Considering all the recent talk on how World of Warcraft actually functions in China I thought it would be interesting to take a much closer look at this little understood topic.

First and foremost it's important to understand that Blizzard doesn't actually run World of Warcraft in China. They have licensed WOW China to the company The9 which is one of the leading online game operators in China. In addition to running WOW, The9 also run several other MMORPGs including "MU", "Mystina Online", "Granado Espada", and "Joyful Journey West". I'm sure that most of you probably haven't even heard of some of these games but they are extremely popular I assure you.

Just to give you an idea of how popular MMORPGs are in Asia and China the game "MU" first launched in February 2003 and very shortly reached a player base of over 15 million registered users. MMORPGs are a huge business overseas and completely dwarf the American and European MMORPG market. Even your "average" MMORPGs in Asia have over a million registered users (meanwhile Everquest is proud of having nearly 500,000 users at their peak).