Shanda Games, a leading online game developer and publisher in China, has received an overwhelming response to its recent open testing launch of ‘Legend of Immortals’.
‘Legend of Immortals’ is a highly anticipated massively multi-player online role playing game (MMORPG) adapted from the immensely popular novel ‘Xing Chen Bian’. Since the launch of testing, the game has been praised by gamers and the widespread popularity of the novel ‘Xing Chen Bian’ has also helped build a large user base.
It is also the first implementation of the Company’s strategy to build social communities for its large MMO games. Pre-launch, the Company spent time building a social network platform that fully integrated with this game with a full set of social features to allow gamers to share their status and achievements with their friends on a real time basis. Players can enjoy social network games (SNGs) and other applications provided by third party in this platform. In addition, the platform also has links to third-party social network service (SNS) sites such as Facebook and Renren so that gamers can share their information with their friends outside of the game. At the end of the first open test day, the registered accounts of the SNS of ‘Legend of Immortals’ have already exceeded 3.5 million.
“We are very pleased with the response from gamers and the popularity of ‘Legend of Immortals’ during this short period of time,” said Alan Tan, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Shanda Games. “We believe communitization is the future trend of MMORPGs development. ‘Legend of Immortals’ not only opens a new page for MMORPGs but also serves as an important growth driver of our business going forward.”
