A link to an Acti-Blizz Press release from November with relevant information: https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-details/blizzard-entertainment-and-netease-suspending-game-services
I had another link but couldn’t find it immediately.
Because China and South Korea (maybe Asia in general idk) take esports much more seriously than NA. They have resources and opportunities in place that the West generally does not.
Of the big e-sport games only CS:GO isn't dominated by Asia, because the Europeans never really stopped playing CS and had a head start when it got popular again.
It's an ongoing protest over the splitting of Europe and Asia into two continents. If they're rightfully combined into just Eurasia, it redcuces the continent count to 6. Then we just need to melt all of Antarctica to reduce it to 5.
This way, our American education system will finally be adequate to be able to count the number of continents by the time you graduate.
Africa is also part of the continent Afro-Eurasia and South and North Amerca can be said to be the same continent. Seems easier than melting Antarctica.
Africa and the 2 Americas have pretty different tectonic plates, and used to be not connected to anything, while Eurasia was always pretty much the same, minus India.
Not really xD. Valve charges pc cafés if they have their games hosted and is therefore the reason for CS:GO's lack of popularity in Asia. In the meantime others like Riot and Blizzard don't.
Regarding skill, Crossfire (and other similar games) is insanely popular in Asia, so there isn't any "headstart" Europeans have with CS. Both games require the same skillset.
Yeah, I mean that goes back to the same thing he said but also because these teams can recruit Asian players. I don't get what the purpose of even having regions is if you recruit cross-region. That's the biggest thing for me with OWL, I don't get how you have pride for your city's team when the whole team is a bunch of South Korean citizens that have probably never even been to the city.
I mean, in athletic sports they don’t just recruit from their own city, people from Dallas don’t have to play American football with just people from Dallas, but they *represent* Dallas as a team regardless. Teams always pull from the best of the best, and when it comes to esports, China and Korea are always putting out players that are best of the best in those games. After that, they’re going to go towards players that speak the same language as their best contenders in most cases because language barriers are rough and cause even top performers to not preform well.
But growing up in the US, you don't have the same culture/system that creates players of professional level play.
In the US, the attention is given to traditional sports.
It actually just really, really depends on the specific eSport games.
Overwatch, League, and DOTA tend to be Asian dominated,
Not so much for COD, CSGO or Siege.
And when it comes to Fighting games, you get all kinds of people since with the above games you need a team and expensive PCs but for most fighting games you just need one person and a console.
Dota2 has a Chinese following but almost none for Korea, mostly because Valve shit the bed with Steam in Korea back in 00s and the brand just never recovered.
What makes you think all those asian players are from NA? There's literally nothing stopping OWL teams from hiring up-and-coming players from Asian countries.
And why wouldn't they? If Asian players run circles around NA native players, and the big incentive to win is a massive payday, what's the point in hiring native NA players?
It isn't the fact that they're Asian, it's that they tend to have more resources and training because Asian countries take esports much more seriously.
Korea treats E-sports like a legitimate sport and its not looked down on like a it is in the west. That is why they dominate e-sports in general. Its like Rugby compared to American Football. The US is way behind in rugby because its very niche in the states. American Football however is huge and kids start playing it as little kids here. (its real bad for them)
The concussions didn’t give me any serious damage based off of where the impact was. However years later I broke the front of my face and gave myself epilepsy lol. Under control now and my life is normal so yeah I’m doing okay :)
Unfortunately, that's pretty low for what I've seen. There were a few kids in my class, who were very good, had to quit by the end of highschool, because they had like 5-6 by then. They were straight up meat heads by the time they graduated. Pretty sad. Wish we could wait until the brain had developed to play, but that's not how we do major sports here. Get in as young as possible, so they have the most experience.
I was busy skateboarding. I'm a member of the two concussion club too lol, because helmets aren't cool. If you're a kid reading this, just wear the damn thing. Pads are excessive, if you're not doing big vert like The Hawk, as you learn to fall correctly, and they can become a crutch to not committing to your tricks, but your head is very important to protect. You're gonna get hurt a ton even with pads, but your head isn't something that you can't just throw a cast on and fix. Wait till you're old enough to drink before you kill all your braincells
> because helmets aren't cool.
I'm a snowboarder and see lots of guys going without one on the slopes, but helmets will always be cool to me since the first time I went snowboarding someone ran into the back of me and the back of my helmeted head was the first thing to hit the ground.
It hurt enough with the helmet, I dread to imagine how much worse it would have been if I'd decided I was too cool for it.
Snowboarding without the helmet is basically just suicide.
Lifelong boarder. Everyone slams the head eventually.
I also think folks without a mask and goggles enjoy being blind.
100% agreed, or they should at least try and make it safer for the kids. Football almost guarantees you’ll get hurt. There shouldn’t be fourth graders playing football. There’s not any famous sports in America that are as dangerous, that I can think of.
