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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)