Impact of Aion on WOW and vice versa

One can find my last article on Aion here:

http://chinese-net-gaming-stock.blogspot.com/2009/04/aion-has-1-million-paying-accounts.html

It is pretty certain that SNDA got a winner in Aion, at least for the short term. I need more observation to make any judgement on how well it would do say 5 years from now. But one thing is certain, at least for the next 6 months, this game is going to make tons of money for SNDA.

If I have time, I could write my impression of the game playing features of Aion. But I might not have the time.

Anyway, I came across a pretty neat information that might be useful to the shareholders of NTES and NCTY.

The following has the players distribution across different provinces in China. The article is below:

http://sqatiresearch.blog.sohu.com/114319951.html

In the above article, there are 3 graphics of players geographical distribution for the three different games. The first graph is for Aion:

The second graph is for WOW:

The third graphic is for Lineage 2:

From the above three plots, SNDA’s Aion is popular in the Southern Guandong province and Eastern province.

On the other hand, the strength of WOW comes from central Eastern provinces.

From the third graphics, the strength of Lineage 2 is very similar to that of Aion. That made sense because both Aion and Lineage 2 are developed by the same company, NCSoft of Korea.

Lineage 2 was licensed to Sina, but Sina no longer run the game.

People always thought that these two games are direct competitor of each other. I think there are a lot of overlaps. Some WOW players will be going to Aion. Many Aion players will return to WOW when WOW’s next expansion pact comes out.

But the above three graphics showed that it is possible for both games to co-exist because there are differences where the players come from.