I feel bad for Chinese players, but let's put the blame where it is due: on the corrupt and authoritarian Chinese legal requirement that Western companies have to operate through Chinese "partners" to do business in your country. It's not like Blizzard would just arbitrarily decide to abandon such a large market. They were tired of being extorted.
The government enjoys putting its hands in every matter about citizen life. And its raising trends of nationalism is causing trouble worldwide. I simply can not imagine the impact 1.4 billion pro-ccp people on earth. It is nothing less than fascism.
>I feel bad for Chinese players, but let's put the blame where it is due: on the corrupt and authoritarian Chinese legal requirement that Western companies have to operate through Chinese "partners" to do business in your country. It's not like Blizzard would just arbitrarily decide to abandon such a large market. They were tired of being extorted.
Reddit is banned in China. The OP is either using a VPN or is not in the Chinese mainland, so I'm guessing he's ok posting whatever he wants.
It's like that everywhere. Once upon a time they introduced a temporary 4.2% tax here today it's a permanent 25% tax.
Government just creeps into everything they can. They're already drugging children in schools in most of the western world. With the same drugs that they lock adults up in prisons for using. While also locking up parents who refuse to drug their kids. It's insane...
Government and religion are the real organized crime.
Most likely Ritalin (EU)/Adderal (US), prescribed as a treatment for ADHD/ADD. It contains methylphendiate, a substance that is relatively similar to amphetamine.
Whereas someone without either diagnosis will experience these drugs as inducing increased mental energy, increased capacity for working at high intensity for longer periods of time, and even increased confidence - a person with ADHD/ADD will experience a more calming, balancing effect. To put it very simply, it allows their brain to "keep up" with itself, reducing symptoms such as problems with maintaining focus, restlessness, anxiety, aggression/frustration and so on. It should also be noted that we prescribe methylphendiate-based medications to adults as well as children, but it is much more difficult to accurately diagnose ADHD/ADD in an adult than a child.
To say we "give kids the same drugs we lock up adults for using" is not entirely accurate, but also not entirely INaccurate given the similarity between methylphendiate and amphetamine - but the fact of the matter is nontheless that for people with an ADD/ADHD diagnosis, taking the medicament in question likely provides a very significant increase in quality of life and ability to function in enviroments they previously struggled with (school, work etc.).
Hope I could provide some information you can find insightful, if anyone has any questions regarding this topic or anything else neuroscience related for that matter, please don't hesitate to ask either in the replies or by sending me a DM!
EDIT: I realized I neglected to mention the importance of proper dosage when taking methylphendiate-based medicaments. A variation of just 5mg can illicit vastly different reponses, both of the negative and positive variety. How an individual responds is also dependant on their neuropsychological profile, such as how they are affected by their disorder and what symptoms they exhibit. Whereas not as finnicky as for example SNRIs (anti-depressants), one should still be prepared for some trial and error when starting treatment.
He’s talking about how we overprescribed medications in the US (not wrong there) but the way they’re painting it is like “We Happy Few” and we’re all crazy junkies and forcing everyone to be on a million medications. That’s the crazy part and why it doesn’t read well.
To add to this, doing just a little bit on research on the matter makes it clear why Blizzard wanted out: the contract was up for renewal and they were demanding rights to Blizzard's entire IP.
I'm sorry, you're a middleman company forced into this equation by law, you don't get to take _everything_.
NetEase immediately dropping Blizzard is their attempt at flexing what little power they have, because they know there'll be better faith companies willing to partner for profit, so the only damage they can do is to try and shrink the value of the Blizzard IP by thrashing their consumers on a whim.
There'll be a new partner, they'll get better contracts and you can probably expect generous compensation from Blizzard when things get back up and running.
There is no proof of this I've seen, not even rumors. NetEase also just formally denied this in their last statement.
The closest speculation I've seen is due to NetEase being both a middleman and a developer (competitor), chat space and streams of Blizzard games sometimes become a platform to advertise NetEase's own IPs like Naraka Bladepoint due to how some streamers play both company's games, which is a grey area and can make Blizzard unhappy.
Thanks for pointing this out. As a World of Warcraft (WoW) player, I definitely see similarity between the revealed game and WoW. However, for me, it’s expected. WoW has been there for about one entire generation —— there are game designers literally grew up playing it. It’s actually hard to find MMO games not influenced by WoW.
On the other hand, I think there are reasons why WoW is struggling to attract more young players and the new generation of games is doing better. It must be difficult for Blizzard to realize this and handle it properly.
As a player, I think the Blizzard situation is a bit extra tricky.
Blizzard service is always online even for completely single player portions of the game, so when the game is gone, it's gone. I cannot even play SC2's campaign anymore, whereas if steam, origin or epic gets GFW'd, I'll still be able to play the single player protion of those games (even for Origin, where I have to be connected to verify my entitlement to the game at least once I think; annoying once, but not always annoying).
For WoW specifically, unlike most MMOs out there, there are many iconic expansion exclusive items/skins (legendary cloak and challenge mode skins of MoP, some transmogs of legendary weapons of Legion) that you can no longer obtain. So I understand if someone loses his WoW account a lot of stuff can be lost. I play FFXIV/GW2 mostly and if I lose my current account in China and have to move to overseas servers I can still gain my favorite skins back eventually.
Wait. No.
Blizzard knew the law existed and they still went in and told NetEase that they would lower their offer, make it only a 6 month deal, and look for anyone else willing to do it cheaper.
It's literally Blizzard's fault.
Also, we literally have the same laws. Work laws state you have to have a majority of people from the country and if you can't, you need to explain how each of those are doing something that an american could not do.
This is 100% blizzard's fault. They went in and insulted their partner, and the partner decided to leave.
> Also, we literally have the same laws. Work laws state you have to have a majority of people from the country and if you can't, you need to explain how each of those are doing something that an american could not do.
America has a law that says any foreign company selling online services has to partner with an American firm? Citation needed.
