WoW Chinese Revenues Increase

Chinese revenues up 20% for the game in 2007, according to figures.

World of Warcraft, it seems, is a hit everywhere. It’s certainly growing in popularity in China. According to Vnunet, The9 Ltd., which licenses WoW from Blizzard Entertainment, its US publisher, reportan increase in revenues of 20% for 2007, with a total of $175.4 million.   The game did have a hiccup during the year, when Founder Technology Group complained that its fonts had been used inWow’s Chinese version without permission, The9 recalled some discs, but to date it appears to have had no bottom line impact. However, there was a $13 million suit over the matter last August,but no word on whether it’s been resolved.   Jun Zhu, chairman and chief executive at The9, said,   "Our solid financial results were mainly due to strong growth of player usageof Warcraft with The Burning Crusade expansion pack, as well as a new revenue source from commercialisation of Granada Espade in late November.In the fourth quarter of 2007, we attained aggregatepeak concurrent users of approximately 1.2 million for games that are currently in commercial operations, and as of December 31 2007 we had over 33.4 million total registered users."