I have followed the China games industry for over a decade now, and have seen how Shanda Games fell from grace from its market leader position in the country. Once at the top of the food chain, Shanda Games was recently bought over by a company known as Zhejiang Century Huatong Group (which owns several other Chinese studios) for USD 4.34 billion. Today, it was announced that Shanda Games has been re-branded to Shengqu Games moving forward. The buyout was deemed necessary as Shanda Games was facing an imminent crisis in its dwindling market share, especially to fierce rival Tencent Games.
It is noted that at this point, there are no huge changes to the overall organization other than the name re-branding and new key executives. I have also seen how Shanda Games wasted tons of opportunities with the Dragon Nest IP after it bought over Korean developer Eyedentity Games many years ago. Since then, the only game which has seen significant success is Dragon Nest Mobile, with several other related games canceled at the wimp of clueless Shanda executives. I am skeptical that Shengqu Games will return to the glorious early days, since the new management team and CEO claims they see the company as a “technology culture enterprise”, whatever the hell it means. Stay tuned for more updates!
