Shanda's game subsidiary IPO will be one to watch because the parent company is already publicly traded and already considered to be primarily an online game operator.  In the past two years the Chinese operators who have listed their shares on public stock exchanges have been able to transform their companies with the new capital, but in Shanda's case Niko wonders what will be transformed. Shanda is unique in China's game industry in that its president is also a political committee member and the company has been fortunate to deflect the inconvenient outcomes of some of its strategic business decisions of years gone (Korean company law suit, Shanda EZ Station) by with its seemingly Teflon shield, though that shield may not be related to the president's political position...

OnLive, the cloud-based streaming game service, is now available for closed beta testing.

Cloud computing services such as OnLive may well be the future for piracy rich environments such as China's video game industry. If the price of consoles continues to fall world wide and if cloud computing takes off for console games (and potentially PC games), perhaps by the time China rescinds the prohibition on game consoles there will be an affordable and lower business risk way for Chinese gamers to play console games. Then again, the console vendors will likely employ an online game service model when they do launch there, and hopefully innovative modes of access will surface such as installing consoles in the country's 170,000 Internet cafés. 

Tencent's Dungeon and Fighter (DNF) exceeded 210,000 peak concurrent users on August 23 and recorded 1.9 PCU in May.

Even though promotional campaigns inflate the PCU data for online games, the fact that Tencent's DNF exceeded 2.1 million PCUs is impressive. Tencent has secured a stable of licensed titles and is building a large development force to produce in-house developed games. Perhaps there are too many games in its pipeline, but with so many captive viewers through its QQ network the online games division of Tencent has climbed to the leading ranks in China's competitive market.