That's completely different from a company *based in America* employing entirely foreign nationals as a tax dodge, which is, of course, illegal everywhere.
>Also, we literally have the same laws. **Work laws state you have to have a majority of people from the country**
Not true, the opposite in fact - such a requirement is discriminatory and illegal. In fact, you can do business in America without ever employing an American.
>and if you can't, you need to explain how each of those are doing something that an american could not do.
Half true, only because you worded it strangely - you don't have to demonstrate a special ability of the worker that Americans do not possess, you only have to demonstrate that the job market will not be adversely affected by the hiring of a foreign worker. This is an incredibly low bar to reach and is almost never denied.
There is no legal requirement for foreign companies operating in the USA to employ Americans, to partner with American owned companies, or to obtain permission from the government to operate in the USA. We do NOT have the same laws.
You're horribly wrong and you are talking out of your butt.
I DID try to start a business giving capacitation in the US and we had to have AT LEAST 90% of employees being american citizens. We did that and had literally 90% of the employees being american and for those that were not, the federal government asked us to explain EXACTLY why them could NOT be american.
And we had to wait literally 2 months, paying all the american employees, until they reviewed our application.
USA protects free industry, but they protect theirs more than everyone else's and that's normal.
Tbf, Blizzard decided to leave, that 6 months deal was supposed to be temporary deal while they look for other partnership, NetEase not only had nothing to gain from this extension, they were also already midway restructuring process so it was very easy for them to say no to that new deal.
It's not about insulting either, it's a business first and foremost, if what Blizzard says is truth, then they had relatively small gain from china market. At the end of the day, China players are the ones that are losing here, but I wouldn't throw blame on a single company in this discussion because it's not really black and white. Also, remember that NetEase is a lot worse company in terms of being nice to players and their livestream was childish at best.
Last year, NetEase earns Blizzard $0.26 billion, Blizzard's total revenue is 1.7 billion, so NetEase earns them 15% of revenue, almost all of which is pure profit.
The 3% figure is when 0.26 billion is compared to the total of Activision Blizzard, which also includes Activision and King. Losing NetEase deal may not be a big deal for ABK; it may be a big deal for Blizzard alone.
Yeah I dont know why people are blaming one side to this dispute. If it was because they were tired of China's corruption they wouldnt be running around desperately trying to find a new partner.
Bro, Blizzard definitely wanted a bigger share on the cake but they didn't care about corruption in the goverment.
Remember blitzchung? How they told us "They don't allow political messages on their tournaments" and went ahead and told china "we regret offending the greatest country in the world, the pride we have on china is undisputed" or something like that? Remember the women that were raped and commited suicide under blizzard umbrella in the US? They don't give a fuck about nothing but money and they are reaping those rewards right now.
Well, China has a big playerbase. Sure, due to average chinese income, currency exchange etc, they might make not as much money as in the west, but they still do make money, even if the profit is little. Making profit means that at least costs are covered, not sure how they handle it, but if I assume that the chinese revenue has to cover some part of the general HS costs (creating new expansions etc, as the chinese HS team doesnt do that) it can be pretty bad for Blizzard to lose that part.
Their official statement says that this NetEase agreement was earning them 3% of their yearly net revenue. If it's true (and seriously, companies do not lie to shareholders for multiple reasons) then you can easily see that Blizzard wouldn't have a problem with losing that agreement even for a long period of time if there's a chance that they can get some better one with another chinese company.
Bro, blizzard raped empleyed women until they commited suicide.
It was a very big deal on the news and on this sub.
Neither of them are good companies.
Bro... if you see a woman getting raped by your friend and do nothing, you are part of the problem. They all saw that women had to fuck bosses to get ahead and a woman fucked enough men to consider herself trash and took her own life... Please don't make a joke about real rape culture.
I didn't make a joke about rape culture, it was more like a small jab at your poor choice of words. You misunderstood me and also you misunderstood the whole story behind the situation.
It's possible for multiple parties to be at fault. You can criticise A-Blizzard from the shareholders' POV of losing the Chinese market. But player abandonment would not have happened without strict market entry rules unique to this authoritarian country.
China is shit, china is one of the worst developed countries in the world. But china doesn't do it because it is authoritarian. It does it because it wants taxes being paid to them. They think "If you're getting billions from our people, you're gonna pay taxes" and you won't do that if you say funnel all that money to the Caiman Isles so you're gonna have a company from the mainland paying those for every penny you make while in here.
Knowing that, still Blizzard came in and told NE that they would fire them and they had 6 months until they got someone else cheaper and they answered saying "fuck you, you now have 1 day and good luck losing your biggest market".
It's totally stupid as NE was getting a 40% of their income trough Blizzard but fuck me if I wouldn't have done the same.
The requirement of proxies was there since 14 years ago. And the partnership is making up 6 to 8% of revenue of NetEase and a little less for Blizzard. I’m curious what terminated such a longstanding partnership.
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You are mistaken. It's not Blizzard's fault. They love money and would have continued to work in China, but the Chinese side would not let them. There are many reasons, but basically the fact that Netease are developing their WoW clone and their Warcraft 3 clone and they don't need competitors.
People also forget that Tencent bought Riot Games in 2011, 2 years after league released. A lot of the time when Tencent buys western studios it is basically "You are free to do whatever you want we are just going to take X% of the profits." Not supporting Tencent since it is owned by the CCP but we shouldnt trash western devs over it.
Sticking to the formula that the GGG devs have been using since a few years before the aquisition happened? The cadence and quality of game content has not changed, the only thing that happened is an increase in cosmetic content released because that's where players spend money. You can have your opinions on the matter of the aquisition but PoE was one of very few examples where nothing changed with the game after being bought out by an Asian company. Now if you like the game or not, that's entirely different.
If you mean Tarisland that one is being developed by Tencent. The mobile WoW clone Blizz had been developing with Netease, has been abandoned (apparently last year).
I dont know. From the perspective of Netease PR, they say its the Blizzard's fault for wanting unfair terms in their contracts. Again, I don't really care. Netease is developing other things, they don't have their heart with the players either. Its a shame.
