NetEase rebuffs Activision Blizzard offer to extend gaming partnership for six months

Activision Blizzard, the foremost US sport developer behind hit franchises Warcraft and Overwatch, has taken to Chinese social media to state that its offer to extend its licensing settlement with NetEase has been declined, Reuters stories. Blizzard posted an announcement on its official Weibo account saying that the Chinese gaming big had turned down its proposal to extend the 2 corporations’ 14-year partnership for an additional six months quite than let it expire on Jan. 23. The failure of the erstwhile collaborators to attain settlement on their long-running licensing preparations was first reported in November, with Blizzard Entertainment President Mike Ybarra saying on the time that, “we are looking for alternatives to bring our games back to players [in China] in the future.” A December report by Chinese media outlet Caijing said that main Chinese companies together with Tencent, ByteDance, Perfect World, and Bilibili had been all speaking with Blizzard about the potential for publishing its titles regionally as soon as the NetEase deal ends. NetEase’s inventory worth took an instantaneous hit when information of the break-up first emerged, however the firm has since performed down the importance of the deal to its total income. [Reuters]