NetEase has been Blizzard’s official publishing partner in China since 2008 (bringing StarCraft II and the Battle.net social gaming platform to the region). NetEase is one of the handful of game companies which operate in the country that has been approved by the Chinese government to perform the business operations of games that aren’t developed by Chinese based companies like Blizzard Entertainment.
Parts of this includes insuring that titles conform to the strict guidelines (imagery like skeletons and blood for example are forbidden) put forth by the cultural ministry but also for technological reasons (the government does not want outside entities operating their own data centers and internal networks in the country where extreme censorship of information is practiced).
Blizzard also recently partnered with NetEase on the development side with the much maligned Diablo: Immortal mobile title that is expected to be released later this year. It remains to be seen if there will be more design/development collaboration between the two companies with the extension of this publishing agreement.
NOTE: yes, some sites are going to spin this as if it were something new as a result of Diablo: Immortal (because it will make for better clickbait) when it is primarily about the extension of their existing publishing agreement and nothing about partnering of developing more mobile titles together.
