It’s old news by now that Blizzard Entertainment is suspending all of its services in China, starting on Jan 23, 2023. Revealing no official plans for the future of Overwatch 2, Hearthstone, and World of Warcraft in the country, players have been migrating to other servers. In the meantime, Blizzard silently added two new payment methods for the Chinese community, encouraging these mass migrations.
Earlier today, Wowhead shared that Blizzard just added two new payment methods to Asian servers: AliPay and WeChat. Normally used by the Chinese community to pay for almost everything, the community believes these two new payment methods were added to help the migrating Chinese players pay for Blizzard services easily.
Since the only way for Chinese players to reach these servers is via a VPN and the Chinese government has severe restrictions on VPN usage and may block many VPN providers, it might lead to a rise in illegal activities across the board.
On top of that, the Chinese government, which limited the playtime of WoW for minors last year, would, in that case, no longer have surveillance of the amount of time players spend playing WoW (or other Blizzard games) because of VPN usage.
The other possible goal of Blizzard adding Chinese payment methods to Battle.net is that the company may be planning on launching a new moderated Chinese server. The company, however, would have to jump through loads of hoops before this new server sees the light of day.
