Since 2008, World of Warcraft was available in China. But on Tuesday at midnight local time, it was over: All servers of the MMORPG shut down in China. Fans are heartbroken.
How do players react to the end of their MMORPG? The Chinese equivalent of Facebook, the platform Weibo, shows how Chinese players felt in the first hours without access to World of Warcraft:
- “When I woke up, I still couldn’t believe it. I cried in my sleep all night because the game went offline. I dreamed that I started crying in the middle of the classroom.”
- Another player referred to World of Warcraft as “his first love” and wrote “I really can’t forget it.”
Even a key employee of NetEase, the previous provider of WoW in China, writes on Linkedin:
Just a few more hours before Blizzard Games servers go down in China, and this is a big deal for players in China. Today is such a sad moment to watch the servers close, and we don’t know what happens next. The biggest victims are those players in China who live and breathe in these worlds.
What does Activision Blizzard say? They respond in a surprisingly cold statement to CNN. They point out that Call of Duty: Mobile for China is still being developed with Tencent and that they are talking to “potential partners” to continue “Blizzard’s iconic game series.”
Empathy sounds different.
At least they have assured that the progress of all players will be saved.
Because a partnership is breaking, Chinese players lose their WOW after 15 years
Why are the servers going offline? We have reported on this multiple times on MeinMMO. Therefore, just a brief summary:
- To operate a game in China (or to do any business), Western companies need Chinese partners – the local government demands it. This practice is sharply criticized by Western companies.
- Blizzard has been working with NetEase since 2008. But the contract has now expired.
- Blizzard only wanted to extend the contract for 6 months, presumably because the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft is looming. NetEase apparently felt insulted by this, and no agreement was reached. Without a Chinese partner, the servers need to shut down.
How is this being discussed among us? The grief of Chinese players also resonates with many MMORPG fans here. In the reddit forum, people discuss how they would feel if they lost access to WoW after such a long time. Many players can relate well to the situation of the Chinese WoW fans:
- It’s not just the game that you lose, but also the community and the friends there.
- Other reddit users report how it was for them to voluntarily stop playing WoW. They invested time, energy, and money into the game. Losing all of that, and never getting it back, does something to you.
- A third reddit user says: Investing almost 20 years in a game? That’s longer than most marriages last, that I know of.
Letting go of MMORPGs is difficult for many players. This shows that MMORPGs are not just any genre, but that they thrive on the social bonds forged in an online role-playing game and from the many memories collected over the years:
74-year-old bids farewell to his MMORPG after 17 years
The title image is a symbolic image. It shows a man in the Haidan district of Beijing. We obtained it from Tommao Wang, from the platform unsplash.com.