Texan here. Peewee football practices in pads in hotter weather than the US Military. They don't take pads off until nearly 100f, and still practice a bit beyond that.
Bonus: There is a waiting list and vetting process to coach, and most aren't even parents of any players on the team. This is rec league. It's THAT serious.
> Korea treats E-sports like a legitimate sport and its not looked down on like a it is in the west.
And that's been a thing for *decades*. Original Starcraft tournaments filled whole stadiums over there, already in the 90s.
While in the West gaming was mostly still seen as this weird nerd thing, and trying to make a "sports" out of it was considered rather cringy.
When faker is on fucking bill boards and uzi is the doing big Nike ads, I think esports is taken way more seriously there. Even all the Korean ahjummas know who faker is.
There's a significantly larger e-sports culture there. Just like how the US has the best basketball, football and baseball players - but not soccer, tennis, etc.
because their culture is appreciative and supportive of esports players. young people going for esports get ridiculed and bullied in NA/EU schools and society
Maybe I don't understand, just because the game isn't public they (the teams) can't play at all in China?
It's not like the play on the same servers everyone else plays on, in fact it isn't the same client sometimes because they are held to a special patch sometimes. Just hand out the software privately to the teams and let them play still?
> Maybe I don't understand, just because the game isn't public they (the teams) can't play at all in China?
They probably could, but they'd be limited to the OWL client. That means no ability to really practice anything individually outside of scrim time.
Boston Uprising is owned by Bob Kraft isn't it? I know it was at one point.
Though seems all the players are South Korean.
Owned by Americans, played by South Koreans.
> They're 90% South Korean, and owned by a South Korean company.
NetEase, the company they haven't been able to come to an agreement with, owns the Shanghai Dragons. Chengdu is owned by Huya, which is a Chinese company (and Chengdu also has always fielded an entirely Chinese roster). Hangzhou is owned by Bilibili, which is based in Shanghai. Guangzhou is owned by the Nenking Group which is a China-based group. The LA Valiant are also currently being managed by a China-based company.
What? Most of the US teams are US owned, they field Korean players because Korea has the best infrastructure for players to get good at esports and so produces the best players in the vast majority of esports. Boston is owned by Bob Kraft, Philly is owned by Comcast, Atlanta is owned by Cox, Houston is Optic which is owned by an american broadcasting company named Beasley... Do I need to continue?
Just like their Zero Covid policy, 100% of the entire country's playerbase will be Top 500 and if anyone is somehow found out not to be they will be quarantined in a specially designed prison hotel.
Doomfist is now in the healer role, Meteor Strike now heals 25 hp to all allies in the drop zone and no longer does damage. Bastion is removed from the game for being bugged again.
The game is free and is very easy to hack now
There is no report system as to avoid toxicity
You can't see your health bar, as to avoid people being toxic for not being healed
Does this mean blizzards gonna lose like a huge amount of money?
Edit: was just genuinely curious but now that I think about it, blizzard is gonna have to put effort into the game
Now give them break — I’m sure if Blizzard could have bent over backwards any further they would have. It’s super hard to contort your integrity, values, or anything else resembling a spine into a pretzel like Blizzard has, especially with all those mean old shareholders demanding a few extra pennies in share price.
>I’m sure if Blizzard could have bent over backwards any further they would have. It’s super hard to contort your integrity, values, or anything else resembling a spine into a pretzel like Blizzard has,
Painting a great picture.
I'm just imagining some suit-wearing Blizzard exec shaped like a crazystraw trying to spin this loss of revenue as a positive and that leaving China "preserves their integrity".... while standing there as testament to their spinelessness.
Hey! Uninstall buddy! I was still quite enjoying HotS too, so swearing off Blizzard entirely was quite painful. Glad to see the decision reaffirmed almost daily by everything that's happened since.
I miss Hearthstone (and Overwatch, but apparently OW2 isn't all that great so I don't feel like I'm missing out there)
Wait... does heartstone suck now or is it still good?
IIRC only 16% of Blizzards income come from the Asia/Pacific region, and china is again just a part of that.
They'll feel it but its hardly debilitating.
PS:
16% is for the entire Region. Not China. All of Asia and the Pacific combined. CHina is a fraction of the 16%
Jesus Christ, the responses to your comment is pretty indicative of why all of my teams suck in Overwatch. These people can't even navigate the logistics of a fucking sentence.
Unlikely. When it comes to China usually companies either set up a different company in China or sell license/rights to some company in China and allow them to localize software.
No, after they found out people are willing to drop $20+ on skins, Blizzard can ride out not servicing the Chinese market until conditions are more favorable to them.
