Chinese gamers flock toTaiwan

This news report caused some confusion in the ranks of China-watchers: Mainland players of World of Warcraft (WoW) are migrating to Taiwan servers en masse, reports Sina citing Taiwanese media reports. The report said the migration is causing nightly traffic jams around 7 p.m., with some queues exceeding 1,000 accounts and causing waits of three ...

This news report caused some confusion in the ranks of China-watchers:

This news report caused some confusion in the ranks of China-watchers:

Mainland players of World of Warcraft (WoW) are migrating to Taiwan servers en masse, reports Sina citing Taiwanese media reports. The report said the migration is causing nightly traffic jams around 7 p.m., with some queues exceeding 1,000 accounts and causing waits of three to four hours. Mainland China’s two largest game guilds have announced their move to Taiwan servers, said the report.

Turns out that the Chinese gamers got caught up in a public squabble between Blizzard Entertainment (the creator of World of Warcraft) and The9, its local distributor (who seems to be developing its own similar game, The World of Fight).

Now, with so many mainland players ending up on servers in Taiwan, Blizzard will need to rethink how it will deal with re-assigning The9’s contract to someone else.

Evgeny Morozov is a fellow at the Open Society Institute and sits on the board of OSI's Information Program. He writes the Net Effect blog on ForeignPolicy.com
Tag: Taiwan

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