One of China’s MMO powerhouses, Shanda Games, has confirmed that Dragon Nest will be published in Singapore as the South East Asia server in 2011. Interestingly, the CEO announced at the Q4 2010 financial results conference that Dragon Nest SEA will be the first game published by its independent Singapore subsidiary, Shanda Games International. If you recall, I posted a few months back that Cherry Credits should be working with Shanda Games to launch the game. Well, whichever the case is, Dragon Nest SEA is still confirmed for a 2011 release.
I am not going into the Q4 2010 financial results of Shanda Games, since not many people are interested. You can still email me if you want a brief summary of how the company did. The China server for Dragon Nest recently saw 15 servers getting merged, which alarmed analysts. However, Shanda Games’ CEO reported a continual raise in ARPU (average revenue per user), meaning although there are less servers, players are spending more. 2 major patches are expected for the China server in April and later in the summer, most probably the Sea Dragon update. Update 4th March 2011: Dragon Nest CN has added a new server and announced the upcoming Sea Dragon update.
The Japanese server will getting the Sea Dragon update soon on 23rd March 2011. As of today, no teams have been able to crack and complete the Sea Dragon nest instance in the Korean server since it was implemented on December 23rd 2010, with an estimated of 15,000 tries done. The Japanese server, hosted by Hangame, is offering a cash prize of over USD120,000 to the first team which beats the Sea Dragon Nest.
