A quick players statistics update, part 4

One can find part 3 here:

Part 3 here

With the 50% players fee increase for NTES's number 1 game (XYQ) and number 3 game (XY2), as well as XY3, one would think it would have impact on the number of players playing the games.

At this important point for NTES, this policy will either push NTES into two extremes, either super growth or devastation. It all depends on how the players react to the new policy.

Of course, the player hate the 50% increase in cost. The players also don't like the presence of in-game items. If the players want to play item-based game, there are hundreds of free games for them to choose. XYQ, XY2, and XY3 are time-based paying games. Players are getting double hit, they have to pay to play the game as time-based games, they also have to pay for the in-game items as item-based games.

NTES is banking on that as these games start to become social games, player will have a hard time leaving these games because all their friends are playing in these games. Also, it is the first time in 10 years NTES raised the gaming fee. Average Chinese had been getting richer by a lot more than 50% in the past 10 years, the impact to their disposable income is actually quite small.

To find out if the players abandon the games or not, I will track the game server counts ( I had documented the methodology of the game server counts in many of my previous blogs). The following is the player statistics for XYQ:

Date	Date	Number of Players (in thousands)	Comments
1/12/2013	Saturday	1420
1/19/2013	Saturday	1377
1/26/2013	Saturday	1395
2/2/2013	Saturday	1299
2/9/2013	Saturday	1153	New Year Eve
2/10/2013	Sunday	1170	50% fee increase, New Year Holiday
2/11/2013	Monday	1047	Chinese New Year Holiday
2/12/2013	Tuesday	1046	Chinese New Year Holiday
2/13/2013	Wednesday	1068	Chinese New Year Holiday
2/16/2013	Saturday		Work date, server count not recorded

As one can see, there is a distinct decrease in the number of players playing XYQ. If we make 2/9/2013 as the break point, and average the first four row and compare to the average the last five row, we will have the following numbers:

Average number of XYQ players BEFORE the 50% fee increase = 1373

Average number of XYQ players AFTER the 50% fee increase = 1097

Thus, the decrease = (1097-1373)/1373 = -20.1%

So, what does this mean? It is hard to tell. First, it is pretty clear that there are players lost. Also, Chinese New Year is slow season for gaming.

But what is clear is there are no crashing of player base.

But it is still too early to tell which way this goes. It could still go either way.

2/16/2013 was a working date for China (to compensate for the one week Chinese New Year holiday), so its game server data is not useful. But this weekend and next weekend would start to give us the trend line. I will keep updated as I have new game server statistics.