First stage: South Korea, the birthplace of China's online game

In 1997, South Korea sprang up tens of thousands game developing workrooms, in the wake that the South Korean Government issued a series of policies to support the software and games developing industry. Under keen competition pressure, it only took half a year or even three months for an online game to produce from script to program development. However, behind this prosperity, is the limited domestic market of South Korea.

Chen Tianqiao came in 1999 while those South Korean games development workrooms were anxious about their market potentials. He left 300,000 US dollars in Korea but what he brought back to China was the Pandora magic box, which was only to be found by many people later.
Two years later, the Korean game developing workrooms found that more and more Chinese bosses came to talk to them. Those Chinese bosses just knew a little bit about online game, some of them even didn’t know it at all, but they have a common point:looking for the next “Legend”.

At that time, the Shanghai-based Shanda, which used to get server, Internet band and channel partners by means of partly deceiving and partly begging two years ago, had already attracted 800,000 online game players concurrently, with monthly income hitting hundreds of million Yuan and gross profit ratio approaching 80%. At the same time, the Chinese Internet forerunners, only then just held the text message as a life straw to solve their food and shelter problem. Comparing to it, Chen Tianqiao’s Shanda had already surpassed the well-off standard.

When most of people didn’t realize this point, those merchants who are subtle to business opportunity have already started to take action.

From 2001 to 2004, China had more than 300 large or small game enterprises, as well as more than 400 network game products. But at that time, CNNIC (Chinese Internet information center) has not counted the population of “online game players”.

By People's Daily Online