There are several hundred social networking sites in China today, though only a handful with a significant user base. The market for SNS is growing quickly globally led by the US with China trying to keep pace. The game Happy Farm is quite similar to FarmVille, and Happy Farm can be found on all the leading Chinese SNS. The Chinese version of Mafia Wars, another leader in the US after FarmVille, was banned this summer for its gangster themes.

A person must be 18 years or older to legally enter an Internet café in China. Most of the successful licenses for foreign online games have been for games that target 18-30 year old males. There have been very few efforts to promote youth and teen online games, though a game such as Free Realms by Sony Online Entertainment may do quite well there if it were to launch in China. Meanwhile, if Tencent is developing a "kid community" similar to Club Penguin, there is a large and growing audience of gaming families with home PCs who could start their children on benign games at home, building more momentum for growth in the total market as those children get older.

It is a relief to see that Activision Blizzard reported a profit in the quarter that WoW was offline in China, but as has been reported in the press in recent months the company only derives less than 5% of total revenue from Asia (mostly WoW) so the closure seems to have been a minor blip for them. Of course it has caused much hassle and headache for Blizzard executives, and as all market observers will agree, it is already high time that WoW catches a break in China instead of being the pawn in the current regulatory power struggle.