by Jeff Woleslagle on Jul 30, 2006
There are multitudes of die-hard WoW fans over here in the Middle Kingdom!
As I'm currently resident in China, I can verify just how popular WoW is over here. Every Chinese city is overflowing with Internet cafes, and in every one of them you always find many people playing WoW at all times!
Gamasutra has just published an article where they speak to Jason Sun, a director of The9, Blizzard's partner in China and responsible for bringing WoW to millions of Chinese gamers!
In the latest results from The9, which is traded on the NASDAQ market in the U.S., the company attained peak concurrent World Of Warcraft users of 610,000 in mainland China. In other words, more than half a million people were playing the game at the same time. The average concurrent user figure was around 290,000, and as of March 31, 2006, the end period of these stats, approximately 4.3 million paid accounts have been activated in the region. (Asian MMOs use the 'concurrent users' statistic because players typically pay by the hour, rather than monthly.)