Deal or No Deal

Lately there's been a lot of deals, almost deals, and broken deals going down within the video game industry in the land of the dragon.

First there was the rumored on-again, off-again romance between American video game giant Electronic Arts and Chinese company, The9. As detailed in this post on Kotaku, EA ended up signing a deal to buy 15% of the other company at a cost of $167 million. Like most deals of this caliber, this also involved licensing rights; in this case, The9 can market FIFA Online, which will probably net them a decent chunk of cash. However, as billsdue discusses in this post, this deal has also caused some speculation that World of Warcraft developer Blizzard might want to terminate their deal with The9 for the distribution rights to that game. World of Warcraft is a major cash-cow, and Blizzard probably doesn't want to be funding one of their American competitors through a continued partnership with The9.

And Blizzard isn't the only company breaking with their Chinese partner. Gamasutra recently had an article on Korean MMOG producers looking to sever the contacts with their Chinese counterparts due to new projects by the Chinese companies that compete directly with the Korean products.

It is rumored that Japan's SEGA meanwhile has shut down their entire China operation due to poor performance of several MMO projects (see story).

On the other hand, the Swedish-based Entropia Universe have announced that they will release their Second-Life clone Entropia in China after negotiating a deal with the Beijing government, strangely enough, and ensuring that no content rules will be broken (see story). As if China needs more MMO games or even a new SL-clone considering that it already has one in the form of HiPiHi (see previous post). Some day I'll actually get around to firing up my beta copy of the latter.

I wonder if any of these wheelings and dealings will be covered in the upcoming documentary that CCTV is filming about Chinese online game companies (see story).