Videogames are serious business in China. The country’s online game market will reach 41 billion yuan ($6 billion) by 2010, accounting for half the global market, according to newly released data from Cnzz.com, a Beijing-based data analysis firm.

The Cnzz.com report says that almost two-thirds of China’s 338 million Web users are now online gamers. The online-game industry, which currently accounts for more than half of the total Internet economy, will see strong annual growth at a rate of 20 percent in future years, the report says.

The mainstream remains the awkwardly named sector of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs). In October, six out of the 10 most popular online games in China are MMORPG games, according to the report. World of Warcraft by Activision Blizzard (ATVI) still tops the list with the most registered players and peak simultaneous online users. But the current government regulatory fighting over its Chinese license, held by Netease, may yet have a negative impact on the game, according to the report.

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Probably the funniest bit of commercial ingenuity I’ve seen these past few months is the growth of corpse-spam in World of Warcraft. You see, it’s quite hard, in-game, to spam people with commercial messages. If you send messages to people you get blocked and reported and your account shut down.

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The turf battle between two Chinese bureaucracies appears to be escalating, with NetEase and the World of Warcraft videogame at its center.

According to a statement, China’s General Administration of Press and Publications said it rejected NetEase’s application to operate Burning Crusades, the latest version of World of Warcraft. NetEase acquired the license to the popular game after Activision Blizzard (ATVI) dropped its previous China licensee, The9.

The regulator demanded, however, that NetEase stop taking payments and registering new game accounts, or else face punishment that includes “suspension of its Internet service.”

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The common perception of World of Warcraft is that the immensely popular online game is a haven for obsessive nerds–folks with no lives and little to contribute to society.

The new “Player Stories” section of the World of Warcraft community site aims to accentuate the positive. While most anecdotes about World of Warcraft lean to the juvenile and the negative–accounts of pranks, tales of addiction or public airings of shameful behavior–these user-contributed tales focus on the ways that World of Warcraft improved lives.

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You might think that starting a brand-new, high-quality, full-glossy magazine in one of the worst publishing environments in years would be a suicidal business idea. After all, take a look at just about any magazine you can think of, and, thanks to the veritable collapse of advertising, odds are it’s about as thin as can be.

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Are you spending wakeless hours trying to master World of Warcraft? Would you rather send a friend a text message than meet in person? Do you sometimes fall asleep at the keyboard?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, you may have an Internet addiction. But now there’s help.

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The relaunch of the popular online game World of Warcraft in China, where it has already been offline for six weeks, still faces an indefinite delay as it awaits government approval for its content.

Problems for Blizzard Entertainment (ATVI), the game’s creator, started when it switched to a new local operator for World of Warcraft in China, online gaming company NetEase.

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Brian Green’s experience with not-so-secret questions began when he logged on to his World of Warcraft account in March of this year and found all of his characters in their underwear. Someone had stolen the account and sold off all of his virtual equipment.

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Is a battle brewing in China over “World of Warcraft?”

Last week, the Web site wofchina.com went online, advertising a familiar-sounding game called “World of Fight.”

“WoF (World of Fight), a new game by The9 Ltd., is soon to come,” the page reads. Web site registration data confirm the site is owned by The9 (NCTY).

Casual viewers might be forgiven for mistaking it for the Web site for “World of Warcraft,” the popular U.S.-based online sword-and-monsters game that keeps hundreds of thousands of Chinese players in the country’s Internet cafes awake into the wee hours of the night. Its Web site address is similar to WoW’s wowchina.com. The layout looks similar too.

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I’ve talked quite a bit in the past about the turning point that the year 2004 represented in the video game business. To recap, in that year the internet revolution finally rocked the game business to its core, with electronic distribution and new business models reaching mainstream acceptance. Between the release of World of Warcraft, the launch of Half Life 2 through Steam, the Shanda, TenCent and JAMDAT IPOs, and several other events, 2004 was a watershed year for the industry.

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My World of Warcraft account is now more secure than my bank account. It is harder to steal 5,000 fake Warcraft gold from me than $5,000 real U.S. dollars. Why? Because unlike my bank, my computer game supports two-factor authentication.

About six months ago Blizzard started selling the Blizzard Authenticator to its U.S. customers for the nominal price of $6.50. It’s a little keychain fob that generates random number codes that change frequently. Logging in to WoW requires both a password and the current code.

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For years, Western governments have used supercomputers to model weapons of nuclear war. Now a company in China uses the powerful machines to tend the fantasy realms of World of Warcraft.

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Based on publicly available data, it looks like an Internet milestone will be passed by the end of next month: World of Warcraft will lose its undisputed status as the most popular massively multiplayer online world. It’s struggling to defend that title as Habbo Hotel, the Web-based, social MMO from Finland’s Sulake Corp., is nipping at its heels. Habbo just sent me news that it has logged its 100 millionth registered avatar, and more crucial, that Habbo “attracts close to 10 million monthly visitors to its services worldwide.”

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Mogwai is cutting down the time he spends playing World of Warcraft. Twenty hours a week or less now, compared to a peak of over 70. It’s not that he has lost interest–just that he’s no longer working his way up the greasy pole. He’s got to the top. He heads his own guild, has 20,000 gold pieces in the bank and wields the Twin Blades of Azzinoth; weapons so powerful and difficult to acquire that other players often (virtually) follow Mogwai around just to look at them. In his own words, he’s “e-famous.” He was recently offered $8,000 for his Warcraft account, a sum he only briefly considered accepting. Given that he has clocked over 4,500 hours of play, the prospective buyers were hardly making it worth his while.

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