World of Warcraft: The closure of the national server has caused heavy losses. Blizzard officially announced that the monthly card price will not increase, and NetEase also hinted

How much impact will the closure of the national server have on Blizzard? If previous estimates are used, then the revenue from the Chinese server accounts for about 15% of Blizzard’s revenue. However, when Blizzard actually released the data, we discovered that the closure of the national server had caused great losses to Blizzard.

Recently, John Hight, Blizzard’s senior vice president and general manager of the Warcraft franchise, announced user data from 2016 to the present at the Game Developers Conference (the above is released by Blizzard Trend chart, below are the specific numbers calculated by players based on the trend chart. Currently, the foreign servers are quarreling because they think this data is too watery).

The last released user data for the 6.0 Warlords of Draenor version was 5.5 million, and then Blizzard announced that it would no longer release the data. From this new data, it can be seen that the 7.0 Legion version increased the number of users, and then fell again, and fell to a record low in the middle of the 8.0 version, with only about 4 million players.

If the classic server hadn’t come out in 2019, then World of Warcraft would really have been completely GG. However, even the popularity of the nostalgic server only lasted until the end of the 60 version. With the arrival of the TBC version, the number of World of Warcraft players dropped again. It can be said that the revenue of the entire TBC version is supported by the Chinese server players.

After the closure of the national server in the P1 phase of the WLK version, the number of World of Warcraft players once again dropped to the level of the mid-8.0 version. This is still a dual-version situation (official server and classic server). One can imagine how much impact the closure of the national server will have on Blizzard.

Although the number of players has rebounded again since version 10.0 and the exploration server were opened, these data include Asian servers. The Asian server not only has many Chinese server players, but also contains a large number of script studios. Blizzard banned about 1,000,000 accounts in half a year. It is not difficult to understand why the user data has been increased. Without the Chinese server as a piece of cake, Blizzard is already struggling. If it were not for the support of Asian server players and scripts, the data would definitely be very ugly. Under this situation, Blizzard's desire to return to the national server will only become stronger.

Perhaps in order to give players more confidence, or perhaps to stabilize players, John Hight also announced an important decision while releasing the data: World of Warcraft Subscriptions and monthly passes will not increase in price.

As we all know, in December last year, a certain anchor publicly revealed that he had received news that the price of the national server monthly card would increase. For a while, players were very dissatisfied with this behavior. Although nothing happened after that, some players are still worried about the increase in the price of the national server monthly card. However, from the current point of view, since Blizzard has officially announced that the price of the monthly card will not be increased, it should not risk the disapproval of the world (national server).

In fact, NetEase has already hinted at the price of the national server monthly card. Do you still remember the activities that NetEase masters organized during the Spring Festival? The monthly card at that time was calculated based on the original price of the national server. Once the national server reopens, NetEase and Blizzard will definitely hope to attract more players to return. If the price of monthly cards increases, it will be a huge blow to the reputation of both parties.

Although the monthly card price of the domestic server is lower than that of the foreign server, for a company of NetEase's size, the monthly card income of World of Warcraft is not an astronomical figure, even if the price increases by 20% , nor is the value of restarting the World of Warcraft mobile game higher.

Pang Ge believes that not only will the price of the national server monthly card not increase, but it may even be possible to play World of Warcraft for free in the future. This is not decided by Blizzard, but decided by Microsoft's future game planning. . Microsoft is gradually putting Blizzard games on its own XGP platform. Once World of Warcraft joins the XGP platform, low-priced World of Warcraft or even free Warcraft will be possible.

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