There have been a number of reports about how the official social media account of Diablo Immortal on Weibo posted "熊怎么还不下台" which roughly translates to "Why doesn't the bear step down?" This led to Netease pulling the game from imminent release. I believe this post was intentional, and was done as a psyop to give a pretext to kill the game. I think the game was killed in order to prevent Blizzard from making a lot of money in the Chinese gaming market.

1. Chinese culture is inferior and they know it: China "got rich" since the 1980s with a massive cultural transformation. Abandoning their communist cultural values, they embraced what can only be called a clown world exaggeration of what communists think capitalists are: greedy, conniving, back-stabbing, do-anything-to-get-ahead cut-throat thieves. Thing about people like this, is that they can be wildly successful. China's rise proves that beyond all doubt. However - and this is key - they are inherently parasitic. They cannot produce anything new. All they can do is take their blood meals and feed on their hosts. Anyone foolish enough to try to be an innovator in China would quickly get torn to shreds by copy cats and thieves. Pretty much all major Chinese corporations are nothing more than copies of Western companies, designed up monopolize the "walled garden" (meaning: no fair foreign competition allowed) Chinese Domestic Market. Tencent largely exists through stealing anything and everything from foreigners and then re-packaging it for the CDM.

2. The primary development model of China in the past 20 years has been: INVITE, STEAL, EXPEL. The main way Chinese steal from foreigners, on top of their usual cyber hacking and espionage, is to invite the foreigners into China, using the lure of hypothetical big money to be made in the "largest market". Once the foreigner commits to China, the Chinese place numerous conditions on the foreigner, which are all designed to limit the ability of that foreigner to control his own Chinese subsidiary, while at the same time forcing "technology transfer" and IP, and trade secrets, into the Chinese subsidiary. These secrets must be handed over to Chinese nationals. Foreign corporations are not allowed to come into China using their native countrymen to hold their secrets, the way foreign corporations routinely do in the US. The whole point of this is to force the foreigners to transfer critical secrets and valuable information to Chinese nationals. Once enough transfer has been completed such that the Chinese nationals feel confident they don't need the foreigner anymore, the CCP snaps into action and begins the process of subsidizing the native Chinese thief-competitor, while also tightening the vice on the foreigner until it is driven out. Using this technique, the Chinese can "leap ahead" to the state-of-the-art in foreign development, without allowing the filthy, evil foreign barbarian to actually be allowed to make 1 dime more profit than is absolutely necessary. This is the epitome of a zero-sum game in the mind of the CCP. The only thing that is shocking about all this, is why foreign governments continue to tolerate it, and why idiots like Elon Musk open up Tesla factories in China knowing it's a matter of time until he gets fucked in the ass.

3. China desperately, desperately wants to break into and dominate the global video game and software market, and they've been making shocking and scary headway. Tencent is - together with Alibaba - the king of the Chinese economy. Tencent is absolutely obsessed with global software domination, and they have strong backing from the CCP in this. Tencent has done everything in its power to accomplish this, including buying every western video game developer that was willing to take their money (which is a LOT of them). Epic's lawsuit against Apple was primarily driven by Tencent's goal of destroying the power of Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo to control what gets on their consoles, so that Tencent could flood the consoles with Chinese trash and not pay a "platform tax". If you follow mobile gaming at all, you will have noticed that a LOT of mobile games getting release these past 6 months are stealth Chinese games. They take pains to hide the fact that the game was developed and is controlled by a Chinese company, because the Chinese know that Western consumers don't trust them. Since I care about this topic, I do research to uncover when games have a concealed Chinese owner, and the answer is that almost 100% of suspicious looking games are Chinese, since Japanese and Korean developers/publishers generally are very open about who they are and their branding. Unfortunately, some of these games are starting to break into some market share because mobile games in general are shitty enough that even Chinese trash can blend in.

4. Diablo Immortal was so important for China, because it represented Blizzard effectively training the Chinese on how to make a game that would break into the global market. The Chinese are shit at making games - putting aside the exception that proves the rule of Genshin, which strongly copied from BotW and other games. The Chinese have been releasing trash onto mobile platforms for a while, where they utterly fail because they're just bad. The slop that the Chinese game companies feed their domestic market just isn't up to standard for global. When Netease agreed to make Diablo immortal, what was really happening is that Netease was going to shit out some typical Chinese slop, and then force Blizzard to spend years training and educating the Chinese at netease on how to make the game better so that it would pass muster with a global audience. This was invaluable experience, and a transfer of know-how from Irvine, CA to Hangzhou, China. Blizzard isn't needed anymore. The training is complete. If the CCP allows Diablo Immortal to release in China, it might become wildly successful. If so, a large percentage of the profits from the game would be transferred to Blizzard in the United States. This could not be allowed to happen. So the game had to be banned.

5. Enter the false flag Weibo post that allowed the Chinese to kill the game while keeping all Blizzard's know-how so that the Chinese could make a ripoff competitor and cut Blizzard out of the profits. This wasn't some rogue employee. This was by design. Netease doesn't want to split profits with Blizzard. The tweet "killed" the game, but this is just a psyop in which Netease and the CCP are complicit. Now one of two things will happen: the bandit kingdom of China will "re-negotiate" the split with Blizzard to cut down Blizzard's share to a much smaller "acceptable" level befitting Netease's reduced need for Blizzard moving forward, or the game will simply stay dead permanently, and Netease will release a slightly re-skinned copy as its own game, knowing that if Blizzard comes to China to sue, they'll get laughed out of court by CCP judges.