As announced back in November of 2022, Blizzard has officially shut down operations in China due to agreement issues with their previous publisher NetEase. With the laws in China, for outside companies to release games in China they are required to be released under a chinese publisher to be able to sell or operate in the country. Blizzard and NetEase have been in an agreement for about 14 years and as of recent have not been able to agree on continuing terms and have ended their partnership.

This has caused the shutdown of all servers of Blizzards in China, cutting off players to World of Warcraft, Diablo 3 and Overwatch 2. This has happened before when China put in new laws that required games to be published by Chinese companies to get a release which Blizzard had to go from The9 to NetEase. Blizzard has updated all players affected in China that they plan to return and are working hard to find a new partnership. Blizzard puts the blame on China and is upset they would not extend the agreement for at least 6 months while they looked for a new publisher to transfer to, NetEase said and quoted from the president “developers and gamers will have a whole new level understanding of how much damage a jerk can make.”

With Microsoft still in to buy Activision/Blizzard, rumor is that if the deal goes through, The9 will agree to take over publishing rights and start publishing the games with Microsoft. As of now though, it’s estimated that just World of Warcraft alone has stopped over 3 million players from accessing the game anymore and all players can do is wait for a solution from Blizzard to happen soon.