The revenue of Blizzard Asia server has surpassed that of the Chinese server. Is it still meaningful to return to China?

In this year without national servers, how are you doing with Blizzard games? If I had to find a word to describe it, it would be thriving. The loss of the national server seems to have no impact on Blizzard at all. Let’s first take a look at the actual data of Blizzard’s three major IPs.

Hearthstone data is incredible

In terms of Hearthstone, let’s just look at one data. Players who won the legendary title in the 123th season of the Asian server There are 150,000 people, and the Asian server originally only had 10,000 legendary players, so the Asian server has at least 140,000 new legendary players. There are only 100,000 Hearthstone players in the original Chinese server, and the Asian server has already surpassed the Chinese server.

You must know that the legend rate of Hearthstone is only 0.3%, which also means that there are 45 million Hearthstone players active in the Asian server! The total population of Taiwan, China, is only over 20 million!

Some players will say that this data is too full of information. It is all robot scripts. How can there be so many living people? Many players even said that they will encounter robots around level 3, and they will basically disappear until level 1.

So even if the players above level 3 are robots, then 6% of the players are real people, and at least 2.7 million Hearthstone players in the Asian server are real people.

Back then, the peak number of Hearthstone players in the national server was only about 5 million, and the number of players going to the Asian server was already half of the peak number in the national server!

Therefore, in Hearthstone, due to the huge influence of the Chinese server, Blizzard has indeed suffered a certain loss in the number of users, but the loss is still within an acceptable range. Since the Asian server is directly operated by Blizzard, Blizzard You can get 100% of the profits. Even if the Asian server only has half of the players in the Chinese server, Blizzard's losses will be minimal, or even no losses at all!

World of Warcraft continues to break through

Blizzard lost the national server of World of Warcraft, and the original impact was still great. After all, there are millions of players of World of Warcraft in the national server, and no more than 100% of them have been transferred to the Asian server. 300,000, most of the players in the Chinese server have been lost, especially in the official World of Warcraft server. Only one out of ten went to the Asian server, and almost all of them collapsed.

But as soon as the World of Warcraft Exploration Server opened, this situation was immediately reversed. Originally, there were only 500,000 players left in the World of Warcraft Classic Server worldwide. As soon as it opened, it soared to 3 million people.

The most important thing is that the exploration server is not a flash in the pan. After the player population reaches its peak, even if the P1 stage lasts for two and a half months, the grass planting period is very long, and the number of players will decline. Very slow, there are still about 1.5 million players so far.

When the exploration server P2 opens on February 9th, the number of players will inevitably rebound significantly, and it will not be difficult to return to the peak of 2.5 to 3 million, especially in the context of Blizzard's delay in officially announcing the national server. Next, Xiao Tan knows that many old players have gone to the Asian server to recharge after waiting and seeing to no avail, preparing to play the level 40 version again.

A simple calculation shows that the huge success of the World of Warcraft Exploration Server has brought Blizzard about 2 million paying users.

Among these 2 million users, even if only 20% are players of the original national server, there are still 400,000 people. Since the monthly card of the Asian server is as high as 110 yuan a month, while the old national server is only 75, it still needs Half of it was given to the agent NetEase, and Blizzard actually earned less than 40 yuan. Therefore, the income contribution of these 400,000 people is already comparable to the million-strong army of the original national server.

This data does not include the more than 100,000 players who continue to fight in the WLK server and the more than 30,000 official server players. Therefore, after Blizzard loses the national server, it will definitely not lose money in World of Warcraft, and even make a profit.

Overwatch

If you have to say which game among Blizzard’s three ace games will suffer the most after losing its national server, it should be Overwatch.

This is the active player data after Overwatch 2 was launched on Steam. At its peak, there were 75,000 players, and now it has stabilized at 20,000.

This result is not bad for some small categories, but it is a bit unfair when it comes to Overwatch. After all, it is a top-tier game that won the TGA award that year.

It is difficult to estimate the total number of players from the Chinese server to the Asian server for Overwatch, but judging from the actual popularity, it should be less than one out of ten.

In general, after Blizzard lost the national server, it seems that it lost a lot of old users, but it had little impact on revenue, and even made a small profit. This can also be seen from the financial report Come out, Activision Blizzard's total revenue in 2022 will be 7.5 billion US dollars, and it will be close to 9 billion US dollars in 2023. The overall situation is getting better and better.

So is there no need for Blizzard to return to China? The answer is of course no. After all, China is the largest game market in the world. Microsoft Blizzard cannot obtain the maximum benefit by just sidestepping the game. Only by doing so can the maximum benefit be achieved.

What's more, the core purpose of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard is to enter the mobile game market, and China is the region with the strongest mobile game development and the largest number of consumers in the world. They must come in to get a share of the pie. Complete the global strategic layout of Microsoft games.

The above is the detailed content of The revenue of Blizzard Asia server has surpassed that of the Chinese server. Is it still meaningful to return to China?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!