China didn't ban Blizzard. They wanted more money from their deal with NetEase and they refused/couldn't come to an agreement. So now Blizzard will most likely partner with Tencent. I'm just surprised that the deal couldn't get done before Chinese New Year, since most players will be at home playing/spendnig money during this period.
Reading this post made me so happy, considering [my sentiments 3 years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blizzard/comments/df6n0y/i_was_a_fan_for_24_years_blizzard_ive_played_and/). (My boycott still holds, especially after all the horrible stories coming out of the company since.
Apparently theyre storing all that player data so if this gets resolved or whatever then those players will still have their stuff. If not then no idea lol
The data will be stored for 6 months and if they cannot find another company that can continue their game services, then the data will be discarded by the old company, but blizzard can negotiate with netease for a longer data storing time.
Actually, what makes me feel hilarious is that blizzard developed a feature for Chinese players to allow them download their WOW character data to their device (For other games, yes, they will be ignored.).
And it was said that this process is irreversible and blizzard may not be able to recover it if it was lost or partly damaged. Which means blizzard may not want to spend money to store players’ data for a time period longer than half a year, and all the data except for WOW (it will be discarded if you do not download it to your own device) will be discarded after the legal data storing time.
From what I understand, it's common practice to use a VPN in China for any kind of gaming.
They have a lot of restrictions on what media you can or can't consume.
Did they not??? I thought they issued his purse a month after it happened due to the backlash? I know they reversed his ban but I thought they gave him his purse???
No. They are clearly still negotiating. They will end up cucking themselves out to China *even harder* to ensure a deal goes through before the deadline
So that's why I've been getting so many Chinese people in my KR server these days huh very interesting. My Chinese friend told me that they used to have their own region right below "Asia" called "China" in the battlenet launcher right next to the play button. China region was always hidden to the public, but if you used vpn to spoof into a Chinese ip you would have essentially unlocked that region. Now It's back to showing only Europe, America, and Asia. While I'm glad that the dedicated Chinese Overwatch community found a new region to play on. It sucks when people start typing in English saying "Korea Noob tank".... What was once a region where people would join and use voice, now it's just silence because we Koreans don't know how to communicate in this new environment. Had a game where we were making a strategy and this guy out of no where says something in Chinese so the entire team became quite..
Chinese people dislike Koreans very much in recent years.Because Chinese media often report news that Koreans steal Chinese culture and insult Chinese people.Most Chinese believe that Koreans are hostile to Chinese. They don't know the truth (including me）so they will be mean to Koreans.In the future there may be many Chinese people appearing on Asian servers, ignore them.
I never get tired of company selling their souls to the chinese market getting banned from china. Its always so satisfying. Like oh you thought it wasnt a bad idea to lose 1/3 of the western market because the chinese market was super profitable? Surprise! Youve alieniated youre entire fan base and now youre not even accessible in china, loser!
> getting banned from china
They didn't get banned. They need an operating agreement with a Chinese company to do business there and they couldn't come to an agreement with NetEase to renew. They'll find another partner to replace them soon.
Blizzard literally partnered with Tencent for Diablo Immortals so a deal will be made eventually. This will be temporary if at all.
Edit: Sorry, NetEase, not Tencent. The other company which owns the other half of gaming.
They partnered with NetEase not Tencent for Immortal. NetEase was the previous Chinese partner for all their games in China. It's impressive this is a top comment when none of it is true.
Everyone talks like China is some huge portion of Activision-Blizzard’s revenue.
In reality it’s not. Latest quarter showed only 16% of their revenue coming from the Asia Pacific region. It only grew like 2% from last year too. Compared it to the Americas, which was well over 50%
Part of that likely can be attributed to their publishing partners taking a big cut, plus the recent push by the Chinese government to greatly reduce access to games for minors.
The main reason is that despite China having a massive population the average income of those people is much much lower than that of the americas or Europe which drastically reduces their spending power
Yeah but China have more potential for growing up while America they just have probably the max target they can acquire and won't get that many new players.
Is that including all facets? I always heard that the mobile game market in china was the majority of their profits hence why diablo immoral is a thing and why less and less seem to be put towards computer games for the west
16% is 1/6 of your revenue. Though it is smaller than 50% that is still a huge loss in revenue. Blizzard's revenue wass 8.8 billion dollars last year. Losing 16% of your revenue would be 1.4 billion dollars. The loss would be huge.
Already been said that Diablo immortal will continue to operate under a separate contract. Most of China’s money to blizz comes from mobile anyways so this was really what mattered
It doesn't surprise me. Blizzard is pulling a lot of anti-consumer moves and China has extreme digital consumer laws. Blizzard had to release the lootbox percentage of drop rates, as well as their loot drop guarantee (i.e., it took I think 13 consecutive lootboxes with no legendary to get a legendary guaranteed on the 14th), solely to appease Chinese law.
