Profits double at Warcraft operator

The9 Ltd, which operates the popular online game World of Warcraft in China, reported that its profits had more than doubled in the second quarter compared to last year. Quarterly profit climbed from $7.4m to $16.9m on revenue of $66.3m. The company's revenue was up almost 70 per cent over the year. Both figures set new quarterly records for the company.

Despite the positive results, shares in The9 were down at the end of last week. Some analysts attributed the fall to investors' concerns that The9 is still too dependent on its strong income from the aging World of Warcraft. Despite the company's efforts to develop other multiplayer online role-playing games, such as Soul of the Ultimate Nation, Warcraft still accounts for approximately 80 per cent of its active users at peak times, according to company data.

“Our solid financial results were driven by the continuing growth of Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft and Soul of The Ultimate Nation, despite our closing all servers for three days on observation and respect for those impacted by the earthquake tragedy,” said Jun Zhu, the company's chairman and chief executive officer.

“In the second quarter of 2008 we attained aggregate peak concurrent users (PCU) of approximately 1.3 million for games that are currently in commercial operation, with World of Warcraft's PCU alone surpassing the one million milestone,” he added.

The company's games had 41.5 million registered users by the end of June.

"The second quarter of 2008 was a busy and fruitful quarter for us. We further grew our overall player base through constant content upgrades and enhanced penetration efforts toward lower tier regional markets,” Zhu said.

US-based games developer Electronic Arts owns a 15 per cent stake in The9.