XY2 players number statistics update, part 5

One can find my last NTES related post here:

Part 4 here

In part 4, I provided the short term impact of 50% gaming fee increase on NTES's number 1 game, XYQ (Fantasy Westward Journey). In this blog post, I will provide the same data for NTES's number 3 game, XY2 (Westward Journey 2).

The following is the player statistics for XY2:

Date	Date	Number of Players (in thousands)	Comments
1/12/2013	Saturday	708
1/19/2013	Saturday	710
1/26/2013	Saturday	705
2/2/2013	Saturday	696
2/9/2013	Saturday	587	New Year Eve
2/10/2013	Sunday	605	50% fee increase, New Year Holiday
2/11/2013	Monday	604	Chinese New Year Holiday
2/12/2013	Tuesday	597	Chinese New Year Holiday
2/16/2013	Saturday		Work date, server count not recorded

Again, we make 2/9/2013 as the date of seperation, and average the first four row and compare to the average the last four row, we will have the following numbers:

Average number of XY2 players BEFORE the 50% fee increase = 705

Average number of XY2 players AFTER the 50% fee increase = 598

Thus, the decrease = -(705-598)/705 = -15.2%

Comparing to the -20.1% decrease for XYQ, the impact to XY2 is even less. If one went to the gaming forum in China, one will find all kinds of planned strikes, etc. against NTES over the higher gaming fee, frankly, I am a little surprised that the impact is so mild.

So far, there is no crashing of players numbers. It is still too early to tell. The player statistics for the next two weeks shall tell us which way this goes. But so far so good.