Millions of Chinese players of the video game World of Warcraft (WoW) will be forced to say goodbye sadly to the “land of Azeroth” as the game is disabled in their country due to a dispute between US company Blizzard and China’s NetEase. .

Extremely popular around the world, especially in the 2000s, WoW is an online role-playing game set in a fantasy medieval world, played by millions of players every month.

Blizzard games have been available in China since 2008 through a partnership with NetEase. According to local law, foreign authors must cooperate with Chinese companies if they want to enter the huge Chinese market.

But 14 years later, despite having millions of players in China, the two companies announced in November that their negotiations to renew their partnership had failed, with WoW’s servers in China going down at midnight Tuesday (local time) as a result.

The same fate will befall the servers for other popular games from the Californian company, such as Overwatch, Diablo III and Hearthstone.

“This is the end,” one Weibo user commented, adding a tearful emoji to his find. “It was not just a game. It was the memory of a whole generation of young Chinese,” wrote another.

“These two companies keep the players in hostageWu, a 30-year-old graduate student and longtime gamer, said.

Last week, Blizzard China said it had requested an extraordinary six-month contract extension, which NetEase denied.

“One day, when we can tell what happened behind the scenes, developers and gamers will understand on a whole new level the damage that a bang can do,” NetEase president Simon Zhu wrote on LinkedIn late last year.

Blizzard said it is in talks with “various potential partners who share the company’s values” to continue providing access to its games in China.

Shutting down Chinese servers is “not the end” but just a “temporary nasty suspension,” Blizzard China tried to reassure. According to Blizzard, user data may be stored for use if and when games become available again in China.

Keeper of the Source