World of Warcraft banned in China

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Chinese authority orders local WoW subscription partner to stop supporting popular MMORPG

A Chinese regulatory authority has ordered the country’s World of Warcraft licensing partner NetEase to immediately cease operating the game within the territory.

According to Reuters, the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) halted and returned a NetEase application to operate the game within China due to “gross violations” of regulations.

The agency also posted a statement on its website recently demanding that NetEase suspend charging users to play the game and to disallow new account registrations. This negatively affected both Activision Blizzard and NetEase share prices.

"Millions of Warcraft players will suffer the most," said Leon Li, vice president of Chinese mobile Internet firm KongZhong told Reuters. "But if you take a long term view of the industry, many of these Warcraft gamers may migrate to other games, so for the other Chinese online game companies, it is a good thing."

World of Warcraft currently has well over 10 million active users in its subscriber base. Eastern regions such as China, Japan and South Korea certainly account for a large number of the game’s users.

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Comments (3 posted): Comments (3 posted):

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Ernst
Ernst
on 04/11/2009 11:14:43
Activision Blizzard will sh** them selfs if they read this news. Bet they going to increase MW2 price again to make up for this loss.
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Jaco
Jaco
on 04/11/2009 15:23:49
Even though the Chinese represent a few million users, they only represent a small percentage of the revenue.
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nice
nice
on 09/11/2009 18:49:46
lol, so if you want to make it harder to goldfarmers in your game, just add in some dead/undead people and pandas? :P
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