Shanda’s bigwigs are at it again. Seems president of Shanda Interactive Entertainment Jun Tang has something to say about the X-box. After their decision to start selling music online in an environment saturated by piracy, and developing health food and drinks, they have decided to denounce Microsoft’s Xbox 360 release in China. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the Xbox 360 is Microsoft’s next generation console, to compete with Playstation 3 and Nintendo’s Revolution.

He claims the poor popularity of FPSs and sports games in China is one of the reasons. Sure, but perhaps Chinese people might actually play other games? While Xbox 360 has a decent library of games that will only continue to grow.

The other reason he cited was that the device would be too expensive for Chinese people  if there are no games for it. I really don’t think that is much of a problem. I put Chinese electronics consumers into 2 groups- those able to buy an Ipod and those who cannot. There does not seem to be much of an in-between.

I think this move is probably because of Shanda’s recent big losses and Microsoft’s plan to invest 100 million dollars per year in China’s internet market, putting even more pressure on Shanda’s weakening position. Perhaps they took this chance to take a few cheap shots at Microsoft’s strategy. While the big “M” has already has a history of poor performance in China, they do learn quickly. Given the moves Shanda is making, I would not put too much credibility in their analysis right now.