XY2 and XY3 Server Status part 1

My previous post on XY2 is here:

http://chinese-net-gaming-stock.blogspot.com/2008/01/xy2-xy3-server-status.html

On 1/1/2008, XY2 consolidated its servers from 275 servers to 128 servers (as of now, the server had increased to 136). It introducing an accuracy question regards the statistics from the server count. For one thing, it is not clear that they uses all brand new servers. If they use all brand new servers, then it becomes more likely that the new server will have more user capacities. In that case, they might change the player counts before declaring the server busy, full, etc.

Without any additional insight, I assume they keep the same servers. Something else to keep in mind is that I can no longer stay up everyday to do server count. I only do server count during weekends. For most games, it is fine because most players play during weekends. But for XY2, Thursday is also a busy day. Any statistics that won’t take into Thursday for XY2 will be incomplete.

But since I am using the same data to compare 4^th quarter 2007 and 1^st quarter 2008, they are apple to apple comparison. It might not be extremely accurate, but they are still accurately enough to be useful.

The following is the server count table:

Month	Saturday/Sunday	4Q2007	1Q2008
1	1
	2	168	319
	3	298	297
	4
2	1	255	248
	2
	3	315	286
	4	247	302
3	1	274	271
	2	254	322
Holiday	4	325	285
	5	318	257
Total		2454	2587

The first column is the month. There are three months in each quarter. In addition, there is a one week national holiday in both 4Q 2007 and 1Q 2008. I used 2 days out of the 7 day national holiday.

The second column is the order of weekends. There are usually 4 weekends per month. The number in the third and fourth column represents the PCU for that particular weekend.

From the last row, one can see ACU increased from 4Q07 to 1Q08 by (2587 – 2454)/2454 = 5.4%

It is a little surprising to me that there is actually an increase this quarter. Ntes didn’t really add a lot of contents this quarter. The expansion pact won’t be ready until the 2Q. It is clear that XY2 is growing again.

Now, lets try to relate ACU with the revenue. Let me use the following table:

	4Q2006	1Q2007	2Q2007	3Q2007	4Q2007
ACU	173	170	162	124	134
ACU %		-1.7%	-6.4%	-23.5%	8%
Revenue	16.2	15.4	15.6	11.9	13.2
Rev. %		-4.9%	1.3%	-23.7%	10.9%

The second row of the table is the Average Concurrent User estimate. The third row is the quarter to quarter increase/decrease for the ACU. The fourth row is the revenue from XY2. The fifth row is the QoQ increase/decrease for the XY2 revenue.

From the above table, with the exception of 2Q2007, the revenue follows ACU. For a paying game, ACU can be a reasonable estimator.

For 1Q 2008, my server count suggested an increase of 5.4%. My guess for the revenue will be an increase of 6%. This will give me a revenue of 13.2 * 1.06 = 14 millions for 1Q2008.

The second part of this article will be about XY3.