Blizzard Entertainment issued a statement on November 16 saying that the agreement with NetEase will expire on January 23, 2023, and will suspend most of the Blizzard game services in mainland China, including World of Warcraft , Hearthstone, Overwatch, and StarCraft, etc.
cooperation is good, why did the talk fail?
NetEase's response is that it has been doing its best to negotiate with Blizzard and hopes to renew the contract, but after a long period of negotiations, it is still impossible to reach an agreement with Blizzard on some key terms of cooperation. Therefore, Blizzard has to accept that it has announced that it will stop cooperation, but NetEase also promised to continue to perform its duties and serve players until the last moment.
In NetEase’s response, what are the key terms that were not able to reach an agreement?
There are three rumors in the market. The first is that Blizzard wants to renew the contract at a high price, which is so high that NetEase cannot accept it.
The second is that Blizzard needs to get a higher share in some projects and requires NetEase to pay a huge deposit.
The third one is that Blizzard has put forward uncommitted binding terms regarding the issue of the domestic game version number .
In fact, when Blizzard announced the termination of its cooperation with NetEase in Warcraft mobile games in August this year, there were rumors in the circle that Blizzard was particularly unreasonable and would have to make 90% of the profit if he spoke, and he was unwilling to bear any development costs.
Of course, Blizzard is not just so harsh on NetEase, but also very harsh when cooperating with Tencent on Call of Duty mobile games, such as having a high share, strong voice, etc.
You can feel that Blizzard is very domineering to his agents, and it is a bit like bullying customers by a big shop. In fact, Blizzard makes net profits in China, because it does not have any operating cost at all, and the share it requires is far higher than the industry standard.
Why is Blizzard already very domineering, and this time it is getting worse? There may be two reasons for
.
The first one is that its performance is not very good and the pressure is too great. Since the first quarter of this year, its revenue and net profit have been declining, so it has to increase prices for performance.
The second one is because Microsoft is going to acquire it, so Blizzard hopes to win a higher price when Microsoft acquires it. So if you are anxious, you must find a way to talk about the higher you want.
Some people say that Blizzard's appearance is too ugly, but from another perspective, today's Blizzard is not the Blizzard of the year. Now its performance is declining, the number of people online in old games has declined, and new games are in decline, and they are on a downward trend.