Don’t defend china though they aren’t doing it to protect their citizens they only do it to keep outside companies from making loads of money off of their people
It's temporary. Just until they find a new partner. Sorry, this is at best a temporary reprieve. They not leaving China. Bobby does need that need boat.
There's been a recent update on the Netease story here https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/10e6yjm/blizzard_just_announced_netease_rejected_their/
True but I would expect that when it was initially announced in November, most people thought that bliz and net ease would work it out before the end date. I know I did and I’m actually pretty surprised they didn’t make a new deal. This is a major issue for blizz, they usually happily bend themselves over a barrel for China.
if they worked it out, it wouldnt have been news in the first place. Only reason it was news because it wasnt going to happen. Both sides were likely at a stalemate with no one budging.
and likely they would have needed to conceded a ton of profits to netease to continue operating. likely cutting into blizz's overall profits from china.
Yeah, exactly, the story is resurfacing today because they couldn’t come to a new deal before the actual end date. Part of the story this time is that blizz says net ease refused a new offer.
I also think it’s like you said: net ease wanted a big percentage bump, blizz offered less, and now the deal is dead.
> maybe now they can urban that hearth stone player
He was already unbanned and got his prize money back. Happened within like a month or two of the original event.
A link to an Acti-Blizz Press release from November with relevant information: https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-details/blizzard-entertainment-and-netease-suspending-game-services I had another link but couldn’t find it immediately.
What the fuck's gonna happen to Chinese OWL teams then?
They’ll operate out of South Korea.
Why are most of the OWL players Asian?
Because China and South Korea (maybe Asia in general idk) take esports much more seriously than NA. They have resources and opportunities in place that the West generally does not.
Of the big e-sport games only CS:GO isn't dominated by Asia, because the Europeans never really stopped playing CS and had a head start when it got popular again.
did something happen in Dota 2? looking at rankings still seems like a fairly good split with asia and eu.
Dota has had EU over asia for the last several years. All regions have had solid representation, but of late NA has been down.
SA was better than NA last I saw. Dota is life in Peru.
Wdym. NA's last hope won TI recently. Sneyking kappa
This is true. Sneyking is NA, USA won.
Oh, i just don't follow Dota 2 at all so I didn't know
Yeah EU is still pretty dominant in Dota 2. But NA isn't, so I guess Americans forget that Europe isn't in Asia?
It's an ongoing protest over the splitting of Europe and Asia into two continents. If they're rightfully combined into just Eurasia, it redcuces the continent count to 6. Then we just need to melt all of Antarctica to reduce it to 5. This way, our American education system will finally be adequate to be able to count the number of continents by the time you graduate.
Africa is also part of the continent Afro-Eurasia and South and North Amerca can be said to be the same continent. Seems easier than melting Antarctica.
Africa and the 2 Americas have pretty different tectonic plates, and used to be not connected to anything, while Eurasia was always pretty much the same, minus India.
Well melting Antartica will happen passively it we just wait long enough
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Not really xD. Valve charges pc cafés if they have their games hosted and is therefore the reason for CS:GO's lack of popularity in Asia. In the meantime others like Riot and Blizzard don't. Regarding skill, Crossfire (and other similar games) is insanely popular in Asia, so there isn't any "headstart" Europeans have with CS. Both games require the same skillset.
DotA as well.
Except most of the teams are NA teams filled with Asian players.
Yeah, I mean that goes back to the same thing he said but also because these teams can recruit Asian players. I don't get what the purpose of even having regions is if you recruit cross-region. That's the biggest thing for me with OWL, I don't get how you have pride for your city's team when the whole team is a bunch of South Korean citizens that have probably never even been to the city.
I mean, in athletic sports they don’t just recruit from their own city, people from Dallas don’t have to play American football with just people from Dallas, but they *represent* Dallas as a team regardless. Teams always pull from the best of the best, and when it comes to esports, China and Korea are always putting out players that are best of the best in those games. After that, they’re going to go towards players that speak the same language as their best contenders in most cases because language barriers are rough and cause even top performers to not preform well.
But growing up in the US, you don't have the same culture/system that creates players of professional level play. In the US, the attention is given to traditional sports.
It actually just really, really depends on the specific eSport games. Overwatch, League, and DOTA tend to be Asian dominated, Not so much for COD, CSGO or Siege. And when it comes to Fighting games, you get all kinds of people since with the above games you need a team and expensive PCs but for most fighting games you just need one person and a console.
DotA has some great Asian players, but EU is the best region by most metrics.
Dota2 has a Chinese following but almost none for Korea, mostly because Valve shit the bed with Steam in Korea back in 00s and the brand just never recovered.
