All of the World of Warcraft servers will be offline for possibly days at a time starting June 7th. Well, in China, at any rate. Ha ha, did I scare you?

The company that used to run the blockbuster MMO in China has lost its contract (and they're not going down without a fight). As the contract is turned over to someone else next month, Chinese subscribers have been alerted that this will mean some downtime. An independent analyst says this transition will run off some of the more casual players. According to Colin Sebastian from the Lazard Capital Markets, "We expect some churn among infrequent users off of the current 11.5M+ WoW subscriber count." He even suggests sales of pre-paid time card, a common way of paying subscription fees, are declining in advance of the transition.

I'm sure World of Warcraft will bounce back just fine, but if you notice a shortage of gold famers starting June 7th, don't expect it to last. Also, here's an interesting factoid to whip out next time you're at a party:

Asia accounts for about 50 percent of WoW's global userbase, suggests Sebastian -- but contributes less than 10 percent of total revenues because of its licensing structure and timecard-based payment model.

(Thanks Gamasutra.)