Chapter 3. WoW: Blizzard Never Actually Wanted a Divorce from The9

A chapter from THE HISTORY BEHIND CHINESE GAMES, the author's unfinished second book, by BBKinG (Liu Yang). Translated from the Chinese original: 三 WOW 暴雪其实不想跟九城“离婚”

First published in the author's Zhihu column on September 19, 2014: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/19849790

This translation was reviewed against the Chinese original on August 3, 2026. If you spot a mistranslation, a wrong name, or a factual error, please open an issue or send a pull request.

When it comes to the history behind Chinese games, the way World of Warcraft was run in China is the classic of classics.

In 2004, because large titles such as Shadowbane (魔剑) and EverQuest had already failed in China, the Chinese games industry had little faith in World of Warcraft, the game of the same type that Blizzard Entertainment in the United States then had in closed beta. Over the following years, though, that game built a superkingdom across the world. It became the benchmark for the industry, it set off a whole run of game-related businesses and culture that had never existed before, and it brought The9 Group, which held the Chinese licence, both fame and money, lifting it into the front rank of Chinese games companies.

Then, in 2009, the divorce between Blizzard and The9 caused an even greater stir, at one point drawing in a contest between the senior levels of the Ministry of Culture and the General Administration of Press and Publication. The open and covert fighting between the two companies, with neither side willing to give ground, was as ruthless as anything in a spy war, and it even produced a whole system of spokesmen for that underground conflict, the Uncle Party (舅舅党), people who passed on what they claimed to have heard from a relative on the inside.

Times have moved on. By 2014 Blizzard and NetEase had settled into a stable relationship, the General Administration of Press and Publication had merged with the broadcasting regulator in 2013 to become the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, and World of Warcraft was about to release version 6.0. Everything seemed to have gone quiet.

But history cannot be sidestepped, and it must not be ignored.

Did you know that Blizzard in the United States did not want a divorce from The9?

At Blizzard's final dedicated meeting on the subject at its US headquarters in 2008, the conclusion everyone reached was still that the two should not separate.

So why did they separate in the end? Who pressed down that last straw? Who drove the other side into a corner? Was it a strategic mistake by The9? Or a flash of anger from Blizzard?

Let us start from the beginning.

In April 2004, The9 Group signed a strategic cooperation agreement in China with Blizzard Entertainment, part of Vivendi Universal Games, and took the exclusive licence to operate World of Warcraft in mainland China.

The head of the project team at the time was Sun Tao, The9's CTO. He is said to have been the man most responsible for The9 winning WoW, and he was the project's first head. Because he was extremely good-looking, the games scene jokingly called him the best-looking man in the industry. He later left The9 to found Bingdong Games (冰动游戏), sold the company a few years afterwards, and now works at Ping An China.

The other two key figures were product director Huang Lingdong and technical director Jiang Huanxin.

Huang Lingdong was the first member of The9's virtual community and a veteran of the company. He was later promoted to vice president of products at The9 and is now deputy general manager of the partner products department at Tencent Shanghai Interactive Entertainment. He personally set up the World of Warcraft project team, and he interviewed and hired a great many of the people on it in its early days.

Among them were Ma Gang, the project manager responsible for external communication, now senior marketing director at Ubisoft China; media manager Liu Feng, known as Aya, now vice president of Hangzhou Legang (杭州乐港); Ediart, Tian Jian, who created the National Geographic of Azeroth website and was responsible for localisation here, and who founded Shanghai Youdian Information Technology in 2011 to develop mobile games; and Wu Jian, a veteran of the WoW project team whose career runs right through the history of both The9 and Blizzard China, who was responsible for design and operations at the time, later joined Blizzard China to run World of Warcraft and other Blizzard products, and was afterwards invited to become COO of KongZhong (空中网).

Technical director Jiang Huanxin came from Hewlett-Packard and joined The9 as the World of Warcraft project was starting up. He later became a vice president of The9, left the company for a while, and appears recently to have returned to help it open up North America.

