World without Warcraft

Hi all, this is Zheping in Hong Kong. In less than a fortnight, Chinese gamers will have to say goodbye to World of Warcraft and that could [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hi all, this is Zheping in Hong Kong. In less than a fortnight, Chinese gamers will have to say goodbye to World of Warcraft and that could be a boon for the country’s leading games firm. But first... Today’s must-reads: • There’s a [security vulnerability]( with Clear airport screening checks • Fujitsu is [streamlining]( by ditching its aircon unit stake • Samsung’s first in-person launch since Covid is [coming next month]( The Warcraft subs are ready to step in In one of last year’s [lose-lose decisions](, US games publisher Blizzard and Chinese distributor NetEase Inc. broke off talks to extend their 14-year licensing agreement, setting the stage for a dramatic Jan. 23. On that day, iconic franchises like Warcraft, Diablo and Overwatch will go dark in mainland China. Absent a last-minute change of course, Blizzard’s absence from China will have one big winner: Tencent Holdings Ltd. The much bigger rival to NetEase is already among the mooted candidates for picking up the Blizzard licenses. But it also owns a developer team that recently showed off a massively-multiplayer online (MMO) game that to many gamers looked suspiciously similar to World of Warcraft. And the WeChat operator just won Beijing’s approval to run Lost Ark and Valorant in China, two global hits that could make the country’s Blizzard breakup a comfortable one. To be sure, World of Warcraft is still huge in China after 18 years and nine expansions. That’s why many Chinese players hoped that local publishers like Tencent, ByteDance Ltd. and Perfect World (which publishes Valve Corp. games like Dota 2) would swoop in and take NetEase’s place. Should that scenario play out, Tencent is again the likeliest beneficiary: only it has bigger scale and deeper games expertise than NetEase. The Shenzhen company’s upcoming MMO titled Tarisland is about to start accepting players to test it out this week on both PC and mobile platforms. It includes dragon-riding, demon-slaying and more than a passing resemblance to Blizzard’s genre-defining World of Warcraft. Just check out its first [trailer]( and see for yourself. The new game even uses some of the same Chinese voice actors. Will an Azeroth by another name play just as nicely? We’ll soon find out. Beijing regulators, for the first time in many months, did Tencent a favor recently. Their latest batch of game approvals refilled the big games publisher’s pipeline with major titles, and the aforementioned Lost Ark, out of South Korea, and Valorant, from Tencent subsidiary Riot Games, promise to draw some crowds.  At its peak in February last year, Lost Ark had 1.3 million simultaneous players on gaming platform Steam, though its popularity [waned]( in Europe and the US later in 2022. China has a big cohort of Korean MMOs (e.g. The Legend of Mir) and historically is more accepting of their pay-to-win elements than Western audiences. Many Warcraft and Diablo fans, suddenly left homeless after the Blizzard exit, are likely to at least dabble in Tencent’s new fantasy world. Valorant is even more straightforward. It’s already a global brand and an esports and streaming destination — bringing it to China is likely to juice global interest by increasing the number of players and the general amount of noise they generate about the game. Whatever happens with Blizzard’s games, Tencent has a way to profit from it. It’s an unusually robust and promising position for the company to be in, after months of being lambasted by government officials and thwarted in its efforts to release more games at home and acquire more content overseas. —[Zheping Huang](mailto:zhuang245@bloomberg.net) The big story Apple’s going to start making its own displays, [building out]( its self-sufficiency push and hurting the long-term prospects of suppliers like Samsung and LG. Get fully charged An anomaly prevented a [Virgin Orbit rocket]( from reaching orbit after it released from a jumbo jet Foreign carmakers will take [center stage]( at India’s Auto Expo, which is returning after a two-year hiatus. The EU’s being gentler with TikTok’s boss [than it was]( with Elon Musk. Follow Us More from Bloomberg Bloomberg’s The Year Ahead event returns to Davos on Jan. 17 for conversations with leading CEOs to map out a strategic blueprint for global business in 2023. 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