Blizzard General Manager John Hight has posted a video and now a written message to Chinese players in the wake of last month’s announcement that Blizzard and NetEase would be ending their publishing partnership and allowing all but one of Blizzard’s games to sunset in China. Unfortunately, that list includes World of Warcraft.
Hight reiterates that the teams are still working to ensure that game accounts and progress is saved and is still working with NetEase to sort out how exactly the data will be moved to a potential new publisher, but no concrete details are given here whatsoever. Blizzard also says that it is indeed still working on that new publisher, but again, there are no guarantees, and in fact the company is allowing players to download some of their account data themselves, with the implication being that they may be able to upload their data at some future point should the publisher switcharoo not go to plan, though we certainly can’t see how that could go wildly off the rails, nosirree.
“We are currently in conversations with a number of new potential distribution partners in China and this process will continue until we find a suitable solution. At the same time, we know how important your progress in World of Warcraft is to you. So I’d like to share the news that the World of Warcraft team is working hard to develop a feature that will allow you to save your characters, items, and progress in Azeroth to your personal devices before the game goes out of service on January 23rd.”
As WoWhead notes, this isn’t the first time Blizzard’s Chinese ops have left players in the lurch; when Blizzard changed its partnership from The9 to Netease over a decade ago, the Chinese service left players stuck in The Burning Crusade for many months past the launch of Wrath of the Lich King elsewhere.
MOP just named Blizzard’s exit from China as the biggest MMO blunder of the year.
