Blizzard Awaits China's Approval For WoW Relaunch 75
angry tapir writes "The relaunch of World of Warcraft in China, where it has already been offline for six weeks, still faces an indefinite delay as it awaits government approval for its content. Problems for Blizzard Entertainment, the game's creator, started when it switched to a new local operator for World of Warcraft in China, online gaming company NetEase. New operators of foreign games have to submit the games for government approval, and China has objected to some of the content it found in its latest review of the game."
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:4, Informative)
Its different rates in china, as most people are quite cheap compared to us/europe.
Players will need to purchase a CD key to create an account and enter the game. The key comes at a price of 30 Yuan (about 3 euros or 2 pounds) and can be bought with a so-called Points Card which costs the same. While game time can be purchased on a monthly basis here, you can play WoW on an hourly basis in China - at an incredible rate of 0.45 Yuan/hour, amounting to 0.05 euros or 0.03 pounds respectively.
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:1, Informative)
Prices are cheaper over there. Last I knew (according to this Blizzard press release: http://eu.blizzard.com/en/press/050606.html) playing in China costs 0.45 Yuan per hour, which converts to 6.5 cents per hour.
So someone over there would have to play just over 230 hours a month to be paying $15/month.
Already moved on (Score:1, Informative)
The majority of the high level player population in China has already moved on to Taiwanese servers. I don't know if they'll move back once the China servers are back up, especially after the huge delays in getting both TBC and WotLK released there. I also don't know if these high level, "hardcore" players constitute any significant majority of the WoW China playerbase (they probably don't).
Re:The real reason for the delay (Score:3, Informative)
wth? they're based in Irvine, CA.