China's decision on World of Warcraft imminent

by Eliot Lefebvre on Jan 4th 2010 8:00PM

World of Warcraft, Fantasy, MMO industry, News items, Rumors

2009 wasn't exactly a bad year for World of Warcraft players -- they had an expansion with plenty of content to play around in, one that was outselling, well, pretty much everything else on the planet. Of course, if you were a Chinese World of Warcraft player, the picture looks a little different, with the expansion being delayed, then stalled as the companies in charge changed hands, then banned again shortly after it was finally released. So while it's nice to hear that there should be a decision on the game's status in the near future, most gamers probably aren't holding out a lot of hope.

It gets worse -- the brief news item announces that the two squabbling agencies, the GAPP (General Administration of Press and Publications) and the Ministry of Culture, have reached a consensus and will announce the punishment in mid-January. "Punishment" obviously doesn't bring to mind a heartfelt apology and a pat on the back for NetEase, who at best might find themselves even further negatively impacted by the whole debacle. At worst, they might wind up being forced to stop operations altogether, which would be bad news for the popular MMO. Nothing's certain, but it looks like there are still a few downturns ahead.

Source

Tags: activision, activision-blizzard, ban, blizzard-entertainment, china, china-ban, gapp, ministry-of-culture, netease, warcraft-china, world-of-warcraft, wow, wow-ban, wow-china

Reader Comments (23)

If you think the U.S. government pulled those games from the shelves...well, I just don't know what to say. Your ignorance is astounding.

Many people live in disbelieving ignorance regarding the freedoms found only in America, though, so these comments probably shouldn't surprise me.

Ha freedoms found only in america, thank you for that long happy laugh you gave me. Calling other people ignorant but at the same time saying something like this is realy clever.

Another thing, Australia´s problems with games only comes from not having an age rating system, this is the only reason why some titles don´t get released there and Germany, despite having some strict laws, hardly bans titles. Even if they do you can order such a game anytime from Austria or Switzerland anyway.

There is so much missinformation here it makes me spin.

Yeah there is communism in china, that´s nothing new. The whole WoW thing however is a bit more than just this. A big part of this trouble is the power strugle between two wings in the goverment itself (which has been written in an older news post already). China has some strict rules for content in online gaming, also because it is that popular over there and all kinds of people play them on a regular base, including kids. There are so many mmo´s in china who have no problems at all because they follow these rules, if Blizzard doesn´t they get smashed and rightfully so.

It´s Blizzard´s own fault they had to rework content. (skeletons, blood and so on) They didn´t do their homework and haven´t thought about culture differences. Just because a game is ok for the western market doesn´t mean it do so in the east. This is something they should have thought off and respect.

I´m sure they are even more reasons to all this, that we probably will never know. Having worked in china for some years, i´m also pretty positiv that they aren´t happy with another non chinese company having success over there, taking players away from their games and thus hurting the domestic companies from a financial point of view. (though a lot of mmo´s in china run without profit from the game itself anyway)

Ah enough said, it has no real impact for the western player base if the ban it or not anyway.

Good news for farmers they can resume their human bot business and manipulating the AH price and monopolize the mobs and loots. :( I'm not generalizing since I've met some real players but most of them are really play to farm.
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