World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King being blocked from release in China
The Wrath of the Lich King is not being felt in
China, where censors have deemed the game unfit for release twice.
“The applications were rejected due to content that didn’t meet requirements, including a city raid and skeleton characters,” reports business research news site JLM Pacific Epoch. The Chinese version of the game had already been submitted without the expansion’s highly anticipated Death Knight hero character. Further, Blizzard recently deleted a link to the game’s simplified Chinese website, likely in recognition that things were not going as planned for the Lich King’s foray into mainland China.
World of Warcraft’s subjugation to Chinese censors is nothing new. MMO news site Massively notes that existing editions of the game has received a number of deletions, “namely removing skeletons altogether,” to receive clearance for the Chinese market.
As the world’s biggest game, Warcraft eclipsed 11.5 million subscribers last December. Roughly half of those are believed to be in Asian markets, which makes Lich King a critical release for Blizzard. The expansion has already sold 4 million copies in Western territories.