The9 had no marketing department at the time, only one large product department. The website was outsourced in the early days to a team called 01media, now a well-known design company in its own right. Later The9 hired someone specifically to take charge of the site, Zhou Hao, known as ZAX, now CEO of Xima (希玛), a company working in esports whose brands include the WE club and StarsWar. There was also a website artist called Hu Yilin, who has since become a well-known independent designer.

The original WoW team was only a dozen or so people. Please forgive the limits of the information I have been able to gather. Some of it may be wrong or incomplete, and I will keep improving it. Right up to the end of 2004 it was still the same group.

Once the World of Warcraft project team was in place, localising the game and recording the Chinese voice-over became the first order of business.

The earliest WoW build had more than a million characters of text to translate, and six or seven part-time translators were brought in to attack it. To make the work easier, The9 moved the translation team out of CITIC Square and into the quieter Kaidike Building next door, and set aside a meeting room where they could translate late into the night. Liu Jilei, who later joined Tencent to work on mobile access, did the first pass of proofreading, Wu Jian the second, and Tian Jian the third pass and the polish. Tian Jian's polish was the most important part of all. Drawing on his deep understanding of Western games culture, he turned stiff translation into flowing, elegant prose, and players later recognised him for it.

For the Chinese voice-over they brought in Ni Kang, the well-known Shanghai film dubbing director, who had come up through voice work himself, as voice director. He is said to have gone on to direct the Chinese voice-over for League of Legends as well.

Ni Kang is a very serious man. He picked top talent from all over the country and brought them to Shanghai to record. To get a suitably commanding voice for the game's big bosses Nefarian and Ragnaros, he went out of his way to find a Mongolian voice actor, Gong Ge'er, and had him take an overnight train to Shanghai.

Early the next morning Gong Ge'er went straight into the booth and started recording, but after several hours everyone realised the same thing. The young man simply was not feeling it. By midday the project team talked it over and decided to buy him lunch and let him go.

Who could have guessed that after the meal the Mongolian's whole spirit came back, and the commanding tone came with it. He recorded every one of the big boss lines in a single two-hour stretch.

So when players were later being wiped over and over in an instance, those infuriating taunts they heard were, nine times out of ten, Gong Ge'er speaking on a full stomach.

Preparing the closed beta, getting ready for launch, government approval and the partnership with Coca-Cola became the main areas of work before the open beta began in 2005.

Outside the company, faith in World of Warcraft was still low, while inside The9 confidence kept growing.

When keys for the closed beta first went out, more than 300,000 Blizzard fans applied within a few days. The conditions were demanding and applicants had to fill in a great deal of personal information, yet the WoW team found that players were filling it all in very carefully.

Good material was starting to appear in the World of Warcraft online community as well. Many older players may still remember a video called Kangxi Wants to Play Warcraft Too (康熙也想玩魔兽). It was very well made, and not long after it went online in 2005 it had several hundred thousand views. The9 staff went looking for the person who made it and sent him a few CD keys as a thank you.

On April 9, 2005, the first World of Warcraft Day, The9 held a player meet-up at the Luwan Stadium in Shanghai, where the date of the open beta was to be announced.

It rained very heavily that day, and several thousand people came anyway. The hall was full and a great many more players were packed outside waiting in the rain, which gave the WoW project team enormous confidence and encouragement. The9's boss Zhu Jun is said to have come as well. He looked in, smiled, and went back behind the scenes, entirely sure of what was coming.

The date announced that day was April 29, but the open beta actually began on April 26.

On the last night of the closed beta, The9 staff ran an event called Demon Invasion, End of the World, with the operations team controlling huge monsters that went into each of the capital cities to play with the players, dance and celebrate. Blizzard placed strict limits on GMs controlling NPCs, but that night was an exception, so the event was probably a very rare one. If you were lucky enough to take part that night, it will be a lovely thing to remember.

