Oh Shanda, what will we do with you? Shanda is making very questionable moves once again. The9.com, following on it’s highly successful World of Warcraft partnership is now negotiating with Blizzard Entertainment with the expansion pack. This is very coherent to the9.com strategy and within their core business of interactive entertainment and online gaming. Here’s a summary:
Vivendi Universal subsidiary Blizzard Entertainment announced on Friday that it has invited Chinese online game company The9 (Nasdaq: NCTY) to negotiate the expansion set to World of Warcraft (WoW), The Burning Crusade. The9 is Blizzard’s current partner for WoW in mainland China, and also owns 30 percent of the company operating WoW in Taiwan. According to the release the expansion is currently planned for 2007 in mainland China, whereas previous expectations had the expansion hitting China in late 2006. According to several industry analysts, The9’s contract with Blizzard for World of Warcraft already gives The9 the rights to operate any expansion of the game in mainland China.
Meanwhile, after Shanda’s foray into countless incongruous decisions. This time they are going crazy, launching an e-magazine with an American company based on a kart racing game entitled “Crazy Kart”! Right, now there is a sorely needed product, that I am sure everyone is clamouring for. This has gone too far! I think someone is purposely trying to drive this company into the ground, or the people at the helm are drunk.
Why don’t we tally up the strange and mysterious the big S has made inpast months:
- Launching a Health food and Beverage brand
- Losing Marketshare to Netease and the9.com due to complacency, then countering it by giving away games for free
- Opening up an online music store, seemingly ignoring the rampant piracy in China
- Discounting the X-box 360, killing their chances of a deal with Microsoft Games
- Buying up Korean games to bring to China, hoping that Chinese will like them
- Launching an e-magazine based on a kart racing game, that has not been launched yet
This is by no means a complete list, but it seems they need to do a bit more thinking in the decision making, wouldn’t you think. Any business shoudl stick to it’s core business, or else they should chage their core business to what they are doing. Shanda doesn’t seem to know what kind of company it is.