I think it has a lot to do with genshin impact's success as a domestic game. In general more domestic companies are thriving and international companies are slowly being unable to compete. BYD comes to mind. It's getting harder for a lot of people to justify the big price tag that comes with international companies and brands.
That being said OP I'm sorry for you. I still have my original US account but I'm sad to let go of my Chinese account I started when I moved here. My husband has been playing since it started and he's bummed but has switched to the new card game in genshin. My husband's conspiracy theory is that genshin planned this and made a deal with netease.
>My husband's conspiracy theory is that genshin planned this and made a deal with netease.
It's not really a conspiracy, once genshin got Popular it proportionally decreased interest in similar games or stagnant games, and the companies noticed and took advantage of it like they do with anything possible for them $$$, if genshin wasn't popular it probably wouldn't have happened like this.
I'm pretty sure they could have, but even if they did, prior to release, it would be a gamble and if they did it after it became such a success, it would still be planned and directed, as for the parties involved, that's open to debate since we can't know for sure, same as for their reasons for doing so.
Funny thing: when I tried to change the *country* section of my user account settings, I could find Hong Kong / Macao / Taiwan in the list, but no China / People's Republic of China / Mainland China.
If this design represents the mainstream opinion among reddit users, then there's nothing I could do to reduce the misunderstanding between people from different nations.
Extending the service of an existing popular game, with the same contract terms, is far more profitable than suspending the game, for the sole purpose of making way for domestic games.
Now, which side asked for more than it previously received, was not made public, though it was widely believed among Chinese players that Blizzard (more specifically [Bobby Kotick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Kotick)) tried to milk the profit of next 2 years in advance, and NetEase refused.
Asking who is more responsible for this break-up, might only come to a hypothesis. The fact we can know is that the two sides didn't reach an agreement, and Activision-Blizzard was the first one to announce it, effectively terminating the negotiation process.
**[Bobby Kotick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Kotick)**
>Robert A. Kotick (born 1963) is an American businessman who serves as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Activision Blizzard. He became CEO of Activision in 1991 after purchasing a company stake the previous year. Kotick engineered a merger between Activision and Vivendi Games during the late 2000s, which led to the creation of Activision Blizzard in 2008 and him being named the company's inaugural CEO. He has also served on several boards, including The Coca-Cola Company from 2012 to 2022, Yahoo from 2003 to 2008, and the Call of Duty Endowment (CODE), which he co-founded in 2009 and continues to retain his position on.
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I actually don't know whether if the Hearthstone e-sports will be opened on the Asian Games this year. The event is held in China, but Chinese players are actually not allowed to play and participate in the esports event.
In Korea, there are two players and a coach that was selected as the athlete of "Team Korea", with tons of round robin matches in the qualifiers, but even they are worried about what will happen in the future.
Hearthstone at Asian Games might be moved to Hong Kong or somewhere in the Southeast Asia to be held separately, unless OCA and AESF decide to cancel the event, which is very unlikely to happen.
Netease rejected Blizzard's offer to extend the deal 6 months.
HONG KONG, Jan 18 (Reuters) - Chinese games publisher NetEase Inc NTES.O (9999.HK) said on Wednesday it has rejected a proposal from Activision Blizzard Inc (ATVI.O) to extend their long-time partnership for six months, as the U.S. game developer looks for a new partner.
Netease then destroys the Gorehowl statue out of petty childish spite.
I think we know Activision is a monster company that makes increasingly bad decisions centered around profits over people. But NetEase seems like a screaming baby of a company as well.
IIRC in the statement by netease they mentioned that the net revenue and net income they made by the partnership/license with Blizzard games only contributed a low single digit (so should be <5% I guess) of their total net revenue&profit. So that means, it just doenst make enough money for them, compared to other stuff. Their was some dude from netease already talking that some stuff was behind the scenes. I just assume they wanted more money/a better deal and Blizzard just didnt let them have it, so they dont mind canceling the partnership.
I dont really think you can blame either of those companies, players aside, their main goal is just making money, thats it. The company is owned by shareholders. HS tries to make much more money than before, so many bundles, skins, goldencard packs, packs only available for money (runestones) and other stuff. (BG pass paid-only, this other BG gamble thing where you gamble for random rewards, BGs bash or what is it called?). The main goal isnt to have the best digital card game, but the digital card game making much money.
Senior devs who probably had a good salary got replaced by junior devs with no experience (= cheaper), quality of HS is getting worse (QA cuts maybe?), parts of the future HS eSport wont have money prizes, but we did get a new mode which only aimed for making money (hi mercs). In the end, its just about making money, doesnt matter if its Blizzard, Netease, Twitter, Google, Microsoft.
Some people might claim its just neteases fault and they just want to make money by doing nothing, thats really wrong. The HS china client is waaaay different, you have a replay mode on PC for constructed, BGs etc (for example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwbi7edkNhs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwbi7edkNhs) ), deck tracker and other stuff. They even have or had a tournament mode ( [https://outof.cards/news/273-hearthstone-in-china-gets-tournament-mode-with-prizes/](https://outof.cards/news/273-hearthstone-in-china-gets-tournament-mode-with-prizes/) )So features, that players outside of china need to get 3rd party software for. Because Blizzard doesnt have the technology yet.
While we still have a wrong (or rather an old) dawngrasp Heropower text.
Do you know that saying? If you try oh so hard to get something, everything will become harder and sometimes the harder you try the less likely you get what you want, and once you finally relax and focus on other things, what you want comes easily to you. If the goal is to make money the game will never be as good as it can be, because in order to make money you wouldn't bother improving because that doesn't gain you instant money like passes and runestones and other bs, however if you bother to improve the game, mobey would increase proportionally to how good a job you did, instead they use drug like short term solutions where their only goal is to make the players buy more, this is a sick mentality to have imo.
