WoW: “I cried all night” – After 15 years, millions of players lose their favorite MMORPG

Since 2008, World of Warcraft appeared in China. But on Tuesday at midnight local time it was over: all the servers of the . closed in China. The fans are heartbroken.

How do players react to the end of their .? The Chinese equivalent of Facebook, the platform Weibo, shows how Chinese gamers felt in the first few 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 class.”
• Another player called World of Warcraft “his first love” and wrote “I really can’t forget it.”

Even a key employee of NetEase, the previous suppliers of WoW in China, writes on Linkedin:

Just a few hours before Blizzard Games servers go down in China, and that’s a big deal for players in China. Today is such a sad moment watching the servers close and we don’t know what’s next. The greatest victims are those players in China who live and breathe in these worlds.

What does Activision Blizzard say? In a statement to CNN, they react surprisingly cold-heartedly. They point out that Call of Duty: Mobile for China will continue to be developed with Tencent and that “potential partners” are in talks to continue Blizzard’s “iconic game series”.

Compassionate sounds different.

After all, it has been assured that the progress of all players will be saved.

Because a partnership breaks up, the Chinese lose their WOW after 15 years

Why are the servers going offline? We have reported about it several times on MeinMMO. So just in brief:

• In order to run a game (or do any business) in China, western companies need Chinese partners – the government there wants it that way. The practice has been sharply criticized by Western companies.
• Blizzard has worked with NetEase since 2008. But the contract has now expired.
• Blizzard only wanted to extend the contract by 6 months, presumably because Microsoft’s takeover of Activision Blizzard is in the air. NetEase obviously felt offended by this and no agreement was reached. Without a Chinese partner, the servers have to close.

How are we discussing this? The grief of the Chinese players also takes away many . fans in this country. In the reddit forum, people are discussing how one would feel if one loses access to WoW after such a long time.

It’s not just the game that you lose, but also the community and friends there.

People are reporting what it was like for them to quit WoW of their own free will. You would have put time, energy and money into the game. Losing it all and never getting it back, do something with one.

Another user says: Putting almost 20 years into a game? That’s longer than most marriages he’s known.

Saying goodbye to .s is difficult for many:

74-year-old says goodbye to his . after 17 years

The cover image is an icon image. It shows a man in the Haidan district of Beijing. We got it from Tommao Wang, from the unsplash.com platform.