February 12, 2011

Tencent Likely to Publish Blade & Soul and Lineage Titles

According to TIG, an authoritative South Korean game portal, Tencent is expected to obtain the publishing rights of Blade & Soul, Lineage and Lineage 2 in Mainland China. Once released, the news drew great attention from the insiders and South Korean net users.



At the recent 2010 financial conference held by NCsoft, developer of Blade & Soul, Aion and the Lineage series, NCsoft was asked whether it wished to get the Lineage series published by Tencent instead of Shanda in Mainland China. In this respect, NCsoft's CFO Lee Jae Ho said that they're negotiating with many Chinese game publishers on relevant publishing affairs.



The Lineage series being operated by Shanda in Mainland China doesn't seem to enjoy satisfying marketing feedback there. Particularly in 2009, Lineage 2 which's influenced by private servers had no choice but to launch the business model of micro-transaction. China's game industry does pay much attention to the Lineage series' publisher change, because the association between Tencent and NCsoft will definitely bring a great impact on the Chinese online game market. Moreover, once establishing a cooperative relationship with NCsoft formally, Tencent is very likely to act as the publisher of Blade & Soul, whose Korean version is slated for OBT this year. This will surely improve the overall strength of Tencent, which obtained the publishing rights of Arche Age with over 40 million US dollars last year.

As Lee Jae Ho expressed, according to the Chinese government's policies, foreign enterprises are not allowed to operate online games independently in Mainland China. To have the Lineage series reach success in China, they're now negotiating with many a Chinese game publisher, but more details just cannot be disclosed for the moment. An insider from China said that Tencent had always been unable to make good achievements in the MMORPG circle, so its cooperation with the South Korean MMORPG tycoon NCsoft would benefit both parties tremendously.

Tencent is now operating many blockbusters, like League of Legend, C9 and Arche Age.




Credits: MMosite, http://www.bladeandsouldojo.com

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