Second stage: In the age of "cut and paste", "Legends " flourished

In the second half year of 2002, Shanda’s success of licensing model started to baffle more and more Internet elder brothers. Sina and Sohu successively started their own online game strategy this year, separately securing the China licensing right of "Heaven" and "Knight" from South Korea.

And Ding Lei, CEO of Netease, who earlier adopted an indepent R&D strategy and already promoted "West Boast Swims online", also cannot resist the enticement of licensing model and signed "Demon" from South Korea.


Until today, from the 17173 online game ranking board, the South Korean game products still account for above 50%. But, a curse on Chinese online game industry came into being.

“A significant characteristic of South Korean game is its simple pattern.” Mr Dai, a well-known game website chief editor who has more than ten years of online game experience said, “Until today, 80% of Korean games are the same as ten years ago in terms of playing skill and worldview establishment, adding the only change was the improvement of its art designing and detail. If striping these outward aspects, all of the Korean games in the market play the same formula like "Legend"

The advantage of this kind of style lies in that the experienced player can play it easily and get familiar with the game. But the weak point is, if we eliminate the community characteristic of network games, the game fans will lose their interests very quickly, because what they can do is always the same.

Therefore, the game fans give this kind of South Korean games a vivid nickname “pickled vegetable game”; which means the games are like the Korean pickles, no matter what brand they are, they have the same taste after you tried several times later. From 2002 to 2005, the online game market was full of all kinds of “pickle games”, which was taunted by Chinese game fans as “pickles period”.

When reviewing the “pickles period”, we must mention the licensing “failure” of the three leading portal websites in China.

Although "Heaven" and "Knight" both have high simultaneous online population in South Korea, they were ranked at the end of those second-class games since being introduced by Sina and Sohu respectively to China. Finally, Sina announced to give up its effort in the online game area, and transferred all its share in online game joint venture to its South Korea partner NCSOFT.

Sohu’s CEO Zhang Chaoyang also gradually realized, the product which depended upon the proxy pattern, is very difficult to become the core competitive power, and he employed Wang Tao, who was an unknown person in online game industry at that time ( now being the incumbent CEO of Sohu Changyou), to develop the game of “Tian Long Ba Bu”.

As far as "Demon", which was a proxy product by Netease, the game players found it was full of Bug after it was operated in China. They even found that a low level game fan could use BUG to modify the server’s dates through a local cheating device, and the South Korean developer’s efficiency to repair these bugs was too slow to imagine. In order to prevent the matter to turn beyond redemption, Netease have to close the server while bearing the players’ taunt and abuse. Since then, Ding Lei strengthened his ideal of “do it by himself”.

According to CNNIC , China has 340,000,000 Internet users at present, which ranked the first in the world. Among the 340,000,000 web users, there are more than 50 million are online game users. At the same time, among a total of 300 online games which are operated by more than 100 domestic online game companies, only 10 of them featuring 4 series developed by Chinese themselves can get to the first-class group.


Ding Lei and Zhang Chaoyang are obviously among the small group of people who has awaken promptly, but the majority of network game operators are still seeking the original code of a successful network games by legal or illegal ways, and employ several art designers to revise the graph image at will, then they change the name of the online game and start to operate it online.

By People's Daily Online