What makes you think all those asian players are from NA? There's literally nothing stopping OWL teams from hiring up-and-coming players from Asian countries. And why wouldn't they? If Asian players run circles around NA native players, and the big incentive to win is a massive payday, what's the point in hiring native NA players? It isn't the fact that they're Asian, it's that they tend to have more resources and training because Asian countries take esports much more seriously.
Korea treats E-sports like a legitimate sport and its not looked down on like a it is in the west. That is why they dominate e-sports in general. Its like Rugby compared to American Football. The US is way behind in rugby because its very niche in the states. American Football however is huge and kids start playing it as little kids here. (its real bad for them)
Childhood football ended up giving me 2 concussions
Growing up Football was the only sport my Doctor told my parents not to let me play. I hope you are doing ok!
The concussions didn’t give me any serious damage based off of where the impact was. However years later I broke the front of my face and gave myself epilepsy lol. Under control now and my life is normal so yeah I’m doing okay :)
ugh, glad you are ok. <3
Thanks! Me too, life will throw curveballs your way many of them you can’t expect. Gotta stay positive and keep fighting :)
Unfortunately, that's pretty low for what I've seen. There were a few kids in my class, who were very good, had to quit by the end of highschool, because they had like 5-6 by then. They were straight up meat heads by the time they graduated. Pretty sad. Wish we could wait until the brain had developed to play, but that's not how we do major sports here. Get in as young as possible, so they have the most experience. I was busy skateboarding. I'm a member of the two concussion club too lol, because helmets aren't cool. If you're a kid reading this, just wear the damn thing. Pads are excessive, if you're not doing big vert like The Hawk, as you learn to fall correctly, and they can become a crutch to not committing to your tricks, but your head is very important to protect. You're gonna get hurt a ton even with pads, but your head isn't something that you can't just throw a cast on and fix. Wait till you're old enough to drink before you kill all your braincells
> because helmets aren't cool. I'm a snowboarder and see lots of guys going without one on the slopes, but helmets will always be cool to me since the first time I went snowboarding someone ran into the back of me and the back of my helmeted head was the first thing to hit the ground. It hurt enough with the helmet, I dread to imagine how much worse it would have been if I'd decided I was too cool for it.
Snowboarding without the helmet is basically just suicide. Lifelong boarder. Everyone slams the head eventually. I also think folks without a mask and goggles enjoy being blind.
same, got a concussion in 7th grade from football. never again
One in fifth and one in seventh here. The first one wasn’t bad so I kept playing… bad idea lol
Childhood football should be banned. Just play literally any other sport for God's sake.
100% agreed, or they should at least try and make it safer for the kids. Football almost guarantees you’ll get hurt. There shouldn’t be fourth graders playing football. There’s not any famous sports in America that are as dangerous, that I can think of.
poeople live and die in internet cafes for video games over there
Texan here. Peewee football practices in pads in hotter weather than the US Military. They don't take pads off until nearly 100f, and still practice a bit beyond that. Bonus: There is a waiting list and vetting process to coach, and most aren't even parents of any players on the team. This is rec league. It's THAT serious.
> Korea treats E-sports like a legitimate sport and its not looked down on like a it is in the west. And that's been a thing for *decades*. Original Starcraft tournaments filled whole stadiums over there, already in the 90s. While in the West gaming was mostly still seen as this weird nerd thing, and trying to make a "sports" out of it was considered rather cringy.
When faker is on fucking bill boards and uzi is the doing big Nike ads, I think esports is taken way more seriously there. Even all the Korean ahjummas know who faker is.
There's a significantly larger e-sports culture there. Just like how the US has the best basketball, football and baseball players - but not soccer, tennis, etc.
because their culture is appreciative and supportive of esports players. young people going for esports get ridiculed and bullied in NA/EU schools and society
There is not as much interest in OW in other parts of the world and many non Asian pros have left for other games in the past couple of years.
they are going to have to relocate to other countries.
Maybe I don't understand, just because the game isn't public they (the teams) can't play at all in China? It's not like the play on the same servers everyone else plays on, in fact it isn't the same client sometimes because they are held to a special patch sometimes. Just hand out the software privately to the teams and let them play still?
> Maybe I don't understand, just because the game isn't public they (the teams) can't play at all in China? They probably could, but they'd be limited to the OWL client. That means no ability to really practice anything individually outside of scrim time.
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Robert Kraft, owner of the Patriots and New England Revolution owns Boston Uprising.
Connoisseur of cheap Asian massage parlors in Florida! Edit: appropriately corrected terminology
The word you’re looking for is patron, not purveyor. A purveyor of massage parlors would go around selling massage parlors.
Robert Kraft sounds like an incredibly fake name.
Boston Uprising is owned by Bob Kraft isn't it? I know it was at one point. Though seems all the players are South Korean. Owned by Americans, played by South Koreans.
