Both parties accuse each other of being at fault – NetEase says that Blizzard didn’t offer enough money, and Blizzard says that NetEase wanted bigger control of their intellectual property. And that’s likely going to be difficult since the breakup with NetEase didn’t go very smoothly. However, Blizzard first needs to strike a new deal with a Chinese publisher to keep operating there. Maybe Blizzard also implemented some other backup methods and if Hearthstone goes back online in the future, Chinese players will be greeted with their previous collections – that’s my hope at least.

It means that if the servers are back in the future, players can just continue where they left off – some cheating is a better alternative to millions of people starting over from scratch. It’s an unprecedented move and can lead to cheating as some might figure out a way to edit those files, but ultimately it’s most likely a good move. For example, in the case of World of Warcraft (I’m not sure if it was possible with Hearthstone), they were given an opportunity to back up their characters locally. It doesn’t necessarily mean that Chinese players will never have access to their accounts again. Chinese players can still play games on other servers through a VPN, but it’s not a great solution – not only they can’t carry over their progress, but the Chinese government has been cracking down on VPNs, which is another way to lose access (non-CN servers can’t be officially accessed in the country, no VPN means no playing). It means that Chinese servers for most of the major Blizzard titles – including Hearthstone – are now offline. It’s official – with no last-minute deals or extensions, it looks like Blizzard services provided by NetEase have closed down in China after 14 years.

Battlenet hs