AUG. 20, 2007 • Director John Woo’s next film, The War of the Red Cliff, will spawn a companion MMORPG. The movie is scheduled for release in 2008 in two parts and revolves around an important 3rd Century battle that forms the centerpiece of the classic Chinese novel, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Beijing Perfect World intends to release The War of the Red Cliff MMO during the fourth quarter of 2007. The game was developed around the Beijing Perfect World’s Angelica 3D engine. The company launched the first of three self-developed MMOs in 2006, Perfect World, Legend of Martial Arts, followed by Perfect World II. During the first quarter of 2007,the two titles had recorded approximately 237,000 average concurrent users in China. Another MMO, Zhu Xian, was launched in May 2007.
Impact: In North America and Europe success for an MMOG is measured in the number of subscribers. In East Asia the metric for success is average concurrent users (ACU) which is how many users are playing at any given time. The ACU is thus a subset of the total user/subscriber population. In China an ACU of over 200,000 is large and would be the equivalent of a Western game with over 1 million subscribers. In other words, Perfect World has some hits on its hands.
