NetEase, Blizzard To End Deal That Brought Warcraft To China 17
NetEase and Blizzard Entertainment plan to end their 14-year partnership after January, depriving the Chinese firm of a slice of revenue and suspending service for some of the country's most popular games. From a report: The Hangzhou-based publishing giant and Activision Blizzard Inc. subsidiary failed to agree on an extension to their long-running collaboration, which had encompassed famed franchises like StarCraft, Diablo, Overwatch and World of Warcraft. Blizzard will suspend most online game services in mainland China from Jan. 23, the US company said on Wednesday. Game sales will also halt in the coming days. Beyond financial terms, key sticking points to the NetEase extension were ownership of intellectual property and control of the data of millions of players across China, people familiar with the discussions said. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks weren't public.
Taiwan players will be affected? (Score:1)
Simplified = China, Traditional = Taiwan (Score:4, Interesting)
Taiwan players will be affected?
Probably not. There were two localizations, simplified and traditional. These were largely politically correct aliases for mainland China and Taiwan. They were considered different markets. Taiwan along with Japan and South Korea being a separate market, or more accurately a separate region - regions a collection of local markets, from China. When mainland China introduced regulations regarding how many hours of video game play was considered "healthy", the simplified (China) installer was updated to show the warning, I don't think traditional (Taiwan) was updated to comply with the mainland regulations.
No (Score:1)
No, and the Chinese are not welcome on Taiwanese servers.
Re: (Score:1)
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They need to increase Warcraft in China, thus decreasing their overall worker productivity.
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This has nothing to do with Taiwan. Foreign companies face a lot of restrictions if they want to do business in China. They often need to collaborate with a Chinese company or form a joint venture with a Chinese company. Those partnerships tend to be structured to give the Chinese company a lot of control over operations and ownership of intellectual property. They also have to follow all Chinese censorship rules and avoid any mention of subjects the government doesn't want discussed. Blizzard seems to
Re: Taiwan players will be affected? (Score:1)
ownership of intellectual property and user data (Score:2)
ownership of intellectual property and user data are the points that China wants or you are locked out of there market
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Why do you always? Make your comment subject and your comment introductory statement the same? Cringy as hell...
Please tell us in detail what is cringy about putting the same thing in the subject as the beginning of your comment, which is a standard feature on many fora for when the subject is omitted. It's a trillion times less annoying than beginning your comment in the subject line, which is the other obvious alternative to writing a nothing subject line.
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I don't see it that way. The subject box is kind of a head scratcher of a thing. It's like you have to write some newspaper byline
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What I'm trying to get across is there's nothing cringy about it to me. I always felt /. was awkward to start root replies at
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Subject lines for internet comments are stupid anyway. Slashdot's comments system is a relic of mid 90's internet bulletin board style forums
As the Vulcans say (Score:3)
Only Nixon can bring Warcraft to China.
The Klingons said no, don't do it (Score:4, Funny)
As the Vulcans say
Only Nixon can bring Warcraft to China.
"China" asked for WoW. When WoW was originally being setup in China the Chinese company (complete with powerful contacts in the government) operating the servers asked for WoW source code so they could fix bugs and localization problems more quickly.
The Klingons responded to the idea with "Their mothers have smooth foreheads!". Blizzard rephrased this as thank you for your generous offer of assistance but we will continue to maintain the source code in the USA and send you binaries.
Shocked, SHOCKED (Score:2)
> key sticking points to the NetEase extension were ownership of intellectual property
Who could have seen that coming?