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Poor Shanda. Poor Chinese game companies! A surprising number of suits have been brought against them in the past year, but this — for a more reasonable 11,000 RMB ($1600) — takes the current cake. Shanda froze the account of a Legend of Mir player (for unspecified reasons), who is now suing for emotional distress and the return of his virtual items: More »
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In totally unsurprising news, China's game market continues to climb — numbers just posted for the second quarter of 2008 show an 11.2% increase over first quarter, and a nearly 66% increase from the same quarter last year (!). In terms of market share, Shanda leads the pack with a 17.9% share, with other big companies hovering below that. More »
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A short and sweet and mildly thought provoking piece over at Terra Nova asks the question: "Why not qualify the taking away of virtual objects as theft?" The author speaks in reference to Dutch law specifically, but a few cases have cropped up in recent months (Shanda getting sued after forgetting to return some virtual items; the case that this post was based on, where virtual theft in Habbo Hotel led to a real life arrest) that raise the question of what do you do with virtual items when they're stolen? Slap a pair of real life cuffs on the thief's wrists? Ignore it, since the items never left the virtual space they inhabited? More »
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NCsoft's Atrix, a casual online game that NCsoft describes as "a lively action fighting game," is making its way to China after being well received in Korea last year. Shanda has gotten the exclusive license to operate Atrix on the Mainland, part of the alliance between the two Asian giants announced this past November. I wonder if having a 'strategic alliance' will preclude any of the messy and protracted legal battles we've seen between Chinese and Korean companies? You can expect the game to be popping up on PRC PCs in 2009; full press release after the jump. More »
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The Chinese game industry is hot hot hot, and money is burning a hole in the pocket of some of the big players like Shanda. Unfortunately, the hot market has led to plenty of companies overvaluing their worth, and despite capital burning a hole in the collective pocket of the big companies, they're starting to realize that snapping up small companies for massive prices isn't the giant payoff they're looking for: More »
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Shanda - one of Mainland China's heaviest hitters in the MMORPG world - was asked by police to remove virtual items from a player's account during an investigation into the sale of stolen virtual items. Shanda did - then forgot to give them back like the police had told them to. When the player discovered his missing virtual items, he flipped his lid and sued them. Shanda lost and has been ordered to apologize and pay a restitution of 5,000 RMB (a little less than $700 USD) - but to add insult to injury, the player has even more lawsuits in mind: More »
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Shanda Entertainment - one of Mainland China's heavy hitters in the gaming industry - announced that their subsidiary, Aurora Technology, has frozen accounts of male players who have elected to play as female characters in the King of the World MMORPG. Apparently there are no bans on women playing male characters, but women (and men-wanting-to-play-as-women) will be required to prove their gender via webcam. How exactly is this all going to work? And is it going to last? Who knows - but it certainly seems very odd and not prone to lasting long: More »
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While the virtual asset/microtransaction/free-to-play models are met with suspicion and derision in some quarters, Free To Play has an interesting analysis up of the challenges facing more traditional channels in the face of declining profit margins and an up-and-coming generation of gamers raised on the Club Penguin and MapleStorys of the world. "North American game companies are taking the same "partner and acquire" approach that they've used to achieve growth and purchase innovation for the last two decades," a model that doesn't work when dealing with some of the Asian companies have theoretical purchase prices that are astronomical. More »
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Shanda is one of China's biggest game operators and while they've been doing well recently (really, really well), they didn't hit their stride for a few years. Chen Tianqiao, former real estate executive and co-founder of Shanda, talked with the Wall Street Journal about what it took to get Shanda off the ground and turn it into one of the dominant companies in the Chinese gaming market (we'll ignore the lawsuits regarding copyright infringement): More »
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Team Ninja's 3D fighter series Dead or Alive is making the jiggly jump from consoles to PCs in the form of Dead or Alive Online scheduled to hit sometime between now and the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. DOA Online won't simply be a port of an existing console or arcade release, instead it will be a "completely new game featuring the characteristics of a PC online game" which most likely means it's six different flavors of rotten garbage. More »
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Shanda Interactive Entertainment, one of Mainland China's biggest players in the online gaming market, has just entered into agreements to license and distribute their games in Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Macao. In Vietnam, VTC Intecom has gotten the rights to Crazy Kart and Woool (that would be World of Legend - where does the extra 'o' come from? Your guess is as good as mine) for a period of 3 years; Hong Kong-based CSOFT is getting the exclusive rights to Magical Land and Crazy Kart in Hong Kong and Macao. More »
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Shanda Interactive Entertainment - one of Mainland China's biggest game operators - has run into some trouble with the South Korean-developed Legend of Mir 2. This is the same game that spawned a rather bitter legal battle between the game's developers and Shanda, who had the distribution rights for China. More »
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It's not just players and net cafes who are planning their strategy to getting around the anti-addiction controls being put in place on July 15th. Now Shanda, operator of several big Mainland Chinese MMOs, is getting in on the act by providing an in-game workaround that allows players to circumvent the anti-addiction controls they are testing out in their MMORPG Magical Land. Over at billsdue, there's a nice translation of an explanation of the workaround. It's hard to argue with the original post's assessment: More »
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