I thought I read somewhere that the Chinese servers are currently offline due to this switchover. Maybe I am wrong. But it is interesting how many players would be lost.

In the same article though it did mention that Blizzard only makes a fraction of its income from the Chinese players. So although they number millions, they only pay pennies to play. Money is money, but is isn't nearly as bad as loosing millions of American players.

Again, it is just what I read elsewhere. I would love to see some investigative journalism on this site look deeper into this story and outline what all this really means as opposed to just repeating another news story. How much will this affect Blizzard? How much do they make from China? Are there any news blurbs from the the various companies in question?

This is great start on a very interesting article.