A small aside here. Before an open beta an operator usually produces and hands out installation discs for WoW, and the master disc used to make them was a top secret Blizzard document at the time, because it held the most complete set of game files, with the newest translation and all of the game's content built into it.

Blizzard did not trust the courier companies, so it sent an employee, Stan Wang, to carry the disc over from the United States in person. The project team at The9 was so excited that nobody slept all night waiting for it, and when they got hold of it and pushed it into a computer, they found the master disc was faulty. You could only laugh.

Open beta. Open beta at last.

The level cap was 45, and player enthusiasm went beyond anything anyone had imagined. Every server had a queue. Around that time Blizzard in the United States had run a marketing line in Europe and North America: "A world awaits". Chinese players promptly rewrote it as "a world is queuing".

The World of Warcraft open beta queues had a lasting effect on the games that came afterwards, and turned into a kind of culture. People in the industry say that some later games went to the trouble of manufacturing the appearance of a queue even when there was no need for one.

Blizzard, the dominant partner

Blizzard made a great many demands of The9 on how World of Warcraft was run, and some of them were steep. On the choice of servers, for example, Blizzard's requirements led The9 to buy the most advanced servers Hewlett-Packard then had, and the computing power of the whole server cluster is said to have far exceeded that of the Galaxy supercomputer.

Blizzard's reasoning was very simple. Players should have the best possible experience. But that assertiveness could make life extremely hard for an operator, and it planted the seeds of the rift between the two companies later on.

The open beta soon passed 600,000 players.

Everyone on the project team was delighted, because on top of the sense of achievement they were all looking forward to Zhu Jun making good on the bonus he had promised.

Early in 2005 Zhu had told them that if the game passed 500,000 players he would hand out a bonus of US$500,000.

Many of them never saw that money, right up to the day they left, and that laid the ground for a number of the team's later departures.

In 2005 an ambitious The9 began laying out its new strategy. One after another it brought back a large number of new games from abroad: Granado Espada (卓越之剑), Soul of the Ultimate Nation (奇迹世界), Hellgate: London (地狱之门), Guild Wars (激战) and others.

Part of the aim was to hold off potential domestic rivals by moving first and taking all the good games. The other part was that The9 did not want to spend its life as Blizzard's puppet.

At the level of strategy the direction was right. The Shanda case was there for everyone to see, and friction between a licensee and a developer only grows, so preparation was essential. Unlike Shanda, though, The9 was not up against some Korean company. It was up against a long-established giant, an aircraft carrier of a games company, Blizzard Entertainment of the United States.

At the end of 2005 the next conflict arrived without warning.

By then The Burning Crusade was about to launch abroad, and the expansion carried a lot of new technology. The American side felt this needed better servers behind it to guarantee players a better experience, so it asked The9 to upgrade.

Note that The9 had only just paid a great deal of money for servers said to outrun the Galaxy, and they had barely been used.

So The9 hesitated.

The crack widened a little further.

Blizzard then began pushing forward a strategy of entering the Chinese market itself, and in 2005 it started work on a plan to set up a Blizzard China subsidiary.

You can see both sides manoeuvring. There is no right and wrong in it. Both were trying to survive, and that is the law of the jungle.

In 2006 Blizzard accelerated its expansion in China.

The9, meanwhile, made a very strange move. It began transferring the core people on the WoW project team off it one after another, putting them in charge of the various new games it had brought back, and moved its own in-house development staff over to run WoW instead.

My own guess is that the move may have had several purposes. One was to let people with proven operating experience help the new games along. One was to train up its own development staff using real operating data. And one, I suspect, was to stop the pro-Blizzard camp inside the WoW project team from growing too strong.

Whose idea was this strange move? I do not know, and I do not know whether my guesses are right either. But I would bet that whoever made the decision never expected it to wound the other side and themselves in equal measure.

