JUN
25
2009
News
Chinese World of Warcraft suffers heavy down-time
MMO stays off-line with no word on return
Blizzard are having something of a technical and PR nightmare in China, the local version of World of Warcraft having been off-line for several weeks now; since June 7th to be precise.
According to Yahoo, the world's biggest MMO went off-line when Blizzard's contract with local operator The9 expired.
The game is being moved to rival service NetEase, but it seems they weren't ready to take the game - and presumably still aren't - given the game's off-line status.
Blizzard have yet to comment on when the game is likely to return but it's fair to say this isn't good news for the game's positioning in China.

Comments
This is going to be a very interesting next couple of weeks for Blizzard. I guess it is no secret that more than half of their World of Warcraft account subscriptions are based in Asia and with this long downtime, would this equate to a decline in subscriptions if and when WoW does go back up in China? We should also consider the fact that the downtime also coincided with the release several new games such as Aion. Could this be the start of WoW's decline?