The9 desperately seeking renewal

The9 is the Chinese company that operates World of Warcraft in China. And these days, they're a little nervous. Their contract with Activision/Blizzard is going to be up in June of next year (a pretty short amount of time for deals like this) and The9's future is dependent on the renewal of that contract. With 92% of the company's income coming from operating World of Warcraft, it probably would kill the company if the contract wasn't renewed.

Normally there wouldn't be any doubt about it. But recently, Blizzard gave the rights to operate StarCraft, and the WarCraft games over the Battle.net in China to NetEase - one of The9's largest competitors, and one that is not dependent on a deal with Blizzard. There are some reasons to avoid panic though:

First of all - if they give the license to someone else (for example, Netease), all of the million+ regular players will lose their WoW accounts with The9. These users have invested years of time in developing their characters and status in the game, and will have to start over from scratch. With significant competition from game operators competing for players, many customers will decide to go to a different game, rather than start from scratch with World of Warcraft. Since Activision gets a 22% cut of player revenues, they would take a huge loss on the reduction of players.

As tempting as it sounds... No, it would not stop the gold farmers. It would just give them an opportunity to steal some of the more normal sounding names.

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