Now, it’s time for Blizzard to think about how to save China players.

In the spring of 2005, a dark door was built in front of Shanghai Luwan Gymnasium to celebrate the listing of World of Warcraft: the game client will be officially released on April 10. Hundreds of thousands of players who can’t buy a CD-KEY are quietly waiting for the free beta to open at the end of the month.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence in date: 19 years later today.(April 10th)Blizzard Entertainment and Netease renewed their agreement, and both parties announced that they would join hands again to "bring the beloved games back to China", and Blizzard’s games will return to the Chinese mainland market this summer.

Since Microsoft has completed the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the main body of this joint statement also includes Microsoft games. Microsoft also reached a new agreement with Netease.Said it would try to bring new Netease games to Xbox and other platforms.

Today’s "remarriage" statement is expected and is a "secret that is not a secret" for both professionals and ordinary players.

In October 2023, with the release of multinational anti-monopoly agencies, Microsoft officially announced the acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, and the largest merger case in the history of games was closed. At this time, Blizzard has been out of the Chinese mainland market for more than half a year, and everyone knows that it is time to return.

There are a lot of rumors, and we have also learned that many domestic Internet companies have contacted Microsoft, and eventually they have gradually lost news; In the past two months, the rumor that "Blizzard and Netease want to get back together" has been repeatedly released in different channels, and finally the boots landed today.

Compared with the horse-catching drama after horse-catching drama, this reunion is particularly calm. Blizzard’s major products have sent thank-you letters on social media to welcome players back, and Blizzard’s customer service center has quietly pushed an interactive button of "Thanksgiving Meeting".

Equally calm is the reaction of the capital market.When the two sides announced the cessation of cooperation at the end of 2022, Netease’s share price fell by 14% in intraday trading. Perhaps the news has already been confirmed, or perhaps the influence of blizzard on the market is not as good as before. Netease’s Hong Kong stock price only fluctuated slightly today, with a closing increase of 0.83%.

The only thing that is certain is that during the 442 days when the national service operation was officially stopped, Blizzard was the more nerve-racking party. More than a year may not be a long time, but Blizzard’s personnel and many of its businesses have undergone frequent adjustments-now, they still need to think about how to encourage China players to return to the embrace of Battle.net.

A missed year

Back to the moment when Netease and Blizzard officially broke up.

On November 17, 2022, Blizzard suddenly unilaterally announced that it failed to complete the contract renewal with Netease, and then Netease responded and confirmed. At this point, the version content of the main product line of "Blizzard Family Barrel" happens to be stuck in a subtle node:

World of Warcraft version 10.0 expansion piece "Dragon Age" is about to go online, and the new version has been fully announced in the early stage; The much-anticipated "Watching Pioneer: Return" has just been transferred from online for one month; The last expansion package of Hearthstone in 2022, "The March of the Lich King", began to warm up …

With the confirmation of both parties that the operation will be suspended in January of the following year, "Dragon Age" has also become the most "short-lived" version in the history of WOW national service operation. A large number of PFU guilds active in the front line chose to switch to foreign service, and ordinary players became "Warcraft refugees", and a large number of users lost to other MMORPG.

Unfortunately,The "Dragon Age" missed by the national service players, although it was generally reviewed when it was first opened, has achieved a substantial increase in word-of-mouth in more than a year:

In NGA forum, the most important WOW community in China, although the number of samples is not as good as before, Dragon Age has received the highest evaluation since the 7.0 version of The Legion Comes Again.

In contrast, the scores of versions 8.0 and 9.0 are only about 2~3 points.

But for Blizzard, Dragon Age was hardly a commercial success at first. Shadow Country, which received poor reviews, sold 3 million copies in foreign service within one week of its opening, but Dragon Age has not disclosed the sales data so far.

This is because as an "old" MMORPG product, World of Warcraft’s ability to pull new products has been weakening year by year, and most active players come from inertia play and new version return.This also makes the initial sales of the new expansion largely depend on the word-of-mouth of the last expansion-and "Shadow Country" obviously has a negative impact.

It was not until last month that Blizzard revealed that "Dragon Country", which has been in operation for more than a year, finally "made the number of players achieve an increase that has not been seen for many years".

