World of Warcraft, Overwatch 2 and other Blizzard Entertainment games will return to the Chinese market this summer. The company has signed a new publishing agreement with NetEase.

On April 9, NetEase’s share price rose 4.1% to HK$157.5 (US$20) apiece. Shareholders have reacted positively to rumors that NetEase has agreed to re-publish Blizzard Entertainment games in China.

Blizzard Entertainment and NetEase could sign a new partnership agreement to publish games in China, according to a number of Chinese media. The previous agreement expired almost a year ago.

The Warcraft Rumble mobile action strategy has brought Blizzard Entertainment $13.7 million in three weeks since its release, according to data from the AppMagic analytical platform. Although this is a good result for the game in its segment, it is far from the starting figures of the hit Clash Royale.

This was stated by the former developer of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty and the founder of the Pirate Software indie studio Jason Thor Hall.

On November 2, Blizzard Entertainment released the Warcraft Rumble mobile strategy for global release. According to the analytical service AppMagic, in the first six days the game earned $ 3.4 million from microtransactions — this is already minus the commission to the stores and taxes.

On October 17, Diablo IV was released on Steam. The users of the site reacted coolly to the game: at the time of writing the news, its rating is 58%.

More than 12 million people have played Diablo IV. This was announced by the general manager of the series Rod Fergusson (Rod Fergusson) at the Opening Night Live presentation, which opened the Gamescom 2023 exhibition.

This morning we already wrote that Overwatch 2 showed a bad start on Steam. As it turned out, the user rating of the game turned out to be so low that it became the worst release of 2023 on Steam according to SteamDB among more than 7,300 titles.

On August 10, Overwatch 2 was released on Steam, which became the first Blizzard Entertainment game on the Valve platform. Steam users met her coolly: now the project has 17% positive reviews.

On June 2, Diablo Immortal celebrated its first birthday. Analysts data.ai we found out that in the year since its release, the game earned $525 million only on mobile devices.

Blizzard Entertainment announced that the revenue of Diablo IV reached $666 million. The game took this mark five days after the release, showing the most successful start in the history of the company.

Diablo IV has set a record for initial sales among Blizzard games. She also beat all the other games of the company by the number of pre-orders: both on PC and on consoles.

On the night of June 1-2, Blizzard released Diablo IV for early access. TwitchTracker estimates that 941,488 people on Twitch watched the launch of the game at the same time.

Game designer Eric Covington believes that he was unfairly fired from Blizzard. He claims that the company did this after noticing the lines he wrote for the Greedy Goblin character from World of Warcraft, ridiculing the behavior of greedy corporations.

Blizzard Entertainment wants to simplify the creation of graphic elements for games. The Gamerant portal drew attention to the fact that the company has filed a patent for a technology that allows using AI to generate textures and other similar game assets.

Earlier this week, the media reported that NetEase decided to sue Blizzard Entertainment over the closure of games in China and filed a lawsuit for $43.5 million. Now it turned out that the author of the claim is not NetEase, but a disgruntled Chinese gamer.

The conflict between NetEase and Blizzard Entertainment continues to develop. According to Sina Technology, the Chinese company filed a lawsuit against Blizzard and demanded to pay her ¥300 million or about $ 43.5 million.

The shelf of studios founded by former Blizzard Entertainment employees has arrived. The former president of the company, J. Allen Brack, together with Jennifer Oneal and John Donham, announced the launch of the Magic Soup Games studio.