What’s the Current State of the Chinese Neverwinter Version?

Today we want to broaden our horizon and look at the state of the Chinese Neverwinter version. First of all: Yes, it actually exists! You hear a lot of Asian titles getting ported to the West in recent years, but being a Chinese publisher, PWE also brings the games of their Western studios to their market.

Perfect World’s website in Asia is called wanmei.com. They actually have a large portfolio including Valve’s Dota 2 and CS:GO. The only other current Western game seems to be the digital TCG HEX. Neverwinter has also been part of their lineup until May 19th when the PC version got shut down. The website still seems to be operational, but you’re no longer able to log into the game. Neverwinter’s PC version in China lasted for less than two years, and never made it further than Tyranny of Dragons.

Lockbox Law & Neverwinter

Some players speculated that the Chinese lockbox law was the driving force behind the shutdown. Since May 2017 (the month of the shutdown), Chinese publishers have to reveal the odds of their lootboxes. With the closure, Perfect World obviously never had to comply.

It’s certainly an interesting topic. It’s not like PWE refused to publish odds at all, they did so for Dota 2 treasure chests for example. That however has no implications on their market in the West where the game is operated by Valve itself. With Neverwinter it’s a little bit different, because releasing odds could have had an impact on marketing in the West as well. If we had found the odds, we definitely would have published them.

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The Game Is Not That Successful

That being said, the much more probable reason is that the game wasn’t too successful. The lockbox thing is a nice theory and all, but the Chinese market is huge and you could doubt that PWE is pulling a game solely because they don’t want any odds released. Also why didn’t they just release higher probabilities in China, which gamers theorize other publishers have done? It simply doesn’t make tons of sense to completely shut down a game because of that. On the other hand, if it’s true, than the game is apparently making money in the West, which isn’t bad for us either.

Still Operated on Consoles

Neverwinter by the way is not completely dead in the East. It’s still live on Xbox in China and on Xbox and PS4 in Hong Kong although the demise on consoles has already begun as well. The Xbox version in Hong Kong has been shut down and servers will go offline at the end of the year.

Overall it’s not looking like Neverwinter will be a major hit on the other side of the world. Maybe PWE even did shut down the game because of the lockbox law, but probably not. By the way, if you are asking yourself why there are no odds when the game is still being operated on consoles, good question. We haven’t been able to find anything, but will continue to monitor the sites.

That’s our little roundup for the state of the game in China. I hope you guys enjoyed it! Make sure to share your opinion in the comments below and visit the corresponding thread on our message board!

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