In other words, Blizzard’s efforts to revive WOW can only be fully reflected in the "new trilogy" beginning with the 11.0 expansion piece "Battle of the Center of the Earth". For the national service players, if they miss a whole big version, they will face the problem of "generation gap" in content acceptance.

Blizzard’s current solution is to "try to cure and then recover excessively".That is, according to the situation, the version catch-up strategy is arranged, and at the same time, the player is given certain return operation benefits.

The good news is that the general node of the return of the national costume happened to be stuck on the eve of the version of "The Battle of the Center of the Earth". Players probably don’t have to adapt to the terrible version of the Nine Cities-Netease era to catch up with the rhythm.(The national service is synchronized from 3.1 to 4.3 all the way)According to the timetable, the national costume fully meets the conditions for opening the Battle of the Center of the Earth simultaneously with the world.

But this time is different,"World of Warcraft" is not the only troublesome thing to consider when the "family bucket" returns.

In the year when Hearthstone left the national costume, the government successively released four pieces of information, including Legend Music Festival and Titan Genesis, and updated a lot of brand-new cards, heroes and playing modes.

Due to the particularity of card games, after missing the massive collection of content in four major versions,It is almost impossible to get a normal game experience in the existing competition year environment.-How should Blizzard reasonably compensate players and how to synchronize the progress of national service and foreign service are all problems that need to be solved.

Watching Pioneer also needs to catch up with the season content and linkage content for more than a year, but this will not directly affect the gameplay. During the period, Blizzard announced that it had cancelled the development of the PVE hero model, which once caused the global players to criticize-but this was only related to the national service players, which caused OW2 to be bombarded by bad reviews when landing on Steam.

Fortunately, the remaining games in Blizzard’s national service product line, whether StarCraft, Warcraft series or diablo 3, have stopped updating their content, and their return process will probably be smoother.

Of course, there is "Hero of the Storm", which is really "returning as a teenager". Unfortunately, it doesn’t even have a name.

However, what Blizzard needs to rethink is not only the catch-up and synchronization of the game content. In the 442 days after leaving the national costume, Blizzard, which was acquired by Microsoft, also ushered in drastic personnel changes and strategic changes-Many once important businesses have lost their planning and support.Even waiting for a new recovery opportunity.

Good times don’t always come.

As one of the most representative IPS since Blizzard was founded, the situation of StarCraft in the past year can be said to be worse.

On February 13th, 2023, the 22nd day after the national costume of StarCraft II, China’s Li Peinan won the championship of the ——2023IEM Katowice Finals, the highest standard event of the project. This is the first world champion won by China Interstellar in 25 years, and it also makes Interstellar, which has become a "dead game", return to public view briefly.

However, throughout 2023 after the national service of StarCraft II was suspended,——Premier level competition, the highest level of the game, has only held 12 games, which is far lower than the number of events in previous years.

Premier events in 2023

Blizzard officials have said that they will still pay attention to the competitive level of the game, but the fact is that StarCraft has gradually lost its official support at the event level. For a whole year, the game itself has only launched two tiny balance patches.

After stopping paying for updates, StarCraft II relies heavily on private sponsorship to maintain the scale and frequency of third-party events.The hope of its e-sports competition is almost maintained by the admission of Middle Eastern capital:After Saudi Arabia officially announced that the StarCraft II project would join the huge "E-sports World Cup", several international clubs started follow-up actions and signed new players for competition training.

Coincidentally, the situation of "Watching Pioneer" e-sports in the past year is also embarrassing. In the middle of last year, Activision Blizzard disclosed the Watch Pioneer League in its financial report.（OWL）Difficult operating conditions: the contribution of league revenue to Activision Blizzard has only accounted for less than 1% of net profit.

Based on this, Blizzard also indicated that it would modify the agreement with OWL Club to allow each team to decide whether to stay or not on the condition of providing termination fee. In fact, OW clubs at home and abroad have already ushered in a wave of dissolution before this. The domestic Hangzhou Lightning Team and Shanghai Dragon Team officially announced their dissolution. By the end of the year, Blizzard finally announced that OWL had completely withdrawn from the historical stage and carried out a new "e-sports transformation".

