[runawaybottle]

I can lend some color to that. Blizzard created a modestly successful MOBA to compete with League of Legends and it just couldn’t make a dent in LoL’s Asia numbers, so they slowly put the game into maintenance mode (effectively given up on it).

Diablo Immortal is them outsourcing development of a flagship franchise to a Chinese company Netease to develop a mobile version. Netease mobile games are really big overseas. That to me is similar to Facebook outsourcing to Bytedance to make a social network with China in mind first. There’s a world of difference between having an office China and literally handing over your IP to a Chinese company. It’s a big deal.

It’s not they don’t want American’s money, everything adds to the bottom line, but China is showing itself to be bigger markets for video games (just as Hollywood is seeing that they are becoming a bigger market for movies).

It’s a very real thing, and forward decisions are being heavily influenced with that market in mind first and foremost.

Edit:

To put a final stamp on my main point, if the Chinese people were to be offended by these allegations, I can promise you Blizzard would turn the world over and rectify it over night. The same way they got John Cena to apologize in Mandarin to not fuck with the Fast and Furious release in China.

We matter very little at this point to these industries.

[itsoktocry]

>Blizzard created a modestly successful MOBA to compete with League of Legends and it just couldn’t make a dent in LoL’s Asia numbers, so they slowly put the game into maintenance mode (effectively given up on it).

Are you talking about DOTA2? It was hugely successful, both from a gamer's perspective, as well as in the eSports world.

[runawaybottle]

No, Heroes of the Storm. DOTA2 was created by Valve :p

[itsoktocry]

Oh, whoops.

[vlunkr]

Still though, dystopian is not the right word for video game drama/economics.