I posted this in the World of Warcraft sub-forum, but I think this topic is interested enough to spark a conversation here.

We recently heard of the termination of Blizzard contract with The9, the Chinese operators of Word of Warcraft. The contract is now change to NetEase, another online gaming giant in China. Nobody knows the real truth behind the switch except those really involves in it. Sideline information seems to think that NetEase was playing a lot of dirty tricks and offer Blizzard a huge huge benefits/advantages. Some also think Blizzard pulled the plug because EA was invested in The9. There are several other reasons floating around including The9 wasn't a very good operator.

Now, here come the bad new for Blizzard. When an online game switchs operators like that, the players will be affected. Chinese WoW players are restlest. Anyone could understand that. If one day in the US, World of Wacraft got transferred to operate by SOE, anyone playing WoW in the US would be socked too. The result is the mentality of wait and see. With the business model in China, you only buy the game card for a certain amount of time you can redeem in the game. The card you buy works for any game of the same operator. It is easy to just stop playing WoW for a while to wait for things to settle down. And that's exactly what Chinese players are doing.

Of couse, they can always come back, but here's the bad new. AION released in China. Hell, in this tumor time for WoW, if Shanda and NCSoft don't take advantage to kick Blizzard in the pee pee, they should not exist in the business anymore. The result? AION is growing with a record speed. We all talk about WoW killer here, WoW killer there, but nobody realizes that to kill WoW, bring it to the #2 MMORPG, the battle has to be fought elsewhere not in the US or EU. US and EU are unfortunately the minority in the subscribers of WoW. The real battles are Korea and China. These 2 regions accounted for 2/3 of WoW subscribers or more. Now, AION already won in Korea. It beats the crap out of WOTLK in Korea for more than 6 months now. And the Blizzard GODS just gave NCSoft a golden chance to kick their ass in China.

If that's not enough bad new for Blizzard, here comes another one. Arcording to Chinese law, when a foreign company comes in to a dispute with a local company. The product of that foreign company may be banned from China. A few days ago, The9, the ex-operator for WoW sued Blizzard in the Shanghai court. The reason was Blizzard employees "damaged" 2 servers of The9 in the process and comercial defamation.

Now, in addition to the competition from NCSoft AION, WoW could be banned forever in China. Talk about another sock to the whole China WoW players. If that happen, it will be a holy shit for Blizzard. With WoW losing at least half of it subscribers, we can all safe to say "hail to the new king of MMORPG - AION".
 

Show me where it says over half of WoWs popualtion is in china.

I can only think of the unemployment rate raising if WOW goes bust in CHina :)

All the Chinese farmers would go to aion

heh been a while since someone completely blew a minor dispute outta proportion like this. First off no nothing is going to happen. At most blizzard will end up apologizing and paying a decent sum of money and that ends that. Secondly, Aion will only do well in Asia because well its an Asian Grinder in the same style as Lineage II.

I'm sure WoW players would be happy to hear that they won't have to put up with gold farmers anymore, but you should probably qualify your king of MMORPG by saying king of subscription MMORPGs, because there are F2P games that are already kicking Blizzard's butt in terms of total users, although there hasn't been any evidence released that the companies are making more money than WoW, despite having anywhere from 4 to 9 times as many registered users as WoW has subscribers.

Originally posted by wootforwow

Show me where it says over half of WoWs popualtion is in china.

While Blizzard calls it "Asia", the vast majority are from china.

http://eu.blizzard.com/en/press/080122.html 

"PARIS, France. – 22 January, 2008 -- Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that subscribership for World of Warcraft®, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has continued to climb, recently passing 10 million worldwide. Interest in the game has remained high in all regions, with thousands of new and returning players signing up through the holiday season. World of Warcraft now hosts more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia"

Also Frostbite05, Aion is not in any way an asian grinder and its gameplay is VERY different from Lineage 2. I suggest you do a bit more research on a game before you post misinformed comments about it.

Interesting read, OP.

I do wonder how this will pan out. I also think that a change of provider is not so very crucial; people will always play the game they like best even if there is a temporary setback. The problem for WOW is mainly Aion itself. It is an evolution to what WOW did as far as I can tell. It does the same but brings more immersive graphics and rich and vibrant detail into the ring. It is hard to pass on something like that when you've got this nagging "been there, done that" feeling when playing good ol' WOW anyway.

I think we'll see the same in EU/US. Loads of WOW players will give Aion a shot. But I agree that the provider swap isn't helping matters for Blizz at all and it could be the impulse that people need to change games. And you could be very right in WOW being degraded to number 2 pretty soon.

If I were NCSoft, I wouldn't kick too hard...Blizzard has some mighty big balls, you never know what might come outta there :p

Add: Also it could be argued this the PERFECT time for Aion to show up...Blizzard will be back. Let them play Aion and get bored of it until then...

While I don't think Blizzard will settle with being banned from China and losing subscriptions, I can see why they're moving to Aion (not because it's a "grinder" it's amazing). This thread should be interesting to see how many WoW fanboys come to its defense. They already seem to be cropping up.

Originally posted by Gameloading

Originally posted by wootforwow

Show me where it says over half of WoWs popualtion is in china.

