WoW has its own licensing scheme and its own version in China. If they’d charged the same over there it never would have taken off. Long story short, Chinese gaming history has been on a separate track all along and you can’t really compare the piracy situation there to what’s going on elsewhere.

I’m no expert but I know China had a total ban on consoles going on from the nineties up to a couple of years ago I think? That whole part of general gamer culture, which anyone can agree is a *huge* part, never got a foothold in China the way it did in Japan and Western countries. Add to that the whole wage gap…