Battle.Net Services Banned In Iran Due to Sanctions

August 29th, 2012 by Brad Ward

United States trade sanctions have led the MMO giant, Blizzard Entertainment, to cut cut off any access to World of Warcraft in the country of Iran. Later on Blizzard posted a statement to its forums after Iranian players were complaining that they could not access the game anymore. The access was lost, Blizzard said, because they had “tightened up its procedures” to comply with the trade sanctions. That isn’t all though. Blizzard had also said that this meant they could not give any refunds to players or even transfer their accounts. Due to complying with trade sanctions, this also means that all online Battle.Net services would also be shut down for Iranian players.

Here’s the full statement Blizzard released:

Our team has been watching this thread closely, and we understand the desire for more information about this situation. Blizzard Entertainment cannot speak to any reports surrounding the Iranian government restricting games from its citizens.

What we can tell you is that United States trade restrictions and economic sanction laws prohibit Blizzard from doing business with residents of certain nations, including Iran. Several of you have seen and cited the text in the Terms of Use which relates to these government-imposed sanctions. This week, Blizzard tightened up its procedures to ensure compliance with these laws, and players connecting from the affected nations are restricted from access to Blizzard games and services.

This also prevents us from providing any refunds, credits, transfers, or other service options to accounts in these countries. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes and will happily lift these restrictions as soon as US law allows.

A lot of this I assume is due to the increasing tensions between the United States and Iran because of nuclear threats towards Israel, who is an ally of the United States. Hopefully things will get sorted out within the coming weeks.

We’ll keep you updated if we hear any further news.

source: EU Battle.Net
via: BBC News