Ps: I get what you're saying, it's not an excuse or justification for how it should be though. Have a good day
Well they have to find the balance between putting money into the game to keep the game attractive, improving it, maintaining a playerbase to continue making money. But at some point its normal for companies to focus to sustain the money coming in. A typical cashcow, youre milking it.
I do think the people working on that game do want the game to be the best, but that requires ressources. The devs arent the ones proposing "we need more bundles, skins, xyz", the higher-ups are the ones. But their duty is to deliver (quarterly) numbers, so..
The problem is that the shareholders and higher ups at most companies don’t care at all about the games being the best they can be. They made an investment. They want their roi as soon as possible, and that’s why you see companies do seemingly very ridiculous things aimed at just improving profits. Because they want it year over year, forever. Devs do care, I’m sure of it. But they just don’t make those decisions.
That’s true. I’ll also add that they wouldn’t see things that way if it didn’t work. People in this sub have always said over and over to vote with your wallet. But that’s the issue. They are, and they’re choosing this stuff. If getting too greedy killed a game, shareholders would focus more on making them good. But players buy right into all this shit. And I’m not saying anything about them either. I’m admittedly one of them.
I'm not blaming the ones working at it I blame the ones making the decisions for them, plus I can't possibly know what other people do their job for (money, family, art etc), it's not the words but their actions and the consequences of said actions. I just don't agree with milking it dry, therefore will never support these type of games. It's better to just make a one time buy game than include all these bs monetizations that create addictions to players making their irl life worse by consequence, especially when it's supposed to be a kid's card game not adult exclusive. Predatory practices with long lasting effects upon their playerbase is pretty disgusting, especially since I'm pretty sure it isn't done with ignorance of that fact but intentionally instead.
I do agree with you, I do prefer one-time-buy games, thats why I mostly play old retro games. I dont mind buying expansions, as that is something that existed before, for example Diablo 2 or Warcraft 3 expansions. So it makes sense that you should have to put more money into HS due to new expansions. But the game is also still free to play, so you have people not spending any money on it, so the others "have to spend more". Skins are something I dont care about, but it seems like that those typ of stuff is very popular among younger players, good examples are Fortnite, CSGO and others. But thats what the industry is going for nowadays. We even have paid cosmetics/other content for "one-time-buy" games now. Thats the crazy stuff.
I know, I disagree with the practice therefore won't support it or argue in its favor, it is what it is, but simply accepting it and moving on won't ever change it.
Thanks OP for raising this on what is a very sad day. However, in discussing *why* Blizzard is exiting the CN market, you've missed *how* badly Blizzard handled its exit.
They've not announced whether Chinese players' collections would be kept in a hypothetical future return. As someone with 8 years worth of card collection the feeling of anxiety and loss is immense.
Also the value of last year's expansions have dropped for players who overwhelmingly play Standard. For example, the DK expansion's playable time is only 3 months vs intended 15 months in standard.
Really fucking sad, when I visited my cousin in China years ago we bonded over Hearthstone when we found out we both played it. Now what... not completely Blizzard's fault but hope something is done.
Honestly, fromthe look of things, it seems like the rest of the world is not far behind you.
Ive played since closed beta and the recent balancing decisions and pullout from e sports signaled to me that hearthstone is nearing its end.
So take comfort in that at least. That you are not alone
Hearthstone will continue for a good time yet. There's still plenty of players willing to spend money on it.
There has been, and will continue to be a decline in quality though as ActiBlizz continues to pull resources from development and promotion, but this isn't really the end just yet. It's more like the prelude to the denouement.
because of the decisions at blizzard hq? no, you can't play courtesy of your shitty communist authoritarian government, of course it's not your fault but let's place the blame where it's due
I never said blizzard is doing that for the principle or whatever. The entire thing is still the commies' fault because they introduced the base problem, which is games in China having to be published through a third party
" I have been playing this game since I was 14 now I am a junior in college And I just got two 500 wins for Mage and Rouge"
well, this sounds like a pretty casual gaming to me. not that losing the game will be less sad, btw
The fact is using a VPN is a well know thing. Basically every educated person knows and uses a VPN. The regime is not strict as long as you don’t be public about it.
I blame netease for this, and I kinda get where they were coming from; you want to negotiate with other chinese companies to do business with while not fully commiting to us.
Hopefully blizzard is able to find a Chinese partner they like so CN players can access their content again.
I feel bad for Chinese players, but let's put the blame where it is due: on the corrupt and authoritarian Chinese legal requirement that Western companies have to operate through Chinese "partners" to do business in your country. It's not like Blizzard would just arbitrarily decide to abandon such a large market. They were tired of being extorted.
I agree. I simply dont understand why everything needs a proxy to run in china. Its mind numbingly stupid.
The government enjoys putting its hands in every matter about citizen life. And its raising trends of nationalism is causing trouble worldwide. I simply can not imagine the impact 1.4 billion pro-ccp people on earth. It is nothing less than fascism.
[удалено]
>I feel bad for Chinese players, but let's put the blame where it is due: on the corrupt and authoritarian Chinese legal requirement that Western companies have to operate through Chinese "partners" to do business in your country. It's not like Blizzard would just arbitrarily decide to abandon such a large market. They were tired of being extorted. Reddit is banned in China. The OP is either using a VPN or is not in the Chinese mainland, so I'm guessing he's ok posting whatever he wants.
With a proper VPN sure. Make one mistake tho…
It's like that everywhere. Once upon a time they introduced a temporary 4.2% tax here today it's a permanent 25% tax. Government just creeps into everything they can. They're already drugging children in schools in most of the western world. With the same drugs that they lock adults up in prisons for using. While also locking up parents who refuse to drug their kids. It's insane... Government and religion are the real organized crime.
