World of Warcraft

WoW may go free-to-play in China

Posted Sep 17, 2008 by Kody

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According to a news story on RedlineChina, The9 -- publisher of Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft in China -- is currently in talks with Blizzard to offer WoW as a free-to-play game in China.

This is rather surprising news to hear, especially after The9's Q3 sales report where the company had net revenue of $42.2m -- due almost entirely to World of Warcraft. That said, the company is also barely scraping by on profits because of increasing operating costs for the game. The increased costs are primarily due to the use of high-quality HP server farms to support its popularity in China.

So then, why would The9 consider a free-to-play version of World of Warcraft, possibly further crippling profits? Granted, free-to-play games are becoming increasingly more popular. Jun Zhu -- the company's CEO -- mentioned it during an interview with local media in China, so it will be interesting to hear how Blizzard responds to this.

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  • h41fgod said 
    Fri, Nov 16 2007 10:24 PM ()

    There is pretty much only one person who got the right idea in the whole comment section. Youre him, gratz. Seriously, the other comments are just plain dumb.

    @2rbear: I think what Vayne meant was that you cannot use a chinese account on a EU/US server (which is right).
    You can however connect to "any" servercluster (EU/US/Oceanic) with "any" client. However, China is a few patches behind, sort of, think they are up to the rest of the world now, dont think they have 2.3 though, meaning the servers would catch them with the wrong gameversion.

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  • Waylo_EarthenRing said 
    Fri, Nov 16 2007 10:24 PM ()

    You think if Blizzard had more power of their game, they'd take care of these gold farmers wouldn't you?

    The farmers are selling their products for real money and all they can do is sit on their hands and not gain a fair profit. And they can't ban them since their IPs constantly reregister or they hacked the game to prevent that, and use the free trial cards they go to stores and online sites and purchase for their own business.

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