TX2 going open beta (commercial) on June 6, 2008

My last TX2 post can be found here:

http://chinese-net-gaming-stock.blogspot.com/2008/05/tx2-criticism-session-with-player.html

It is an exciting time for NTES. After three years of virtually no new successful games (XY3 are somewhat successful), there are a slew of new exciting games that will be in the market in the next 1 to 4 quarters. The XYQ is growing like crazy. The XY2 is growing as well. The XY3 has a good start, then slow some, but is now growing again. They are going to add many new contents for Datang. In addition, a free-to-play version of Datang will also be developed. They also talked about developing a free-to-play version of XY3. Fly for Fun 2 shall be out pretty soon also. Finally, they are continuing developing casual games.

But the most important of them all is probably TX2. From my last few posts on TX2, I suspected TX2 will go open beta on either June or July this year.

It looks like it will go open beta on June 6, 2008!

Netease released the official trailer for the new TX2 on 5/4/2008. You can download the official trailer from the following link:

http://czdltx2.163.com/tx2/tx2_blood.rar

You would need to have winrar to uncompress the file. The trailer is very nice. Watching movie trailer is definitely one of the more enjoyable thing to do when one trying to analyze a stock.

One can compare the official trailer from the old TX2, that trailer came out in about the same time (around May) in 2006. The old TX2 trailers has a lot of group fighting. That is to be expected. The old TX2 is centered on castle siege and global domination.

The current TX2 trailer is very similar to the official trailer for World of Warcraft. If one read my previous articles on TX2, I said that if TX2 can be converted to a Chinese clone of World of Warcraft, TX2 will then be a very successful game. So far, from all the users' feedback, it does seem that NTES is trying to emulate World of Warcraft. It seems to be very user friendly, especially for new users. It had upgraded the game engine so that it is no longer a game for only those users with fast computers. In addition, it will also keep a lot of group fighting features of the old TX2.

In a nutshell, the new TX2 is going to be a Chinese version of World of Warcraft. In addition it will have quite a few group/gang/tribe fighting features that WOW doesn't have.

But the most exciting thing about that trailer is that it announced at the end of trailer that the game will be operational on June 6, 2008.

Another thing I find useful to me is somebody had developed a flash player instruction on how to play the game. One can go to the following web site to see the user interface in flash form:

http://tx2.17173.com/guide/tx2mn.shtml

Finally, something I don’t like. Just like the marketing effort for the old TX2 (or more precisely, the lack of effort), there is no marketing effort for TX2 yet. It is less than 1 month from the official launch, NTES still have not started the marketing campaign!!! I hope NTES is not going back its old bad habit of pinching pennies.