Overall Situation of World of Warcraft in China

A Blizzard representative Wednesday refused to estimate when World of Warcraft would come back online in China. World of Warcraft's Chinese servers have been offline since midnight on June 7, when the operating license ended for Blizzard's former Chinese partner.

It is said that China has about 50 million frequent online game players. World of Warcraft is not the biggest or the most profitable game in China, but it is one of the best known. World of Warcraft had 11.5 million subscribers worldwide at the end of last year.

The game is likely to lose more players and other Chinese game companies have raised their advertising budgets in a scramble to win over idle World of Warcraft players. Many have gone in for other games during the outage.

Many World of Warcraft players in mainland China have also migrated to the Taiwan server during the transition, even though that means a slower connection and having to start a new account.