WoW China: Progress is being made on relaunch
Hardware changes have been made and approval process is well underway, says Blizzard
Work on getting Blizzard's market-leading MMO, World of Warcraft, back online in China following its operator transition from The9 to NetEase is progressing well, according to Blizzard's head of International Operations, Michael Ryder.
The game, which has been offline for several months now, has undergone the required hardware changes and is now awaiting the final approvals from the Chinese government before powering up once more.
"We're working hard to complete the transition - we're working with the government to get the final approvals, and we've made a tremendous amount of progress in a short period of time in transitioning from one partner to another in going to NetEase," Ryder told GamesIndustry.biz.
"Our servers are up-and-running now in a beta test phase, and concurrency is running quite high, so we know there's continued interest with the players. We've transitioned everyone over to the Battle.net account management system, which has been a big success for us as well.
"We've upgraded the technology and the server hardware across the board and everyone's very pleased with how that's performing."
World of Warcraft had previously been identified by one section of the Chinese government as a cultural problem for the country, but Blizzard is confident that the game will receive the green light shortly.
"We feel pretty good about the progress we've made, and hopefully we'll be getting the rest of the approvals we need in the near future," added Ryder.
The full interview with Michael Ryder will be available on GamesIndustry.biz soon.