Recently, news about the return of Blizzard's Chinese servers has sparked widespread attention. Bloggers revealed that Blizzard's Chinese servers will officially announce the news on the morning of April 10.

According to well-known media, Netease stated, "The official announcement of the return of Blizzard's Chinese servers will be made on April 10, but this announcement will primarily be handled by Netease's Leihuo Business Group, with a high level of confidentiality."

Sources claim that the main content of the official announcement is the restoration of the previously disrupted cooperation between the two parties, but the specific launch date of Blizzard's Chinese servers will not be until the summer of this year at the earliest.

Is Blizzard "divorced but not separated"?

Upon hearing this news, netizens were both excited and fearful, expressing, "I feel like a child whose parents are about to remarry. I'm looking forward to their reunion but also worried about another divorce."

The story began two years ago.

In November 2022, Netease and Blizzard ended their 14-year "long-distance relationship" due to their inability to reach an agreement on some key terms of cooperation. The existing licensing agreement expired on January 23, 2023.

It was thought that Netease and Blizzard could part ways amicably, but how could a business war storyline end with just one episode.

High-level quarrels do not always take the most down-to-earth approach, such as pouring hot water on a rival's money tree in Guangdong; replacing a rival's god of wealth with Ultraman in Fujian; or breaking a rival's coffee machine in Shanghai.

Although these actions are simple, they can be "deadly." The same is true for Netease and Blizzard, who did not treat netizens as outsiders and directly "quarreled" with each other.

In January 2023, Blizzard China officially stated that it had actively contacted Netease a week earlier to try to extend the agreement signed in 2019 for six months, allowing the Chinese servers to operate normally. At the same time, it clearly stated that it would not stop negotiating with other potential partners during the contract extension period.

However, Netease did not accept this agreement and described Blizzard's behavior using phrases like "riding a donkey while looking for a horse" and "divorced but not separated," stating that "Blizzard's proposal - including today's sudden announcement - is arrogant, inappropriate, and does not conform to business logic."

Subsequently, Netease introduced drinks such as "Blizzard Green Tea" and "Blizzard Unhappy" on its campus. On a poster circulating online, it boldly wrote, "After drinking this cup, let's part ways," subtly targeting Blizzard.

Even a netizen who posted seeking help with a relationship issue was mocked by other netizens, asking, "Is your girlfriend Blizzard?"

After the rupture, Blizzard encountered one obstacle after another. First, the "Hearthstone" event was canceled from the Hangzhou Asian Games, and later, Microsoft's intention to acquire it was opposed by the UK antitrust agency.

Netease seized the opportunity to demand the repayment of up to 300 million yuan in arrears and filed six lawsuits. These included full refunds for games like "World of Warcraft" that had stopped service, as well as multiple "unequal terms" in the agency game-related agreements that favored Blizzard. However, the six lawsuits were reduced to four last September and were scheduled to be heard in January of this year.

Now that the two have reunited, the lawsuits have already been canceled due to the plaintiff's withdrawal.

Netease's Gaming World

It would be more accurate to say that this reunion is a joint move by Netease and Microsoft rather than just Netease and Blizzard. After all, Microsoft acquired Blizzard for 500 billion yuan in October last year, bringing new opportunities to secondary market investors.

As one of the giants in the gaming industry, Netease Games achieved a milestone category breakthrough with a revenue of 81.6 billion yuan in 2023.

Currently, Netease's key self-developed technologies such as generative AI have been fully integrated into its games:

• "Justice" is the first mainstream game to apply AI gameplay on a large scale. Based on the underlying Fuxi AI model, the mobile game of "Justice" pioneered the virtual newspaper system "Da Song Tou Tiao." AI automatically generates over 300 million news articles with text and images based on players' interests, continuing to explore the scenario-based implementation of AI transforming gaming experiences.

• "Party Egg" continues to upgrade its UGC creation tools equipped with AI algorithms, introducing new features such as "Egg Codes," significantly lowering the threshold for map creation, enhancing the creative limit, and helping the total number of player maps in the park exceed 100 million, with the highest number of plays for a single map exceeding 120 million times.

The importance of cloud computing in gaming cannot be underestimated.

As a latecomer in the field of cloud computing, Netease has launched a series of cloud service products, including communication and video, cloud security, intelligent cloud customer service, and cloud computing basic services.

For example, to address latency issues in the transmission layer of cloud gaming, Netease Cloud Messaging released its self-developed global intelligent routing network. Based on technologies such as 3D game engines, AI, and cloud computing, Netease Fuxi's immersive event platform "Yao Tai" replicates real-world offline scenarios in the metaverse.

In March this year, the combination of Unicom's calculation card and Netease Cloud Gaming created a new "computing power + gaming" service. Leveraging the features of Unicom's calculation card, such as "high-priority network guarantee and ultra-high uplink and downlink rates," it safeguards the speed, quality, realism, and smoothness of cloud gaming, enhancing the overall game computing power carriage quality.

Final Thoughts

This morning (April 10), Netease Games officially announced that Blizzard's games will return to the Chinese mainland market in the summer of 2024.

According to relevant research institutions, it is expected that by 2025, the revenue of the cloud gaming market will reach 34.28 billion yuan, and the monthly active user base of Chinese cloud gaming is expected to reach approximately 250 million people.

How will Netease, as the leader in cloud gaming, "compete openly and secretly" with Blizzard in the hundred-billion market?