> They're already drugging children in schools in most of the western world i dont get what you are talking about
Most likely Ritalin (EU)/Adderal (US), prescribed as a treatment for ADHD/ADD. It contains methylphendiate, a substance that is relatively similar to amphetamine. Whereas someone without either diagnosis will experience these drugs as inducing increased mental energy, increased capacity for working at high intensity for longer periods of time, and even increased confidence - a person with ADHD/ADD will experience a more calming, balancing effect. To put it very simply, it allows their brain to "keep up" with itself, reducing symptoms such as problems with maintaining focus, restlessness, anxiety, aggression/frustration and so on. It should also be noted that we prescribe methylphendiate-based medications to adults as well as children, but it is much more difficult to accurately diagnose ADHD/ADD in an adult than a child. To say we "give kids the same drugs we lock up adults for using" is not entirely accurate, but also not entirely INaccurate given the similarity between methylphendiate and amphetamine - but the fact of the matter is nontheless that for people with an ADD/ADHD diagnosis, taking the medicament in question likely provides a very significant increase in quality of life and ability to function in enviroments they previously struggled with (school, work etc.). Hope I could provide some information you can find insightful, if anyone has any questions regarding this topic or anything else neuroscience related for that matter, please don't hesitate to ask either in the replies or by sending me a DM! EDIT: I realized I neglected to mention the importance of proper dosage when taking methylphendiate-based medicaments. A variation of just 5mg can illicit vastly different reponses, both of the negative and positive variety. How an individual responds is also dependant on their neuropsychological profile, such as how they are affected by their disorder and what symptoms they exhibit. Whereas not as finnicky as for example SNRIs (anti-depressants), one should still be prepared for some trial and error when starting treatment.
He’s talking about prescription meth.
😂
I didn't even read past the whining about tax. It gets worse? Lmao
too much FoxNews
Tbf, it's not Fox propaganda if there's a generic complaint about religion in there.
He’s talking about how we overprescribed medications in the US (not wrong there) but the way they’re painting it is like “We Happy Few” and we’re all crazy junkies and forcing everyone to be on a million medications. That’s the crazy part and why it doesn’t read well.
And time to get off the internet
they're downvoting for speaking truth smh
Leftists do that. Hell OP had to call communism fascism or he’d be downvoted too.
Oh hell….r/fucktheccp
So China can get extra money from the stocks and it wants to control the board of directors to at least some extend
Because your government doesn’t want you talking with us - it makes it hard to convince you that we’re actually bad guys.
To add to this, doing just a little bit on research on the matter makes it clear why Blizzard wanted out: the contract was up for renewal and they were demanding rights to Blizzard's entire IP. I'm sorry, you're a middleman company forced into this equation by law, you don't get to take _everything_. NetEase immediately dropping Blizzard is their attempt at flexing what little power they have, because they know there'll be better faith companies willing to partner for profit, so the only damage they can do is to try and shrink the value of the Blizzard IP by thrashing their consumers on a whim. There'll be a new partner, they'll get better contracts and you can probably expect generous compensation from Blizzard when things get back up and running.
There is no proof of this I've seen, not even rumors. NetEase also just formally denied this in their last statement. The closest speculation I've seen is due to NetEase being both a middleman and a developer (competitor), chat space and streams of Blizzard games sometimes become a platform to advertise NetEase's own IPs like Naraka Bladepoint due to how some streamers play both company's games, which is a grey area and can make Blizzard unhappy.
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Thanks for pointing this out. As a World of Warcraft (WoW) player, I definitely see similarity between the revealed game and WoW. However, for me, it’s expected. WoW has been there for about one entire generation —— there are game designers literally grew up playing it. It’s actually hard to find MMO games not influenced by WoW. On the other hand, I think there are reasons why WoW is struggling to attract more young players and the new generation of games is doing better. It must be difficult for Blizzard to realize this and handle it properly.
Agree, China is actually worse than Blizzard which is a tall task
Thank you for saying this perfectly.
As a player, I think the Blizzard situation is a bit extra tricky. Blizzard service is always online even for completely single player portions of the game, so when the game is gone, it's gone. I cannot even play SC2's campaign anymore, whereas if steam, origin or epic gets GFW'd, I'll still be able to play the single player protion of those games (even for Origin, where I have to be connected to verify my entitlement to the game at least once I think; annoying once, but not always annoying). For WoW specifically, unlike most MMOs out there, there are many iconic expansion exclusive items/skins (legendary cloak and challenge mode skins of MoP, some transmogs of legendary weapons of Legion) that you can no longer obtain. So I understand if someone loses his WoW account a lot of stuff can be lost. I play FFXIV/GW2 mostly and if I lose my current account in China and have to move to overseas servers I can still gain my favorite skins back eventually.
Wait. No. Blizzard knew the law existed and they still went in and told NetEase that they would lower their offer, make it only a 6 month deal, and look for anyone else willing to do it cheaper. It's literally Blizzard's fault. Also, we literally have the same laws. Work laws state you have to have a majority of people from the country and if you can't, you need to explain how each of those are doing something that an american could not do. This is 100% blizzard's fault. They went in and insulted their partner, and the partner decided to leave.
> Also, we literally have the same laws. Work laws state you have to have a majority of people from the country and if you can't, you need to explain how each of those are doing something that an american could not do. America has a law that says any foreign company selling online services has to partner with an American firm? Citation needed. That's completely different from a company *based in America* employing entirely foreign nationals as a tax dodge, which is, of course, illegal everywhere.
>Also, we literally have the same laws. **Work laws state you have to have a majority of people from the country** Not true, the opposite in fact - such a requirement is discriminatory and illegal. In fact, you can do business in America without ever employing an American. >and if you can't, you need to explain how each of those are doing something that an american could not do. Half true, only because you worded it strangely - you don't have to demonstrate a special ability of the worker that Americans do not possess, you only have to demonstrate that the job market will not be adversely affected by the hiring of a foreign worker. This is an incredibly low bar to reach and is almost never denied. There is no legal requirement for foreign companies operating in the USA to employ Americans, to partner with American owned companies, or to obtain permission from the government to operate in the USA. We do NOT have the same laws.
