations, customer service and other work.
The general director of the base is Zhang Fengyi, vice president of NetEase Games, who was in charge of the World of Warcraft project in the early years.
After confirming that Blizzard will return to China, NetEase released recruitment information for Blizzard game-related jobs.
In a letter to players on Wednesday, the Blizzard Entertainment and NetEasease game publishing team also mentioned the latest progress so far.
The team said that the two sides have now signed the agreement, but it will still take a not-so-short period of time to make technical preparations for the opening of the service, such as the need to rebuild a new server room and restore various types of data.
There will be sequential launches of the games, and the first one will meet up with everyone again in the summer, the team said.
In addition, it emphasized that when the servers are open, it will ensure that users' account data is kept intact.
