Pacific Epoch reports that The9(Nasdaq: NCTY) has added 10 more server groups (clusters?) at its seventh server farm (data center?) in China bringing the total server groups at that location to 30.
World of Warcraft certainly continues to grow in total population (having just crossed 7 million total users). However, its revenue model, much less revenue split, in China is very different than elsewhere. It is probably increasingly irrelevant to talk about World of Warcraft's global population as population doesn't map well to either players or revenues in Asian markets.
So, for the US and Europe, we want to know subscribers counts, but in Asia, it is Average Concurrent Users (ACU) and Peak Concurrent Users (PCU) for a reason. It would be interesting to hear/see how much of this growth is in the West or in China, Korea, and elsewhere in Asia.
I don't even think there is a good way to fuse these numbers except in terms of total revenues per month or revenues per server per month (which might be a good way to normalize across different business models... and would be REAL interesting).
Gamers Queue Up For New WoW Servers
Gaming, Internet, NCTY, Online Game, The9, WoW, World of Warcraft
Posted by: Hattie Lee on Sep 25, 2006 | 19:09
Editorial Summary
Chinese online game operator The9 (Nasdaq: NCTY) added 10 more server groups for the 7th server farm of its license MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW) on September 24 and 25, bringing the total number of server groups in the new area to 30. The new farm was overloaded when it was first opened on September 23, with as much as over 4,000 gamers queuing up to enter the new servers. The9 had to temporarily close the 7th server farm on September 24 until it could increase capacity. The 7th server farm is now back in operation.