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Following their split earlier this year, NetEase is reportedly suing Blizzard over the refunds for games no longer available in China.
Last year it was announced that Blizzard would be pulling games like World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and Overwatch from China due to it and NetEase being unable to come to an agreement on a new contract. Services for these titles, and other games like Warcraft 3, the StarCraft series, and Diablo 3, all went offline January 23, ending the 14 year agreement between the two companies. Now, according to a new report from Sina Technology (thanks, WoWHead), Blizzard could be facing a $43.5 million lawsuit for a number of claims.
The primary claim from NetEase is that Blizzard apparently promised refunds to over one million players that wanted them when servers for games like WoW, Overwatch, and more went offline in China. However, NetEase apparently had to cover these refunds as Blizzard allegedly had not covered them. NetEase is also looking for compensation over unsold merchandise inventory and undeveloped games, as the company apparently had to make a “huge deposit for several games in advance, while Blizzard did not refund the relevant deposit when the relevant games were not developed.”
Details on if the lawsuit has even been filed or not yet aren’t available at the moment, so who knows when this could get resolved, if it even goes through. China was a massive market for Blizzard, though the company is planning to bring the games back to the region through other means in the future.
Blizzard is also currently attempting to be acquired by Microsoft, and the UK’s decision on the almost $70 billion deal will be coming this week. The ruling will obviously make or break the deal, so Microsoft has been doing whatever it can to prove the deal won’t be damaging for its competitors.