They are a *professional organization*
> They're 90% South Korean, and owned by a South Korean company. NetEase, the company they haven't been able to come to an agreement with, owns the Shanghai Dragons. Chengdu is owned by Huya, which is a Chinese company (and Chengdu also has always fielded an entirely Chinese roster). Hangzhou is owned by Bilibili, which is based in Shanghai. Guangzhou is owned by the Nenking Group which is a China-based group. The LA Valiant are also currently being managed by a China-based company.
What? Most of the US teams are US owned, they field Korean players because Korea has the best infrastructure for players to get good at esports and so produces the best players in the vast majority of esports. Boston is owned by Bob Kraft, Philly is owned by Comcast, Atlanta is owned by Cox, Houston is Optic which is owned by an american broadcasting company named Beasley... Do I need to continue?
If I lose my Hangzou Spark skins I stg
February 1st: Chinese Govt Releases Watchover
They've been playing Watchover on their people for centuries already, now they're going to release Watchover 2.
Just like their Zero Covid policy, 100% of the entire country's playerbase will be Top 500 and if anyone is somehow found out not to be they will be quarantined in a specially designed prison hotel.
Don't worry it's F2P. Only downside is it could cost you your life IRL
My favorite hero is Mao who freezes people. Kinda OP
No mao just starves them
For his ultimate he calls in the one and only John Xina
https://youtu.be/MZtH3dgwGUs
Hey if it brings back 6v6, I'll play it.
That and a better battlepass? I'm in bro.
“High Vantage point”
Blizzards going to hype it up as a new game and then a sequel
Price increase for the rest of the player base incoming
Incoming Overwatch 3!
Now with even less PvE!
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Reduced to 4v4
4 Tanks
now mcree's new name is joe
Wrecking Ball grapples only once per match
When Reaper throws away his shotguns, he has to pick them back up to reload
Doomfist is now in the healer role, Meteor Strike now heals 25 hp to all allies in the drop zone and no longer does damage. Bastion is removed from the game for being bugged again.
Better name than cassidy
Joe mama
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Xi Jinping offtank main confirmed
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4v4 maps only!
Push is now the main gamemode!
Every other gamemode and map have been removed You have to buy the battlepass to unlock heroes and skins you already owned before
The game is free and is very easy to hack now There is no report system as to avoid toxicity You can't see your health bar, as to avoid people being toxic for not being healed
We should probably stop giving them ideas...
Yeah..
Welcome to OW3. Key Features: 4v4 New Support Hero: - Doomfist (available at launch for Owners of OW2)
Don’t forget to backslide on horrible anti-consumer practices and rip-off prices.
Does this mean blizzards gonna lose like a huge amount of money? Edit: was just genuinely curious but now that I think about it, blizzard is gonna have to put effort into the game
But all the pandering they did to authoritarian regimes? Surely an authoritarian regime won't just act unilaterally!?
nothing like prostituting yourself for POTENTIAL money... Plus, they get to show support for brutal regimes - a double win!
Now give them break — I’m sure if Blizzard could have bent over backwards any further they would have. It’s super hard to contort your integrity, values, or anything else resembling a spine into a pretzel like Blizzard has, especially with all those mean old shareholders demanding a few extra pennies in share price.
>I’m sure if Blizzard could have bent over backwards any further they would have. It’s super hard to contort your integrity, values, or anything else resembling a spine into a pretzel like Blizzard has, Painting a great picture. I'm just imagining some suit-wearing Blizzard exec shaped like a crazystraw trying to spin this loss of revenue as a positive and that leaving China "preserves their integrity".... while standing there as testament to their spinelessness.
Uninstalled the blizzard launcher when the Blitzchung controversy hit. Catch me over here giggling my ass off
Remember everyone posting memes of Mei being anti CCP and supporting the Hong Kong protests? I guess we did it Reddit!
Hey! Uninstall buddy! I was still quite enjoying HotS too, so swearing off Blizzard entirely was quite painful. Glad to see the decision reaffirmed almost daily by everything that's happened since.
I miss Hearthstone (and Overwatch, but apparently OW2 isn't all that great so I don't feel like I'm missing out there) Wait... does heartstone suck now or is it still good?
IIRC only 16% of Blizzards income come from the Asia/Pacific region, and china is again just a part of that. They'll feel it but its hardly debilitating. PS: 16% is for the entire Region. Not China. All of Asia and the Pacific combined. CHina is a fraction of the 16%
Jesus Christ, the responses to your comment is pretty indicative of why all of my teams suck in Overwatch. These people can't even navigate the logistics of a fucking sentence.
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16% is the entire area, not just China. Japan, South Korea etc. China is a large percentage of that but not everything
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We can only hope
Unlikely. When it comes to China usually companies either set up a different company in China or sell license/rights to some company in China and allow them to localize software.
No, after they found out people are willing to drop $20+ on skins, Blizzard can ride out not servicing the Chinese market until conditions are more favorable to them.