 

While Blizzard calls it "Asia", the vast majority are from china.

http://eu.blizzard.com/en/press/080122.html 

"PARIS, France. – 22 January, 2008 -- Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that subscribership for World of Warcraft®, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has continued to climb, recently passing 10 million worldwide. Interest in the game has remained high in all regions, with thousands of new and returning players signing up through the holiday season. World of Warcraft now hosts more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia"

 

Also Frostbite05, Aion is not in any way an asian grinder and its gameplay is VERY different from Lineage 2. I suggest you do a bit more research on a game before you post misinformed comments about it.

I don't have any numbers and don't care enough to look, I would bet a big chunk of those Asia numbers are South Korea.  I bet the average NA/EU WoW player would hardly be heartbroken if Chinese "players" disappeared from the servers.

Who gives a crap about China.

Originally posted by Darth_Osor

Originally posted by Gameloading

Originally posted by wootforwow

Show me where it says over half of WoWs popualtion is in china.

 

While Blizzard calls it "Asia", the vast majority are from china.

http://eu.blizzard.com/en/press/080122.html 

"PARIS, France. – 22 January, 2008 -- Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that subscribership for World of Warcraft®, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), has continued to climb, recently passing 10 million worldwide. Interest in the game has remained high in all regions, with thousands of new and returning players signing up through the holiday season. World of Warcraft now hosts more than 2 million subscribers in Europe, more than 2.5 million in North America, and approximately 5.5 million in Asia"

 

Also Frostbite05, Aion is not in any way an asian grinder and its gameplay is VERY different from Lineage 2. I suggest you do a bit more research on a game before you post misinformed comments about it.

 

I don't have any numbers and don't care enough to look, I would bet a big chunk of those Asia numbers are South Korea.  I bet the average NA/EU WoW player would hardly be heartbroken if Chinese "players" disappeared from the servers.

And guess what people are playing in South Korea right now?

Aion still have to tripple their number of subscribers to even be on par with WoW, and then retain those subscriptions for five years,I doubt Blizzard are worried. A generous estimate would be for Aion to peak with 5 million subscriptions in asia, and 5 hundred thousand in the west. It is a nice game and all, but it won't do much better than WAR or AoC on the western market, and certainly not better than both of them put together.

Originally posted by Dibdabs

Who gives a crap about China.

A couple of billion Chinese for starters.

And every businessman and politician in the US or EU as well, I reckon.

I think Aion is going to be popular, but I doubt that even with this news it will put a dent in WoW's sub numbers.   How do you know Korea and China accounts for 2/3 of WoW's sub numbers is there any proof you could link to this?  It's also highly unlikely that even though the law allows a ban that China would actually ban WoW too. 

Bringing WoW to #2 isn't "killing" WoW either.  Killing them would be removing enough subscribers from them to make WoW no longer profitable and force them to close down all their servers.  That's not going to happen for a long time.

I don't see how a change in game operators would effect the consumers too much either.  If they run the servers then maybe the servers will be down for quite a bit, but it shouldn't have too much of an effect other than that.  I only major problem that could come out of it is if the new company suddenly decides to start charging more.

Originally posted by bmdevine

there are F2P games that are already kicking Blizzard's butt in terms of total users

Such as?  Free to Play games are grindfest crap anyway.  I've tried about 18 of them, and only 12 lasted long enough for me to bother writing down my passwords for them in my notebook.  I don't think any of those 12 held my interest longr than maybe two weeks.  Pure garbage, the lot of them.

Originally posted by DarkPony

Originally posted by Dibdabs

Who gives a crap about China.

A couple of billion Chinese for starters.

No-one important then. Even their own government doesn't think they're important.

Originally posted by Frostbite05

heh been a while since someone completely blew a minor dispute outta proportion like this. First off no nothing is going to happen. At most blizzard will end up apologizing and paying a decent sum of money and that ends that. Secondly, Aion will only do well in Asia because well its an Asian Grinder in the same style as Lineage II.

Minor dispute? I don't think so, consider the timeline of events. The9 is pissed at Blizzard and NetEase. If you read the letter The9 CEO send to her employees, you can see they are mad, real mad. Any mistake from Blizzard will be blew off proportion by The9 themself to get back at Blizzard. WoW was the major income for The9, probably around 80% of it. They have their income source taken from them by what view by them as dirty play, hell anyone would get really pissed.

Now, Shanda and NCSoft know this, and they will do anything in their power to make it worse. If they do not do so, they do not worth to stay in business anymore.

Originally posted by Karbonoid

Aion still have to tripple their number of subscribers to even be on par with WoW, and then retain those subscriptions for five years,I doubt Blizzard are worried. A generous estimate would be for Aion to peak with 5 million subscriptions in asia, and 5 hundred thousand in the west. It is a nice game and all, but it won't do much better than WAR or AoC on the western market, and certainly not better than both of them put together.

Aion hasn't released world-wide yet. I doubt it will do amazing in the western market as well, but that doesn't matter to me. I want a good community, and if WoW is "killed" and those players come to Aion the game will be ruined, in my opinion.