At the beginning of the year, Blizzard announced OW’s new e-sports plan: Watch the Pioneer Championship Series.（OWCS）Sponsored by Blizzard authorized ESL sub-brand DreamHack. The event has also completely removed the "threshold", and will hold qualifiers in Asia, Europe, America, the Middle East and other regions, encouraging players from all over the world to form their own teams to participate.

In other words,OWL, which was once vigorous, eventually became an ecology dominated by third-party community competitions, just like StarCraft II.It is worth mentioning that ESL has been controlled by the Saudi government’s referendum fund, and finally the same "oil guy" is still thinking about "Dead game".

Mainly based on the OWL project team, from last year to the beginning of this year, almost every wave of layoffs involving Blizzard clearly included e-sports employees. In just over a year, Blizzard’s e-sports business has almost ushered in a total recession.

After the cooperation with Netease was suspended, Hearthstone banned China players from participating in the competition, and then was withdrawn from the Asian Games’ e-sports events, which also epitomized this recession in the China market.Blizzard not only completely missed last year’s Asian Games e-sports craze, but also gave way to many competing products on different types of tracks.

In the past, with the active support of Netease, China was the smoothest market for Blizzard’s e-sports business: OW Challenger Series and Hearthstone Golden Open are excellent samples of localized events; Warcraft 3 and StarCraft II have been held in golden league for a long time, and Blizzard has never found such an agent who is willing to provide systematic and long-term support for niche categories around the world.

Compared with the game product itself, when the national service team has been dissolved for a long time and the overall e-sports strategy of Blizzard has shrunk dramatically,The most difficult thing to go back to the past is actually the good e-sports soil that Blizzard Family Barrel once owned in China.

Derived from e-sports, Blizzard once had brand loyalty in China that other brands could not match, whether it was the player community or the content creation and live broadcast ecology-after a year, they really needed to try their best to reunite.

Aim for the future

In any case, compared with the fierce criticism when breaking up, this reunion is really too simple and peaceful. For both sides, many things have passed.

Since the completion of the merger, Blizzard has been in a period of overall business and personnel changes. Important products, including World of Warcraft and Watching Pioneer, need to be adjusted in a long period; Last year, the most significant revenue growth for the company was also the new product Diablo 4 based on the old IP; Although the casual mobile game "Warcraft Battle", which was first tested and researched by ourselves, lacked continuous operation and poor stamina, its market performance was not bad when it was first launched.

In other words,Blizzard’s product potential is still focused on the value of developing these classic old IPS.The main action of Microsoft after entering the company is to bring the turbulent product lines back to stable operation and gradually promote them to be introduced into the XGP family. For Netease, it is on the one hand to save some IP loyal users’ basic disks, on the other hand, it also hopes to cooperate with more important partners.(Microsoft)Achieve the integration of resources and channels.

This is why in the joint statement of Microsoft, Blizzard and Netease, "Blizzard Entertainment and Netease Update Agreement" will be placed in a parallel position with "Microsoft Games and Netease will cooperate more widely". "remarriage" plotted loudly,It is more like the future-based cooperation of the three parties, rather than the immediate needs of existing interests.

Fifteen years ago, the proxy struggle of Warcraft national service was repeatedly seesawed, which can be said to be based on the fact that "WOW revenue share once accounted for 90% of Ninetowns’ revenue". The world is different from time to time. Although Blizzard’s product line in China has changed from an MMO to a family bucket, its importance in revenue has greatly weakened for both parties.

Just like the data mentioned in Activision Blizzard’s 2022 financial report, the national service revenue only accounts for about 13% of Blizzard’s independent revenue.(equivalent to about RMB 1.6 billion). This figure is placed on Netease, which has a total revenue of over 100 billion in 2023, and it is only a "departmental level" ratio.

When the two sides break up, these numbers are often used to express "I will live without you"; Now that cooperation has resumed, they seem to have paid a small price and have a better reason to get back together.

In fact, things are still such a thing, and what has changed is only the attitude of the company and the external environment. Fortunately, Bobby Codick has retired-Those disgraceful past disputes have at least someone to blame.

After all, even the nostalgic clothes have to pass the version of Wrath of the Lich King.

This article comes from WeChat WeChat official account:Game research society (id: yysaag), Author: Aria X, Luo Meat Satellite, Baiyigu wine also contributed to this article.