China.com's popular Yulgang MMOG surpassed 260,000 concurrent online sessions recently, according to a company press release. (For context, an early 2005 report via blog billsdue reports that Blizzard's World of Warcraft might have hit 500k concurrent users in China). Who says that piracy is killing software sales in Asia?
Yulgang is free. Sort of. Gamers play free but have the option of paying for virtual merchandise in order to enhance their online experience. Yulgang players purchased an average of 28,000 items every single day the three-month period ending December 31, 2005. This business model is typical for Asia, where a company's only hope of extracting money from piratical consumers is to make sure that the software is worthless without an Internet connection connecting the consumer to a central database.
Other metrics--some of them puzzling--the company mentions in the release:
- Average concurrent users per day numbered 162,000 in Q4 FY2005, up 34% from 121,000 in Q3 FY2005
- Registered users totaled 14,966,000 in Q4 FY2005, up 63% from 9,170,000 in Q3 FY2005 [Are you seeing that? Nearly 15 million registered users for a MMOG. Granted, it's free, but those are big, big numbers!]
- Average virtual merchandise sold per day amounted to 28,000 units in Q4 FY2005, up 65% from 17,000 units in Q3 FY2005
- Server groups throughout China supporting Yulgang and the company's other online games numbered 36, up 33% from 27 server groups in Q3 FY2005 [Why brag about something like the number of servers? Servers cost money. This is like bragging about how much money you're spending without actually talking about how that spending is translating into revenue!]
