Activision Felt Netease Threatened Them In Contract Negotiations, Leading To Breakup

gameranx.com:

The New York Times has a new report that’s helped shed light on the split between Activision Blizzard King and former Chinese partner NetEase.

The final straw was an incident where Kotick felt that the Chinese company threatened them, BUT, this was the final straw to a souring relationship.

NetEase and Activision Blizzard had invested in a joint venture, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard called Blizzard Entertainment, that was based in China. This was how Blizzard’s games like Overwatch and Diablo were distributed in the country, but there had been bumps in the road of this relationship.

In 2018, NetEase invested $ 100 million in Bungie, then owned by Activision and working on Destiny. Bobby disliked this movie because Destiny had been behind schedule and Bobby considered the move a distraction.

In the same year, NetEase also invested in a company founded by a former Activision employee. In 2019 Activision signed a deal with them that would ban NetEase from making similar investments again.

To add to this was the complicating matter of the Chinese government’s state regulation.

Activision Blizzard had been doing business in China for nearly twenty years, and it that time saw the country tighten its grip on the tech industry with increasing regulation. Foreign companies are constrained to the point that they have to partner with Chinese companies to do business there.

However, Chinese companies themselves are also victim to their country’s regulation. At times, the regulation seems so random that tech companies don’t know what to expect from the country.

In 2020, China’s antitrust and competition regulators decided to review mergers and joint ventures that brought in a lot of money from abroad. There were also massive