World of Warcraft Launches in China

June 7, 2005 By Ian Bell

The popular MMORPG title has officially launched in China this week. Blizzard is working with Chinese company The9 for the infrastructure.

Blizzards World of Warcraft MMORPG game is one of the top online games this year across the world and China’s contribution will only propel Blizzard to new heights. At one point during the beta test in China, Blizzard saw more than 500,000 users playing on their China based servers simultaneously.

A completely rebuilt pricing and security structure had to be developed for the Chinese market. Under the new system users can download the game, but have to activate their account by purchasing an authorized CD. And instead of paying a monthly subscription fee like you would here in the U.S. users in China must buy cards with points on them and then use those points for playing time. Sounds sort of goofy, but security is extremely important to Blizzard.

You can read more about this story at Gamesindustry.biz

Showing 2 comments

Tantrum at 5:32pm 7th June 2005 Great, there goes the game. Get ready for online stores selling in game items, hackers etc.

Boo
fungku at 12:45pm 7th June 2005 They should really focus on fixing the serious lag issues instead of continueing to open to new markets. It's pretty frustrating when you die because of lag (you are running, it lags and you run into a monster and you are dead when the lag stops, or you are fighting something then lag happens. Your character stops fighting but the npc doesnt, etc.)