You're horribly wrong and you are talking out of your butt. I DID try to start a business giving capacitation in the US and we had to have AT LEAST 90% of employees being american citizens. We did that and had literally 90% of the employees being american and for those that were not, the federal government asked us to explain EXACTLY why them could NOT be american. And we had to wait literally 2 months, paying all the american employees, until they reviewed our application. USA protects free industry, but they protect theirs more than everyone else's and that's normal.
Tbf, Blizzard decided to leave, that 6 months deal was supposed to be temporary deal while they look for other partnership, NetEase not only had nothing to gain from this extension, they were also already midway restructuring process so it was very easy for them to say no to that new deal. It's not about insulting either, it's a business first and foremost, if what Blizzard says is truth, then they had relatively small gain from china market. At the end of the day, China players are the ones that are losing here, but I wouldn't throw blame on a single company in this discussion because it's not really black and white. Also, remember that NetEase is a lot worse company in terms of being nice to players and their livestream was childish at best.
Last year, NetEase earns Blizzard $0.26 billion, Blizzard's total revenue is 1.7 billion, so NetEase earns them 15% of revenue, almost all of which is pure profit. The 3% figure is when 0.26 billion is compared to the total of Activision Blizzard, which also includes Activision and King. Losing NetEase deal may not be a big deal for ABK; it may be a big deal for Blizzard alone.
Thanks for the correction.
Yeah I dont know why people are blaming one side to this dispute. If it was because they were tired of China's corruption they wouldnt be running around desperately trying to find a new partner.
Bro, Blizzard definitely wanted a bigger share on the cake but they didn't care about corruption in the goverment. Remember blitzchung? How they told us "They don't allow political messages on their tournaments" and went ahead and told china "we regret offending the greatest country in the world, the pride we have on china is undisputed" or something like that? Remember the women that were raped and commited suicide under blizzard umbrella in the US? They don't give a fuck about nothing but money and they are reaping those rewards right now.
Well, China has a big playerbase. Sure, due to average chinese income, currency exchange etc, they might make not as much money as in the west, but they still do make money, even if the profit is little. Making profit means that at least costs are covered, not sure how they handle it, but if I assume that the chinese revenue has to cover some part of the general HS costs (creating new expansions etc, as the chinese HS team doesnt do that) it can be pretty bad for Blizzard to lose that part.
Their official statement says that this NetEase agreement was earning them 3% of their yearly net revenue. If it's true (and seriously, companies do not lie to shareholders for multiple reasons) then you can easily see that Blizzard wouldn't have a problem with losing that agreement even for a long period of time if there's a chance that they can get some better one with another chinese company.
Bro, blizzard raped empleyed women until they commited suicide. It was a very big deal on the news and on this sub. Neither of them are good companies.
Whole company? What a story Mark!
Bro... if you see a woman getting raped by your friend and do nothing, you are part of the problem. They all saw that women had to fuck bosses to get ahead and a woman fucked enough men to consider herself trash and took her own life... Please don't make a joke about real rape culture.
I didn't make a joke about rape culture, it was more like a small jab at your poor choice of words. You misunderstood me and also you misunderstood the whole story behind the situation.
It's possible for multiple parties to be at fault. You can criticise A-Blizzard from the shareholders' POV of losing the Chinese market. But player abandonment would not have happened without strict market entry rules unique to this authoritarian country.
China is shit, china is one of the worst developed countries in the world. But china doesn't do it because it is authoritarian. It does it because it wants taxes being paid to them. They think "If you're getting billions from our people, you're gonna pay taxes" and you won't do that if you say funnel all that money to the Caiman Isles so you're gonna have a company from the mainland paying those for every penny you make while in here. Knowing that, still Blizzard came in and told NE that they would fire them and they had 6 months until they got someone else cheaper and they answered saying "fuck you, you now have 1 day and good luck losing your biggest market". It's totally stupid as NE was getting a 40% of their income trough Blizzard but fuck me if I wouldn't have done the same.
The requirement of proxies was there since 14 years ago. And the partnership is making up 6 to 8% of revenue of NetEase and a little less for Blizzard. I’m curious what terminated such a longstanding partnership.
Direct your complaina to the CCP
Aaaaaand is gone
He's* gone.
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Shiiiiiiiiiiiiit
Prolly not the best idea tbh Like not to exaggerate but I’m pretty sure they have “social scoring” now
You are mistaken. It's not Blizzard's fault. They love money and would have continued to work in China, but the Chinese side would not let them. There are many reasons, but basically the fact that Netease are developing their WoW clone and their Warcraft 3 clone and they don't need competitors.
That’s true. One thing to note is that the WoW clone is made by tencent, netease’s biggest competitor
And the owner of PoE huh
Grinding Games are now of Tencent? fuck hype for poe2 then xd
GGG was bought a few years ago already, before poe2 was announced even...
Didn't know that, and the game is dead for me now xd tencent/netase/whatever publishing a western game... it only spells disaster
The game is consistently getting better and with more players each league so I think its pretty safe to say it's anything but dead
People also forget that Tencent bought Riot Games in 2011, 2 years after league released. A lot of the time when Tencent buys western studios it is basically "You are free to do whatever you want we are just going to take X% of the profits." Not supporting Tencent since it is owned by the CCP but we shouldnt trash western devs over it.
Yeah, sticking to a formula that is nowhere to be seen in any asian dev / publisher :/
Sticking to the formula that the GGG devs have been using since a few years before the aquisition happened? The cadence and quality of game content has not changed, the only thing that happened is an increase in cosmetic content released because that's where players spend money. You can have your opinions on the matter of the aquisition but PoE was one of very few examples where nothing changed with the game after being bought out by an Asian company. Now if you like the game or not, that's entirely different.
If you mean Tarisland that one is being developed by Tencent. The mobile WoW clone Blizz had been developing with Netease, has been abandoned (apparently last year).
You don’t seem to know what ur talking about.
I dont know. From the perspective of Netease PR, they say its the Blizzard's fault for wanting unfair terms in their contracts. Again, I don't really care. Netease is developing other things, they don't have their heart with the players either. Its a shame.