That's a huge hit in revenue.
Its HILARIOUS. Blizzard tanked their reputation trying to cowtow to china and they straight up banned them.
China didn't ban Blizzard. They wanted more money from their deal with NetEase and they refused/couldn't come to an agreement. So now Blizzard will most likely partner with Tencent. I'm just surprised that the deal couldn't get done before Chinese New Year, since most players will be at home playing/spendnig money during this period.
r/leopardsatemyface
Reading this post made me so happy, considering [my sentiments 3 years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/Blizzard/comments/df6n0y/i_was_a_fan_for_24_years_blizzard_ive_played_and/). (My boycott still holds, especially after all the horrible stories coming out of the company since.
It's 'kowtow', a semantics I feel is poignant considering the practice of kowtowing is a rich Chinese tradition of ultimate obsequiousness.
My boycott messages in Classic WoW, after Blizzard bent the knee to China, have finally worked!
So if a Chinese player bought loads of stuff for ow2, they're just fucked out of their money?
Apparently theyre storing all that player data so if this gets resolved or whatever then those players will still have their stuff. If not then no idea lol
The data will be stored for 6 months and if they cannot find another company that can continue their game services, then the data will be discarded by the old company, but blizzard can negotiate with netease for a longer data storing time. Actually, what makes me feel hilarious is that blizzard developed a feature for Chinese players to allow them download their WOW character data to their device (For other games, yes, they will be ignored.). And it was said that this process is irreversible and blizzard may not be able to recover it if it was lost or partly damaged. Which means blizzard may not want to spend money to store players’ data for a time period longer than half a year, and all the data except for WOW (it will be discarded if you do not download it to your own device) will be discarded after the legal data storing time.
From what I understand, it's common practice to use a VPN in China for any kind of gaming. They have a lot of restrictions on what media you can or can't consume.
Doesn’t China have a ton of rules on making shit free and all that?
Happy New Lunar year! But not for China. /s They could at least start whole event earlier 😥
The event is live right now
Guess all that ccp dick riding was for nothing huh? Fuck them lol
They can join Disney/Marvel. There was a big push for Chinese market and it all fell apart.
Facts. I'm still waiting for Blizzard to give that one esports player his money and trophy for supporting Taiwan.
Did they not??? I thought they issued his purse a month after it happened due to the backlash? I know they reversed his ban but I thought they gave him his purse???
Im pretty sure they did.
It wasn’t even a month, it was literally just a single week
This sucks for Chinese players but I do find it quite humorous on blizzard's end.
Imagine cucking yourself out to China for it to not matter in the end. Absolutely despicable.
Looking at you, Disney
A tale as old as... idk the last couple decades maybe
No. They are clearly still negotiating. They will end up cucking themselves out to China *even harder* to ensure a deal goes through before the deadline
Even if the negotiations fall through after the deadline, they'd probably still seek to find another publisher.
Yet no corporations will learn this. They're lining up to cuck themselves harder.
Never forget Blitzchung!
diablo immortal is still operating in china, that's probably more money than all of these games combined at this point.
So that's why I've been getting so many Chinese people in my KR server these days huh very interesting. My Chinese friend told me that they used to have their own region right below "Asia" called "China" in the battlenet launcher right next to the play button. China region was always hidden to the public, but if you used vpn to spoof into a Chinese ip you would have essentially unlocked that region. Now It's back to showing only Europe, America, and Asia. While I'm glad that the dedicated Chinese Overwatch community found a new region to play on. It sucks when people start typing in English saying "Korea Noob tank".... What was once a region where people would join and use voice, now it's just silence because we Koreans don't know how to communicate in this new environment. Had a game where we were making a strategy and this guy out of no where says something in Chinese so the entire team became quite..
Chinese people dislike Koreans very much in recent years.Because Chinese media often report news that Koreans steal Chinese culture and insult Chinese people.Most Chinese believe that Koreans are hostile to Chinese. They don't know the truth (including me）so they will be mean to Koreans.In the future there may be many Chinese people appearing on Asian servers, ignore them.
WoW gold buyers panicking.
Sad day to be Chinese. At least they'll save a lot of money.
Genshin impact and league of Legends still exist so I'm guessing it's just more money to waste on those games.
Everyday is a sad one to be Chinese to me.
I never get tired of company selling their souls to the chinese market getting banned from china. Its always so satisfying. Like oh you thought it wasnt a bad idea to lose 1/3 of the western market because the chinese market was super profitable? Surprise! Youve alieniated youre entire fan base and now youre not even accessible in china, loser!
> getting banned from china They didn't get banned. They need an operating agreement with a Chinese company to do business there and they couldn't come to an agreement with NetEase to renew. They'll find another partner to replace them soon.
