(Yicai) June 27 -- Blizzard Entertainment has reportedly said World of Warcraft, its popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game, will return to the Chinese market on Aug. 1.

In addition, the servers for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King were opened today, The Paper reported, citing the US video games developer. This version will be free until July 10. The servers were opened for public beta tests on June 11.

Blizzard executives will attend ChinaJoy, one of the largest gaming and digital entertainment events in Asia, and bring Hearthstone, the free-to-play online digital collectible card game, back to China at this year’s event, it said. ChinaJoy 2024 will open on July 26.

California-based Blizzard pulled out of its partnership with China's NetEase in November 2022, rendering most of its hugely popular games, including World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Hearthstone, and Overwatch, unavailable in the mainland.

Blizzard said the games would no longer be available in the mainland from Jan. 24 last year after talks with NetEase broke down. The pair's licensing agreement expired the day earlier. After allying again with NetEase this April, Blizzard said it would return to the mainland market in the summer.

At the start of the troubles between NetEase and Blizzard, the Chinese firm said that revenue brought by the latter was only in the single digits. Income from its gaming agency business accounted for 7.5 percent of its total in 2019, 9.1 percent in 2020, and 9.5 percent in 2021, according to the firm’s earnings reports.

NetEase's game business revenue rose 9.4 percent to CNY81.6 billion (USD11.2 billion) in 2023 from a year earlier, accounting for 79 percent of total income.

Editor: Martin Kaidev