NTES - TX2 Recent Status 1. – Not slowing down

My last TX2 post can be found here:

http://chinese-net-gaming-stock.blogspot.com/2008/07/ntes-ceo-predicted-pcu-of-more-than-1.html

This is going to be the first part of a three part article.

NTES just came out with the announcement of a new expansion pact for TX2. Usually, I don't write much about expansion pacts. But the timing of this expansion pact and how it is announced says a lot about NTES the company.

Recently, about a couple of weeks ago, a wall street analyst came out with a warning that TX2 is not doing well. It knocked the stock down from $25 back to $21 or $22 in the next couple of days.

If you do the server count, you would have observed this already. There were weakness to TX2 server statistics. The server count seems to indicate that the number of players playing TX2 is decreasing.

Well, what those analysts didn't realize is that it is actually related to the strength of all Netease's games: all Netease's games have very strong anti-piracy features.

Starting about couple of weeks ago, NTES starts to put features into TX2 to combat players that use pirate servers. Those players who use pirate servers get to level-up extremely quick and are able to get lots of power-ups.

They destroy the balance of the game and most importantly, they don't pay anything to Netease.

This is a problem that infects all MMORPG games in China. This problem had destroyed quite a few games in China. But Netease had always be one of the best in combating it.

If you monitor TX2』s server counts, you would have notice an immediate decrease in the number of players. But that is a GOOD thing.

The following is the link to the announcement that shows all the players that were banned from playing TX2 because they were caught using pirate servers:

http://tx2.netease.com/viewthread.php?tid=393497&extra=page%3D1

Of course, the actual number of users who use pirate server is a lot more than shown in the above link. Most of these players either stopped using pirate server (so not to be caught) or left TX2 completely.

But it is something a successful game has to go through. Many popular games failed because they can't find players using pirate servers. It looks like NTES is pretty successful in its attempt at combating piracy.

I consider this a good thing for the long term success of TX2.