I really don't think that social media memes or Microsoft acquisition have anything to do with that.

Chinese authorities are pushing hard against video games for the last few years (well, technically for much longer than that, but things started looking better in mid-2010's and now they're doing it again). If you want to release a new game there, you need to have government permission, and they have been "freezing" approvals for long periods of time over the last few years. Many Chinese gaming companies shut down because of that, they couldn't even release their games at all.

If you add things like putting hard limits on gaming time for minors (3h per week, only on weekends), making international version of Steam inaccessible, making the lives of gaming giants like Tencent and NetEase as difficult as possible, or pushing other anti-gaming regulations, everything becomes clearer.

If I had to guess, it's just another part of the same "problem" - Chinese government is heavily against video games, thinking that they ruin ******'s lives (especially young ******), make them unproductive, are the "bad western thing" and so on. So not renewing licenses would fit right into that narrative and other things they've been doing.

There are lots of sources, but if you want a good summary, [here's a Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_games_in_China#Approvals_freeze_and_further_steps_to_restrict_youth_gaming_(2018%E2%80%93present)) about that.

Alternatively, it's not a permanent thing and they just want to switch a partner and make someone else publish/operate their games in China. Maybe Tencent? But again, given all of the above, I'm not sure if Chinese government will even allow that.

P.S. This is a REALLY big issue for Hearthstone. The game has tons of Chinese players, it's by far the biggest server, and they have a major presence in things like deck building or competitive play. Shutting them down sucks both for the players (because who would like to just lose access to their account?), but also the game in general (a huge drop in playerbase & revenue can't be good).