I had reported that there was attrition between Blizzard and The9, the chinese operator. Now it seems that the divorce can become more than a rumor:

Blizzard Re-Evaluating World Of WarCraft Chinese Partner

In an intriguingly cryptic press release, World Of Warcraft creator Blizzard Entertainment has announced that it “is currently actively exploring and discussing cooperation opportunities and further expansion of its business with local potential partners for mainland China”, implying that it may be evaluating other partners than current Chinese distributor The9.

In fact, Blizzard’s statement also indicated that it has invited The9 to negotiate in a bid to distribute the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion set, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade, and to discuss its release in mainland China, which is currently planned for next year.

This article on Gamasutra also mentions the server problems that the chinese operator had. Bad service? Is maybe Blizzard complaining for bad service?

Not really. Those server problems were related to “a large-scale raid involving nearly 1,000 players”. Aka the opeining of the gates of Ahn’Qiraj. One fucking thousand players. Of course the server blew up. That event on Mannoroth crashed the server more than THIRTY TIMES in the span of a few hours, and we had much less that 1k of players in the zone. What is sure is that Blizzard cannot complain with The9 for poor service with a straight face.

In fact the chinese servers and general infrastructure seems much, much more solid that whatever Blizzard has done in the USA.

So it’s really all about the money greed, Blizzard saw the huge success the game had in China and decided that the price The9 paid for the original licence was too low. They upcoming release of the expansion was the perfect occasion and they decided to ask The9 to buy a new, special licence for it. Of course The9 refused, they distribute the game in a different way and the updates have always been offered for free for these kinds of game. Their licence is valid for four years and they were expecting it to include everything. So they opposed to this new request from Blizzard and Blizzard answered threatening them to split the expansion in a standalone product and offer it to someone else.

The result is that Blizzard now decided to put the expansion on auction, so that The9 is now forced to compete with other companies to have the rights to run it. It is very best way to get the most out of a cash cow. Instead of setting a price you can just watch the companies competing against each other. It’s a win-win for Blizzard. WoW has already benefited from a *huge* exposition thanks to The9. More than two millions of players of the total six that the game has worldwide are now in doubt. What will happen to the accounts and the servers if the whole game switches operators? And who “owns” those accounts, Blizzard or The9?

At the end the loss is always of the players. The other option is absurd: in China the standard WoW and “The Burning Crusade” could split in two games ran by two different operators.