First, Sun Tao, the project head and a member of the pro-Blizzard camp, resigned outright to set up his own company, and took a group of people with him. The9's new COO was Nancy Zhou, Zhou Ning, who took a far harder line with Blizzard than Sun Tao had. Nancy is now general manager of Ubisoft China.

Wu Jian, who ran operations at The9, refused to move to another project, and Blizzard took the chance to hire him away as the fourth employee of Blizzard China.

Zhu Jun was furious. He prepared to send lawyers' letters to Wu Jian and Blizzard at the same time, and issued a strict order at an internal company meeting that nobody was to have contact of any kind with Wu Jian, and that Blizzard was not to let Wu Jian have any part in any work connected with WoW.

The affair blew up badly enough that The9 and Blizzard ended up signing an agreement barring each side from poaching from the other, which slowly brought it to a close.

On the surface it was only one employee changing jobs. In reality it was a collision between two companies at the level of strategy.

Blizzard's general manager at the time was Michael Fong, a Hong Kong Canadian. One of his important tasks was setting up the Blizzard China subsidiary, and the man doing the research for it was the newly arrived Wu Jian.

Over the next few years, exactly opposite to the increasingly warm relationship between World of Warcraft and Chinese players, relations between The9 and Blizzard grew colder and colder. On one side Blizzard wanted to be more involved in operations and to understand the details. On the other The9 would not upgrade its servers, and kept its data hidden away rather than share it with Blizzard.

The manoeuvring grew fiercer and the conflict grew wider.

The thought of changing licensee had come up inside Blizzard countless times, yet Blizzard still did not want to change, for a very simple reason. Blizzard believed no decision should ever hurt the players. Anyone who knows the company will recognise that as its core culture, and the basic starting point for a great many of its decisions.

Even on May 21, 2007, when EA took a 15 per cent stake in The9 for US$167 million, Blizzard, as EA's main competitor, held its anger in.

It was not until 2008 that a Blizzard which had taken all it could began talking to other companies and studying whether a handover was feasible.

Throughout that period The9's senior management went on handling the relationship with Blizzard in the same hard-line way. Far from easing an increasingly tense situation, it finally made Blizzard angry.

I should make one thing clear here. The9's strategy was to control and balance its own position in negotiations with Blizzard. Everybody wants to keep the final say in their own hands. So licensing many games, trying to break free of Blizzard's control, pushing its own development and even bringing EA in were all ways of giving itself more bargaining chips against Blizzard. At the level of strategy that general direction was not wrong.

Sadly, what had The9 by the throat was the limit of the age it lived in. Never mind Chinese in-house development back then. Even now, all these years later, how many games in the world have surpassed World of Warcraft?

It is like a small country wanting independence. If you have no nuclear weapons, no means of retaliation, no decisive advantage in resources or economy, and your largest source of income depends on the other side, then talk of standing as equals is only a slogan.

Deng Xiaoping said that if you fall behind, you get beaten.

These days the beating is simply a little more civilised.

And The9 at the time still looked like a company that had not worked out where it stood, and stayed hard-line.

On the very night that Blizzard's final meeting again decided against a divorce, Bobby Kotick, the head of Activision Blizzard, suddenly gave the order to split from The9.

Perhaps it was an email? A report? A single sentence? None of that matters any more. An assertive foreign company running into a hard-line local licensee, a pairing of temperaments that did not fit, was always going to end in divorce.

The last straw came down slowly, and the whole structure collapsed in an instant.

I will keep what happened next short. After talking to a number of companies, Blizzard came down to NetEase and Tencent, but Blizzard in the United States felt that the attitude of NetEase and Ding Lei towards players fitted its own core culture better, and so it chose NetEase.

On July 30, 2009, the NetEase version of World of Warcraft reopened its closed beta.

As for the story after that, let us write it up in a few years' time.

The History Behind Chinese Games.