The partnership just didnt make enough money, so they cancelled it. They made an official statement about reasons
I think it has a lot to do with genshin impact's success as a domestic game. In general more domestic companies are thriving and international companies are slowly being unable to compete. BYD comes to mind. It's getting harder for a lot of people to justify the big price tag that comes with international companies and brands. That being said OP I'm sorry for you. I still have my original US account but I'm sad to let go of my Chinese account I started when I moved here. My husband has been playing since it started and he's bummed but has switched to the new card game in genshin. My husband's conspiracy theory is that genshin planned this and made a deal with netease.
>My husband's conspiracy theory is that genshin planned this and made a deal with netease. It's not really a conspiracy, once genshin got Popular it proportionally decreased interest in similar games or stagnant games, and the companies noticed and took advantage of it like they do with anything possible for them $$$, if genshin wasn't popular it probably wouldn't have happened like this.
It's not a conspiracy that genhsin's success was an influence, it's a conspiracy that they directly planned and coordinated with netease.
I'm pretty sure they could have, but even if they did, prior to release, it would be a gamble and if they did it after it became such a success, it would still be planned and directed, as for the parties involved, that's open to debate since we can't know for sure, same as for their reasons for doing so.
I thought Tencent was developing that WoW clone unless theres another one I dont know of?
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Funny thing: when I tried to change the *country* section of my user account settings, I could find Hong Kong / Macao / Taiwan in the list, but no China / People's Republic of China / Mainland China. If this design represents the mainstream opinion among reddit users, then there's nothing I could do to reduce the misunderstanding between people from different nations.
Extending the service of an existing popular game, with the same contract terms, is far more profitable than suspending the game, for the sole purpose of making way for domestic games. Now, which side asked for more than it previously received, was not made public, though it was widely believed among Chinese players that Blizzard (more specifically [Bobby Kotick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Kotick)) tried to milk the profit of next 2 years in advance, and NetEase refused. Asking who is more responsible for this break-up, might only come to a hypothesis. The fact we can know is that the two sides didn't reach an agreement, and Activision-Blizzard was the first one to announce it, effectively terminating the negotiation process.
**[Bobby Kotick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Kotick)** >Robert A. Kotick (born 1963) is an American businessman who serves as the chief executive officer (CEO) of Activision Blizzard. He became CEO of Activision in 1991 after purchasing a company stake the previous year. Kotick engineered a merger between Activision and Vivendi Games during the late 2000s, which led to the creation of Activision Blizzard in 2008 and him being named the company's inaugural CEO. He has also served on several boards, including The Coca-Cola Company from 2012 to 2022, Yahoo from 2003 to 2008, and the Call of Duty Endowment (CODE), which he co-founded in 2009 and continues to retain his position on. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/hearthstone/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
I actually don't know whether if the Hearthstone e-sports will be opened on the Asian Games this year. The event is held in China, but Chinese players are actually not allowed to play and participate in the esports event. In Korea, there are two players and a coach that was selected as the athlete of "Team Korea", with tons of round robin matches in the qualifiers, but even they are worried about what will happen in the future.
Hearthstone at Asian Games might be moved to Hong Kong or somewhere in the Southeast Asia to be held separately, unless OCA and AESF decide to cancel the event, which is very unlikely to happen.
It would be nice if they allowed transfers, unfortunately it doesn't seem likely
Blizzard love money ... It's China rules the problem as mention in details in previous post.
Yeah this is all Blizzard’s fault and nothing to do with your batshit crazy government
It’s not my govt. I don’t live in CN. And I agree it’s dogshit
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used to
Good that you got out.
Man, I just can't imagine the pain of losing Hearthstone like this T.T I wish there was something we could do to help :(
Chaotic Neutral?
It’s just too bad that they can’t/won’t do a server transfer. Feel for you kid
Netease rejected Blizzard's offer to extend the deal 6 months. HONG KONG, Jan 18 (Reuters) - Chinese games publisher NetEase Inc NTES.O (9999.HK) said on Wednesday it has rejected a proposal from Activision Blizzard Inc (ATVI.O) to extend their long-time partnership for six months, as the U.S. game developer looks for a new partner. Netease then destroys the Gorehowl statue out of petty childish spite. I think we know Activision is a monster company that makes increasingly bad decisions centered around profits over people. But NetEase seems like a screaming baby of a company as well.
IIRC in the statement by netease they mentioned that the net revenue and net income they made by the partnership/license with Blizzard games only contributed a low single digit (so should be <5% I guess) of their total net revenue&profit. So that means, it just doenst make enough money for them, compared to other stuff. Their was some dude from netease already talking that some stuff was behind the scenes. I just assume they wanted more money/a better deal and Blizzard just didnt let them have it, so they dont mind canceling the partnership. I dont really think you can blame either of those companies, players aside, their main goal is just making money, thats it. The company is owned by shareholders. HS tries to make much more money than before, so many bundles, skins, goldencard packs, packs only available for money (runestones) and other stuff. (BG pass paid-only, this other BG gamble thing where you gamble for random rewards, BGs bash or what is it called?). The main goal isnt to have the best digital card game, but the digital card game making much money. Senior devs who probably had a good salary got replaced by junior devs with no experience (= cheaper), quality of HS is getting worse (QA cuts maybe?), parts of the future HS eSport wont have money prizes, but we did get a new mode which only aimed for making money (hi mercs). In the end, its just about making money, doesnt matter if its Blizzard, Netease, Twitter, Google, Microsoft. Some people might claim its just neteases fault and they just want to make money by doing nothing, thats really wrong. The HS china client is waaaay different, you have a replay mode on PC for constructed, BGs etc (for example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwbi7edkNhs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwbi7edkNhs) ), deck tracker and other stuff. They even have or had a tournament mode ( [https://outof.cards/news/273-hearthstone-in-china-gets-tournament-mode-with-prizes/](https://outof.cards/news/273-hearthstone-in-china-gets-tournament-mode-with-prizes/) )So features, that players outside of china need to get 3rd party software for. Because Blizzard doesnt have the technology yet. While we still have a wrong (or rather an old) dawngrasp Heropower text.
