Gaining the license to distribute pre-paid game time cards for World of Warcraft in June 2005 altered the structure and growth prospects for The9's business, and the company saw over 100% revenue growth and an increase in operating margins between 2005 and 2006, from 12.2% to 26%, due to the agreement with Vivendi Universal Games.^[1] In 2008, The9 primarily licenses hugely scaled online games (Massively Multiplayer Online-games) from other developers, typically based outside of China, and handles the marketing and distribution efforts within the People's Republic of China. The company has a portfolio of over 10 titles, but 99% of the company's total revenues in 2006 came from World of Warcraft.^[2] In 2008, the company acquired new licenses, including the Korean game Atlantica on April 24th, 2008^[3] and most importantly, the right to distribute Blizzard's second expansion game for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King.^[4]

In April of 2008, The9 announced that it had achieved peak concurrent users of World of Warcraft of over 1 million, meaning at any given time over 1 million users were logged on playing the game.^[5] In Q4 of 2007, the company reported average concurrent logins of 470,000.^[6] Blizzard reported that there were over 3.5 million subscribers to World of Warcraft in China in the beginning of 2007, while there were only 2 million subscribes in North America, and 1.5 million in Europe.^[7]

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