Take-Two has confirmed that they just laid off 30 staff from their Visual Concepts studio (they are the developers of the 2K Sports titles). (Link)

The reason for the lay offs?

"In order to properly align its resources with its current and future goals, and to continue to develop games as efficiently as possible, 2K Sports has eliminated approximately 30 positions at its Visual Concepts studio. These reductions will not affect 2K Sports’ ability to create and deliver AAA titles, including its upcoming release of NBA 2K11."

This is some of the activity I've been on the lookout for since my earlier post on the Red Dead Redemption PC port. Could this be a sign of Take-Two trimming the hedges with future lay-offs on the way? Many of the Rockstar offices have been pretty scared the past several months waiting to see what their future holds.

The reason for this might simply because of the amount of money they can potentially lose because of the franchise, Gamespot explains. It makes sense though, based on the timing. Next quarter is probably when we'll see some more activity.

Number of Players and Average Game Time

Current estimates (another) put China's user base at approx. 4 million players (out of Blizzard's claimed 11.5 million "Active Subscribers").

Although many users had migrated to Taiwan realms for WOTLK and less hassles, it's interesting to note that Blizzard's revenues were much higher on average during the quarters when fees were not collected in China. (During that same time, Blizzard stated that their player counts were the same.) I'm guessing that not many players had moved back to the China realms during that time.

Most recently, 16,000 WoW players interviewed by Sina.com stated that ~44% intended to return to CWOW servers, ~25% intended to keep playing on TWOW servers, and ~30% were giving up the game (e.g. tired of the drama, there are plenty more games out there, etc.)

To The Blizzard Employee Reading This:

Please tell your superiors to open up server transfers between all geographies (e.g. US to China, Taiwan to China, China to Taiwan, etc.) You can claim that this is all your idea and create a return-on-investment case detailing how this project will increase player growth in all geographies, is excellent for public relations, significantly improve customer loyalty, and how Blizzard can make tons of revenue in additional services for a process that is very simple and inexpensive. (You'll probably even get a promotion or pay raise out of this. Yay. But hurry up, plenty of other Blizzard employees regular this blog.)

In regards to average game time by WoW players in China, there haven't been as many studies as I was hoping. But here's a summary of what does exist:

- A 2006 Study from Research and Consultancy Firm Niko Partners stated users in China averaged 4 hours per day.
- A 2006 Morgan-Stanley Study (as per IDC) stated that user in China averaged 3-5 hours per day.
- A 2007 "Assessment of U.S. and Chinese Online Gaming Environments" stated that the average user in China averaged 5 hours per day.
- And finally in 2010, a very recent study (June 30 to be exact) stated similar findings to those above but also added that approx. 20% of players play 5 to 8 hours per day and approx. 22% play for more than 8 hours per day!

Those are 3 independent studies that claim 28 to 35 hours per week are spent. Other studies from blog webpages claim that the average is over 25 hours per week, but they were missing sources and citation. So, it's pretty safe to say that the average CWOW player puts in approximately 4-5 hours per day. I'll be using that figure for some upcoming calculations regarding monthly fees and total number of players.

As of right now, Chinese players have only been able to play The Burning Crusade since it was first launched in China on September 6, 2007 (8 months after the NA/EU release.)

There's been a lot of drama between government regulators, Blizzard, The9, and NetEase but it appears that WOTLK will finally see a release in China sometime within the next few months. (By comparison, NA/EU release date was Nov 13/08).

Here's a summary of the most recent WoW China activity after The9 lost their license to operate World of Warcraft.

Apr 2009 - The9 loses license to operate WoW
May 2009 - The9 sues Blizzard, also creates "World of Fight"
Jun 2009 - Servers offline (The9 -> NetEase)
Jul 2009 - Servers offline (The9 -> NetEase)
Aug 2009 - Servers offline (The9 -> NetEase)
Sep 2009 - Servers offline (The9 -> NetEase)
Oct 2009 - Servers back online
Nov 2009 - NetEase ordered to stop charging players and new registrations (deemed illegal).
Dec 2009 - Servers online
Jan 2010 - Servers online
Feb 7 2010 - NetEase attempts to re-approve TBC
Feb 8 2010 - NetEase ordered to halt new accounts again
Feb 12 2010 - Gave "approval to release" TBC in China (even though it was already out)
Mar 2010 - Subscriptions collected again & new players allowed
Apr 2010 - Business as usual
May 2010 - Business as usual
Jun 2010 - Business as usual
Jul 2010 - Business as usual
Aug 2010 - Announced that WOTLK would finally launch

For 7 months, they were not allowed to accept new players and for 4 months there was no revenue. There was practically no growth for a year. But, let's hope things stabilize for NetEase. (More information if you're interested in this.)

On an interesting note, WOTLK has been available on Taiwan realms (TWOW) for some time and many guilds and players have moved from their CWOW to TWOW servers due to their closer proximity and acceptable latency. Not just because of the WOTLK expansion pack, but also because of their ongoing issues on the CWOW servers (constant up-and-down, servers offline, new accounts being blocked, etc.)

There are also many Chinese players who have tried to make the move to US Realms for some of the same reasons (realm issues, wanting to get into new exp. packs), but they have met with new challenges.. other than bandwidth latency.

There is a very common misconception that if you're Chinese you're automatically a "Chinese Gold Farmer". Fact is, the number of "gold farmers" (under it's classic definition) is actually very low (1-2% of total Active Subscribers) and are actually located in your own realm's geography. But that doesn't stop Blizzard from banning China-based IP addresses without actually investigating the user.

Here's what Blizzard had to say on the matter:

"Chinese IP's are not blocked on the US or Taiwan realms, but sometimes accounts using IPs are banned due to large amounts of exploiters or gold sellers using the network. It's possible for some personal accounts to get blocked as well (highly unlikely) is where this probably stems from."

I think investigations should be based on a user-by-user basis, rather than just banning entire IP ranges because of some bad apples. Because of the amount of money involved too, most of these gold farming businesses in China buy dedicated US VPN servers for maximum bandwidth.

Consider this: If NA/EU realms were constantly crashing, down for maintenance for months at a time, new expansion packs were a year late (but released in China a year early), you never knew if the expansion pack would ever be approved by NA/EU government regulators or when they were going to shutdown the realms "for good this time", and there were ways to correct any latency issues, wouldn't you try to setup a CWOW account just so that you could play the game? And after all is said and done, wouldn't you just want to get your WoW fix and be free from labeling or harassment?

As it stands now, though, you may even want to signup on the CWOW servers right now once I explain some of the other interesting facts about CWOW (however you have to wait for the next parts of this article.) =]

* Update (08/20/10):
Here are direct links to the other parts of the article.

Part 2 - Average game time played by CWOW players.
Part 3 - Subscription model, and total number of CWOW players vs worldwide.
Part 4 - Gold has real value and easy to buy/sell.
Part 5 - Unique in-game services on China realms.
Part 6 - Overview of gameplay, culture, government regulations and censorship.
Part 7 - Census information, ratio of Alliance vs Horde, and PVP is uncommon.