World of Warcraft may return to China: media claims that Blizzard and NetEase are considering renewed co-operation

In January 2023, after 14 years of partnership between Blizzard Entertainment and the Chinese corporation NetEase, the parties could not reach an agreement on further cooperation and broke the agreement to distribute World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, Warcraft III: Reforged, Overwatch 2, StarCraft series, Diablo III and Heroes of the Storm in China.

Here's What We Know

It has been noted that Blizzard Entertainment and NetEase have been trying to negotiate an agreement to continue the contract, but have been unable to come to a consensus. It is believed that one of the main opponents of this cooperation was Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. NetEase president Simon Zhu couldn't stand it and publicly called Kotick a "jerk"©.

And after Activision Blizzard became a part of Microsoft, and Bobby Kotick leaves his post, perhaps the cooperation with the Chinese corporation will be resumed.

This information is spread by the Chinese media, which learnt that all this time Blizzard was looking for a new partner to distribute its games in China and considered such giants as Tencent, ByteDance and Bilibili Games. Negotiations with them did not lead to a positive result, so the Americans had to return to a dialogue with NetEase.

Indirect confirmation of this information is the fact that Chinese gaming forums have started posting news about World of Warcraft again.

Source: Resetera