15 Years Ago, He Was The Number One Online Game Player In China. Tencent Was The Younger Brother In Front Of Him, But Now He Is Facing Delisting!

Hello everyone, this is a serious game, and I am a serious brother.

To say that the giants in China's online game industry today are definitely Tencent and NetEase, but we have to move forward more than ten years. In the era when "Legend" and "Miracle" were popular in Internet cafes, the giants of China's online games were agents of the two games. Shang Shengda and Jiucheng, today I will be serious for a while and talk to you about Jiucheng.

Once upon a time...↑↑↑

Now...↑↑↑

The full name of Ninetowns is "Ninth City". In 1998, Zhu Jun registered a foreign-funded company named "" in Hong Kong, China with US$500,000 in capital, and created a virtual community in China (later renamed "The Ninth City"), which was the earliest virtual community in China at that time.

In the 2003 Forbes China Rich List, Zhu Jun, Chairman of The9, became the second person in the Chinese gaming industry to be on the Forbes Billionaires List after Chen Tianqiao. In 2004, The9 was listed on NASDAQ in the United States, becoming one of the first Chinese online game companies to be listed in the United States. However, Ninetowns has almost disappeared from the gaming industry in the past two years, and it received a delisting warning from Nasdaq in early 2017. What happened in the past ten years that caused the former gaming hegemon to turn from prosperity to decline?

Rise: Beginning with Agent "Miracle"

In 2002, Ninetowns, which was still just running an online community, announced that it had won the agency rights for the Korean 3D online game "Miracle". "Miracle" once set off a whirlwind of online games in South Korea. It has recovered its development costs after only two months of operation.

After one year of operation, the game began to charge fees, ushering in an era of dominance for nearly three years. In 2003 alone, the number of game users exceeded 10 million, and the number of people online at the same time was as high as 300,000. "Miracle MU" is expected to generate nearly 600 million yuan in revenue for Ninetowns in 2003, which is close to the 800 million yuan in revenue for Shanda's "Legend" in 2003. Ninetowns has also become a company that rivals Shanda with this game.

As "Miracle" became more popular, many problems in The9's operations were also exposed. The first thing to bear the brunt is the fight against plug-ins. After 2005, game cheats became more and more rampant. Although Ninetowns took measures such as blocking accounts and opening new cheat-free areas in the early stage, it was still unable to solve the problem. It even opened a weird cheat-legal area called "Greed Island".

Later, Ninetowns gave up its fight against plug-ins and turned its operations center to other games. The legalization of cheating has caused "Miracle" to enter a long period of decline in China that will never see the light of day. MU, which was once known as "China's No. 1 online game" and maintained its leadership for three years, has gradually disappeared from the main pages of major game websites in China, and news about MU can hardly be found in search engines.

Peak: Win World of Warcraft

"Miracle" has made Ninetowns a lot of money, but Ninetowns is no longer satisfied with one game. In 2004, The9 won the most popular online game "World of Warcraft" after winning the competition with "Ogilvy". (Students who want to know this history can check out the article "China's largest game agent 20 years ago, and players born in the 1980s and 1990s all owe it a genuine CD!")

At that time, Blizzard's reputation was already very high in the hearts of Chinese players. Players who were slightly involved in game culture all worshiped Blizzard. In such an environment, "World of Warcraft" became popular before it was tested. People in countless Internet cafes spread the word by word of mouth and became excited. In the closed beta registration alone, nearly 500,000 players submitted applications for test qualifications.

The9 has also put a lot of effort into promoting the game. Before the open beta, it held a player meeting at the Shanghai Luwan Stadium. Thousands of "World of Warcraft" players braved the rain to attend. There were even more players outside in the rain than inside. many. The most famous one was the linkage with Coca-Cola. At that time, supermarkets of all sizes sold "World of Warcraft"-themed Coke, and each bottle of Coke could be redeemed for game time. This cross-border cooperation became the most successful marketing cooperation in the gaming industry and is still imitated today.

