Possibly in the hopes of gaining some positive press after its recent legal wrangling, CDC Games released performance metrics for a few of its commercially-available titles that operate on the free-to-play business model. The company says that average concurrent users across its portfolio was about 200,000 in October 2007, a growth of 12 percent over the previous month, and CDC now claims 119 million registered users among all of its games.

CDC also offered some numbers for Yulgang, the game over which CDC has recently settled its conflicts with Mgame. Yulgang is in its third year of commercial availability, and CDC says its average daily revenue grew by 2 percent in October compared to the prior month, and that peak concurrent users grew by 10 percent, while average concurrent users grew 20 percent. The company attributes the improving metrics to the release of the v180 version of the game in August 2007, and to its active efforts to shut down pirate servers hosting the game.

CDC believes that two-thirds of the pirate servers were successfully shut down during August and September, due to its work with the Chinese government authorities, law enforcement agencies and internet operators. CDC says the pirate shutdown is continuing, and that less than 10 percent of the pirate servers remain currently active. CDC is one of the founding companies of the OGAAP (Online Games Alliance Against Piracy), which aims to protect the industry from such pirate servers and unlawful operation.

The company also provided stats on Special Force, launched in June 2007 as what CDC claims is China's first free-to-play, pay for merchandise FPS game in China. According to the company, compared to September 2007, revenue for Special Force grew 37 percent in the month of October, while registered users grew 34 percent to 7.7 million in total. Special Force also saw October growth of 23 percent in peak concurrent users, and 27 percent growth in average concurrent users.

CDC president Xiaowei Chen said, "We are very happy to see Special Force growing so well and gaining momentum after just four months since we launched the game. This early momentum and the establishment of a loyal base of players is critical to the long-term success of any free-to-play game. We are also happy to see the return to growth for Yulgang... Clearly our efforts to combat pirate servers are having a positive effect. We will continue to shut down pirate servers, and although recovery will take time, the trend is encouraging."

He also provided an update on the legal proceedings with Mgame: "Additionally, we are making good progress in our negotiations with Mgame and feel confident we can reach an amicable settlement on Yulgang with our next step scheduled for this coming Tuesday with a meeting in Hong Kong."