World of Warcraft China

World of Warcraft will not be under The9 in June 2009.

So, an analyst implied that they might be stuck with 10,000 servers. I wonder what they will do with those servers.

Well, Netease will soon have WoW, but then, they are planning to buy new servers. If The9 planned to recoup the expenses they incurred from the servers in 4 years, maybe Netease will also plan 4 years to get back their money. But then, Blizzard gets a bigger royalty from Netease. Getting back their money might take a longer time.

Well, WoW is old. It's been around for quite some time now. But it doesn't necessarily mean that it will wane in popularity.

I read an article before that said if The9 doesn't release Wrath of the Lich King, then they might go bankrupt. Well, they just lost the whole game.

Mabe they are plannning a new game. Of course they have to come up with something that will be WoW's competition.

Chinese GE performance

"Next, about Granado Espada, or GE -- GE's performance in the third quarter of 2008 was not up to our expectations. During the third quarter of 2008, the Korean game developer IMC focused its efforts on the launch of new Granado Espada or new GE. Therefore, only one content upgrade, the Battle of Kings, has been launched during Q3 in China. Also, GE was subject to the impacts caused by online game seasonality as well as the Beijing Olympic Games.

On November 13th, however, we started the open beta test for new GE in China. We are deeply committed to the success of the new GE. We closed the GE servers for seven days before the open beta test in order to make sure the transitional process is smooth. There is a great improvement in the game content of new GE to fit the demand of Chinese game players.

In order to better collect our players’ feedback about new GE, online players can send their feedback to my email directly so as to build a direct access to the insights into our game players needs. We believe new GE will assemble more users around the game and ARPU will begin to increase in Q4 2008.

On a combined basis, SUN and GE generated net revenues of $4.9 million in the third quarter of 2008, decreased by 12% compared to the previous quarter. As mentioned earlier, the sequential decrease was primarily due to GE’s performance. SUN and GE in aggregate had approximately 2.0 million active accounts in the third quarter of 2008, of which 129,000 were active paying accounts."

This is from the earnings transcript of The9. The9 operates a bunch of games in China, and they also own a stake of IMC and IAH games. I don't know exactly who owns who, but as I understand it, The9 partly owns IMC who then partly owns IAH games via the investments they made to these companies. Anyway, I might be wrong, so correct me on this.

I am intrigued by what the article says. It mentions a new GE that had an open beta test. Is that the GE II? Or maybe it's GE v3.0. And it mentions a patch called the Battle of the Kings. I don't know any king in the current version of Granado Espada in Singapore/Southeast Asia and the US/Europe version. Maybe it's a king from Errac in v3.0?

It's disappointing that they said that GE's performance didn't meet their expectations. GE is such a great game.

Things to do:
Do more research on the new GE that just had an open beta
Keep track of other MMORPG games (Aion)