Over Two Million Players Sign Up for World of Warcraft's Return to China
Within two days of NetEase announcing a renewal of their partnership to bring Blizzard games back to China, over two million players have pre-registered, 147,000 accounts reactivated, 92,000 accounts recovered, and Blizzard China has received 1,000+ resumes!
While restoring service to other Blizzard games including Hearthstone, Overwatch, Starcraft, Diablo, and Heroes of the Storm, the response for WoW has been overwhelming.
Officially reported by Blizzard China and translated by NasDa on Twitter, these stats show the extreme appetite for World of Warcraft in China. While many players completely rerolled on Taiwanese realms in order to keep playing after servers shut down last year, many more still have been left in limbo, without access to the game they invested the better part of two decades into playing.
World of Warcraft has always been popular in China, with Warcraft Logs estimating 60% of all Classic WoW players from China. Although it is unlikely that Chinese servers spin up again before the launch of The War Within, even those who chose to reroll their accounts in new regions in order to continue playing have reported overwhelming desire to go back to their original accounts and servers, to the point where interest in Season 4 has dropped very low within that player base — especially as NetEase has reported their future plans include ways for players to re-earn missed rewards from Dragonflight.