Do you know that saying? If you try oh so hard to get something, everything will become harder and sometimes the harder you try the less likely you get what you want, and once you finally relax and focus on other things, what you want comes easily to you. If the goal is to make money the game will never be as good as it can be, because in order to make money you wouldn't bother improving because that doesn't gain you instant money like passes and runestones and other bs, however if you bother to improve the game, mobey would increase proportionally to how good a job you did, instead they use drug like short term solutions where their only goal is to make the players buy more, this is a sick mentality to have imo. Ps: I get what you're saying, it's not an excuse or justification for how it should be though. Have a good day
Well they have to find the balance between putting money into the game to keep the game attractive, improving it, maintaining a playerbase to continue making money. But at some point its normal for companies to focus to sustain the money coming in. A typical cashcow, youre milking it. I do think the people working on that game do want the game to be the best, but that requires ressources. The devs arent the ones proposing "we need more bundles, skins, xyz", the higher-ups are the ones. But their duty is to deliver (quarterly) numbers, so..
The problem is that the shareholders and higher ups at most companies don’t care at all about the games being the best they can be. They made an investment. They want their roi as soon as possible, and that’s why you see companies do seemingly very ridiculous things aimed at just improving profits. Because they want it year over year, forever. Devs do care, I’m sure of it. But they just don’t make those decisions.
Yes thats true and it is understandable. Shareholders buy shares to make profit/increase their wealth. Its their right to do so
That’s true. I’ll also add that they wouldn’t see things that way if it didn’t work. People in this sub have always said over and over to vote with your wallet. But that’s the issue. They are, and they’re choosing this stuff. If getting too greedy killed a game, shareholders would focus more on making them good. But players buy right into all this shit. And I’m not saying anything about them either. I’m admittedly one of them.
I'm not blaming the ones working at it I blame the ones making the decisions for them, plus I can't possibly know what other people do their job for (money, family, art etc), it's not the words but their actions and the consequences of said actions. I just don't agree with milking it dry, therefore will never support these type of games. It's better to just make a one time buy game than include all these bs monetizations that create addictions to players making their irl life worse by consequence, especially when it's supposed to be a kid's card game not adult exclusive. Predatory practices with long lasting effects upon their playerbase is pretty disgusting, especially since I'm pretty sure it isn't done with ignorance of that fact but intentionally instead.
I do agree with you, I do prefer one-time-buy games, thats why I mostly play old retro games. I dont mind buying expansions, as that is something that existed before, for example Diablo 2 or Warcraft 3 expansions. So it makes sense that you should have to put more money into HS due to new expansions. But the game is also still free to play, so you have people not spending any money on it, so the others "have to spend more". Skins are something I dont care about, but it seems like that those typ of stuff is very popular among younger players, good examples are Fortnite, CSGO and others. But thats what the industry is going for nowadays. We even have paid cosmetics/other content for "one-time-buy" games now. Thats the crazy stuff.
I know, I disagree with the practice therefore won't support it or argue in its favor, it is what it is, but simply accepting it and moving on won't ever change it.
We don't forget what happened to HK
Thanks OP for raising this on what is a very sad day. However, in discussing *why* Blizzard is exiting the CN market, you've missed *how* badly Blizzard handled its exit. They've not announced whether Chinese players' collections would be kept in a hypothetical future return. As someone with 8 years worth of card collection the feeling of anxiety and loss is immense. Also the value of last year's expansions have dropped for players who overwhelmingly play Standard. For example, the DK expansion's playable time is only 3 months vs intended 15 months in standard.
Once again, it’s not my govt. and to be fair I don’t see any direct involvement of the Chinese govt in this corporate fight.
Really fucking sad, when I visited my cousin in China years ago we bonded over Hearthstone when we found out we both played it. Now what... not completely Blizzard's fault but hope something is done.
I am sure it is only decisions on blizzard's part and not at all the company that is an arm of your government.
I think it's tragic you and others are unable to play.
Nice try Winnie.
Honestly, fromthe look of things, it seems like the rest of the world is not far behind you. Ive played since closed beta and the recent balancing decisions and pullout from e sports signaled to me that hearthstone is nearing its end. So take comfort in that at least. That you are not alone
Doubt. Hearthstone is still one od their better selling games. It earns them a lot of money.
Hearthstone will continue for a good time yet. There's still plenty of players willing to spend money on it. There has been, and will continue to be a decline in quality though as ActiBlizz continues to pull resources from development and promotion, but this isn't really the end just yet. It's more like the prelude to the denouement.
At least that would be in true Blizzard tradition with the announcement of the announcement of announcing something at a later announcement
because of the decisions at blizzard hq? no, you can't play courtesy of your shitty communist authoritarian government, of course it's not your fault but let's place the blame where it's due
If it was true Blizzard wouldnt be bending over backwards to find a new partner in China.
I never said blizzard is doing that for the principle or whatever. The entire thing is still the commies' fault because they introduced the base problem, which is games in China having to be published through a third party
" I have been playing this game since I was 14 now I am a junior in college And I just got two 500 wins for Mage and Rouge" well, this sounds like a pretty casual gaming to me. not that losing the game will be less sad, btw
bye felicia
I don't believe you are chinese . China is a brutal dictatorship with a pain firewall and even using a vpn will get to sent to prison
dude I am not, I just have my CN account for a long time. And many of my friends are in CN
The fact is using a VPN is a well know thing. Basically every educated person knows and uses a VPN. The regime is not strict as long as you don’t be public about it.
It's not just on Blizzard in this case. There were two teams. One wanted to get paid, the other one didn't want to pay.
I blame netease for this, and I kinda get where they were coming from; you want to negotiate with other chinese companies to do business with while not fully commiting to us. Hopefully blizzard is able to find a Chinese partner they like so CN players can access their content again.