' Warcraft' raising a war in China

Written by: Biplob Kishor Deb
Chinese people are becoming crazy about pc gaming. For your convenience, here I should give an information that, at present, there are about 200,000 people are enjoying online gaming in China. The most recent evidence of such increasing popularity of gaming among the Chinese is the World of Warcraft game that became an instant hit in the Chinese market just after its launching in China one year back.

The present game fans of World Warcraft in China are more than 4.3 million which is more than the half of its total users world wide. So, the developer of this game, Blizzard became astonished seeing the rapid growth of its users in China and they said that they have more than six million users over the world. But recently some problems were found between Blizzard and the operator of this game in China, The 9 Limited. Blizzard refused The 9 Limited to give permission to update with its upcoming “Burning Crusade” expansion. On the other hand, The 9 Limited threatened Blizzard that they would operate another game “Guild War,” which is the competitor of World of Warcraft. The 9 Limited is now getting its 99 percent revenue from the World of Warcraft. To solve this problem both companies have started discussion but they have not figured out any possible solution. Here, it is also noteworthy that the revenue of the last quarter of The 9 Limited was less than its previous one because of having some technical problem with its database. The 9 Limited said that, “Of the 4.3 million registered player accounts in China, on average 300,000 are playing at any one time and during peak hours there are up to 610,000 playing simultaneously.”

Well, Chinese people are heading towards the gaming world and that is why, the gaming companies will also be heading towards the Chinese people.

What do you think about it?

Source:
China's millions flock to World of Warcraft
Global Gaming league (GGL) going for China (another article published in Asianbiz on China gaming)