Presumably many old players bought countless bottles of Coke for World of Warcraft back then, right?

SHE endorses Warcraft↑↑↑

With the promotion of the game itself and Ninetowns, the number of people online exceeded 450,000 after the game was charged for operation. On July 20 of the same year, Blizzard announced that the number of Chinese players of "World of Warcraft" exceeded 1.5 million. "World of Warcraft" has always accounted for more than 90% of The9's overall revenue. In 2008, The9's total game business revenue was 1.56 billion yuan, making it the number one player in the gaming industry that year.

Decline: Nine Cities after Losing Warcraft

During the four years that Ninetowns has been operating World of Warcraft, too many things have happened, including public opinion and the government's attitude towards the game. In April 2009, Blizzard announced that Ninetowns would no longer have the Chinese agency rights for "World of Warcraft". Suddenly The9's stock price and revenue plummeted. In the second half of 2009, game revenue was less than US$7 million. In the same year, NetEase won the agency rights for World of Warcraft in mainland China. For the whole year of 2011, The9's net loss was as high as 284 million yuan.

The9, which made its fortune through agents, has never had a breakthrough in self-developed products. The first games were "Legend of Miracles" and "Planetside 2", but they both performed tepidly after being launched. The9 later placed its bet on Firefall, an open-world shooting game in the United States. CEO Zhu Jun made a bold statement: "Back then, I brought "Warcraft" to China and achieved success. Today, I will also bring a good game to China." Take it to China and drive Warcraft out."

For this game Ninetowns invested a lot of financial resources and manpower to assist game developers. However, "Firefall" did not bring good luck to Ninetowns. After the game's national server was launched in 2015, the market response was not satisfactory, and the national server continued to "bounce". Coupled with the wave of mobile games in China in 2015, "Firefall" was discontinued in just one year.

In 2015, The9 acquired the licensing rights for CrossFire 2 for a huge $500 million, but the game has yet to be released.

It is difficult for Ninetowns today to be linked to online games, and its stock price has been below $1 for a long time and it was delisted by Nasdaq. The opening price on the first day of listing was $19, which has shrunk by more than 10 times in more than ten years!

Because of the success of The9's agent products, although he is a senior Chinese game manufacturer and does not pay much attention to self-research and technology accumulation in this area, he can solve various bugs and server stability that appear in the operation of "Miracle" and "World of Warcraft". See the problem.

Secondly, there is a lack of development capabilities in the country. Since the overall operation of Ninetowns relies too much on agents, and more and more game giants have begun to join the agent battle, the difficulty and cost of agenting good products have soared year by year, leading to the "dependence on agents" This single mode of operation is increasingly risky. There are very few domestic game products, and users are in a state of desperate need.

What was the situation back then? A game whose gameplay seems very ordinary now can become a hit. Of course, this is also due to the explosive popularity of Internet software and hardware technology. In this case, agent games are the first choice. Grabbing a good game means a high probability of profit. Therefore, in this case, The9 has no need to develop its own research and development. It invested heavily to represent many products that seemed to be masterpieces at that time, such as "Guild Wars", "Hell's Gate", "Excellent Sword", and the later "Firefall". ", "au2", etc. Until the later stage, Ninetowns still insisted on agent operation and was a very pure operator.

Finally, since around 2008 to now, the market has changed a lot. Players have higher and higher requirements for game quality. New capital and manufacturers have entered, bringing a wealth of products, especially self-developed products, with higher revenue than The price of an agent is much higher, because the agent not only requires a signing deposit, but also a share of the money, and the game is not easy to change. Ninetowns' pure agency model is no longer suitable for market competition. Nowadays, there are still many game manufacturers like The9 in Shanghai, and they still follow this model.

It can be seen that the decline of Ninetowns also has its historical inevitability, and it is the "leftover fighter" of that agency era.

A serious question: What do you want to say about the former overlord Nine Cities?