History
VNG was founded by five avid gamers including CEO Le Hong Minh, and American entrepreneur Bryan Pelz.
In November 2004, VNG's founders signed the exclusive license deal with Kingsoft for Swordsman Online (or Vo Lam Truyen Ky), known as the successful JX Online franchise in China. The game exceeded everyone’s expectations, reaching 20,000 peak concurrent users (PCU) after only one month of operation. Since then, VNG has licensed and operated games, mostly from Chinese and Korean developers, in Vietnam.
In its early days VNG faced the risk of closure from the Department of Information and Communications of Vietnam because there were no regulations on online gaming in the country. However, the company endured and in 2005, VNG received a significant investment from IDG Ventures. It was the largest investment IDG Ventures had made in Vietnam at the time.
In 2006, VNG closed the year with 17 million USD in revenue, six times higher than the previous year.
In 2007 and 2008, ZingMe, Zingchat, ZingNews, and ZingPlay are released. Zing.vn becomes the number one website in Vietnam, topping the Alexa chart in terms of traffic. By 2009, ZingMe is Vietnam's largest SNS website with over 5 million users.
In May 2010, VNG releases Thuan Thien Kiem, Vietnam's first locally developed MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). Although the game did not perform up to expectations, it marked an important transformation of VNG from a game operator into a game developer.
Read more about this topic: Vina Game
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