Azaroth

Actually, we don’t know if it’s 50%. We don’t know if it’s 1, or 99%. What I can tell you is that Blizzard won’t be announcing any new subscription statistics for a good long while.

You see, the World of Warcraft servers are down in China. All of them. Boy, I bet free WoW servers just got very popular.

Tobold breaks the story:

The best guess is that the story started by Blizzard transfering their WoW license in China from The9 to NetEase. Obviously The9 wasn’t happy to lose this major earner, and filed several lawsuits. The new operator, NetEase, needs a license to run WoW. But the Chinese authorities didn’t give NetEase a license, and “said that in order to protect the interests of domestic gaming enterprises, they would suspend review of all games belonging to foreign companies in the event of lawsuits or arbitration between foreign companies and Chinese companies”. This could still go on for months!

I assume there’s more to the story than this, but nobody is talking about it. Which is why I’m sure there’s more to the story.

One interesting thing to note is that we don’t actually know how many users they’ve lost, but I’d say it’s significantly higher than 50%. We just know it’s probably over 50%, and a recent statement by The9 (Chinese WoW operator) claimed one million concurrent users for World of Warcraft. Meaning that we could actually be talking about up to ten million subscribers.