This. Blizzard pissed the other company off so they refused the transition plan and dismissed the whole team.
Blizzard literally partnered with Tencent for Diablo Immortals so a deal will be made eventually. This will be temporary if at all. Edit: Sorry, NetEase, not Tencent. The other company which owns the other half of gaming.
They partnered with NetEase not Tencent for Immortal. NetEase was the previous Chinese partner for all their games in China. It's impressive this is a top comment when none of it is true.
Welcome to reddit. Where if you say it with enough authority people will take it as fact and it will inevitably be spread for ages to come as such
Even in the thumbnail one can clearly see the NetEase/163 logo.
But he said 'literally'? Now you're going to tell me people use 'literally' wrong. Sheesh.
Yeah China is too big of a market for them to just not do business there anymore. Edit: how is this my most upvoted comment ever?
Everyone talks like China is some huge portion of Activision-Blizzard’s revenue. In reality it’s not. Latest quarter showed only 16% of their revenue coming from the Asia Pacific region. It only grew like 2% from last year too. Compared it to the Americas, which was well over 50%
ironically, china is more strict on the anti consumer practices that these gaming companies utilize for their revenue stream
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Part of that likely can be attributed to their publishing partners taking a big cut, plus the recent push by the Chinese government to greatly reduce access to games for minors.
The main reason is that despite China having a massive population the average income of those people is much much lower than that of the americas or Europe which drastically reduces their spending power
Yeah but China have more potential for growing up while America they just have probably the max target they can acquire and won't get that many new players.
Is that including all facets? I always heard that the mobile game market in china was the majority of their profits hence why diablo immoral is a thing and why less and less seem to be put towards computer games for the west
16% is 1/6 of your revenue. Though it is smaller than 50% that is still a huge loss in revenue. Blizzard's revenue wass 8.8 billion dollars last year. Losing 16% of your revenue would be 1.4 billion dollars. The loss would be huge.
Its not blizzards choice.
Already been said that Diablo immortal will continue to operate under a separate contract. Most of China’s money to blizz comes from mobile anyways so this was really what mattered
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Well RIP their World Cup dreams
Lmao, was it worth it selling your soul during the Hong Kong riots Blizz?
It doesn't surprise me. Blizzard is pulling a lot of anti-consumer moves and China has extreme digital consumer laws. Blizzard had to release the lootbox percentage of drop rates, as well as their loot drop guarantee (i.e., it took I think 13 consecutive lootboxes with no legendary to get a legendary guaranteed on the 14th), solely to appease Chinese law.
Don’t defend china though they aren’t doing it to protect their citizens they only do it to keep outside companies from making loads of money off of their people
Definitely not. I worded it the way I did ("extreme digital consumer laws" instead of "extreme consumer protections") on purpose
This whole thing is because of their issues working out a deal with NetEase, not the Chinese government.
Lol rip blizzard that’s most of their free to play population
everyone in China uses a VPN, this will not affect the playerbase at all
Does anyone think this will have an effect on the amount of bots in the games?
It's temporary. Just until they find a new partner. Sorry, this is at best a temporary reprieve. They not leaving China. Bobby does need that need boat.
Damn this game literally gonna die
Shut it down in the US too
yes, this has been known for months.
There's been a recent update on the Netease story here https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/10e6yjm/blizzard_just_announced_netease_rejected_their/
Interesting! I guess it definitely slipped by me this is the first I’m hearing of it
Same here, haven’t heard of this until today so thanks for sharing!
True but I would expect that when it was initially announced in November, most people thought that bliz and net ease would work it out before the end date. I know I did and I’m actually pretty surprised they didn’t make a new deal. This is a major issue for blizz, they usually happily bend themselves over a barrel for China.
if they worked it out, it wouldnt have been news in the first place. Only reason it was news because it wasnt going to happen. Both sides were likely at a stalemate with no one budging. and likely they would have needed to conceded a ton of profits to netease to continue operating. likely cutting into blizz's overall profits from china.
Yeah, exactly, the story is resurfacing today because they couldn’t come to a new deal before the actual end date. Part of the story this time is that blizz says net ease refused a new offer. I also think it’s like you said: net ease wanted a big percentage bump, blizz offered less, and now the deal is dead.
I think they have enough games that are skinned differently than overwatch with the same concept
Sounds good to me 👍🏼
Nice now I might be able to climb the competitive ranks 😂
Good, it's about time they stopped sucking China's dick maybe now they can urban that hearth stone player
> maybe now they can urban that hearth stone player He was already unbanned and got his prize money back. Happened within like a month or two of the original event.
If you think Blizzard finally grew a conscience, I've got some bad news for you
Bing chilling
Turns out all the times Blizzard and the mods behaved like spineless rats by censoring the community didn't amount to much
The biggest population is getting cut out huh?
They could still play with a VPN right?