About 17173

17173

17173, published at 17173.com, is a Fuzhou-founded online games news portal and one of the foundational websites of the Chinese games industry. Established in 2001 by NetDragon, it was sold to Sohu in November 2003 for 20.5 million dollars, and in 2011 Sohu's games subsidiary Changyou agreed to acquire it for 162.5 million dollars, an eightfold increase in value that measures how central the portal had become to reaching Chinese online game players. It publishes online game and massively multiplayer news, guides and rankings for Chinese players, and at the time of the Changyou acquisition it featured more than 650 dedicated game zones for popular titles. Few Chinese websites illustrate the economics of the country's first online game era better: a portal built to serve players with news, information and community space around individual games became valuable enough to be traded between major internet companies, first as part of an early developer's diversification, then as a portal group's games asset, and finally as the media foundation of a listed game operator's platform strategy.

Established by NetDragon in Fuzhou in 2001

The history of 17173 begins with NetDragon. Fujian NetDragon Websoft was formed in Fuzhou, China, in 1999, initially providing internet services. According to NetDragon's own listing history, the company successfully established the online game portal www.17173.com in 2001, and also started to develop online games in order to diversify its business in that year. Its first online game, the massively multiplayer role-playing game Monster and Me, was launched in July 2002. The pairing of a portal and development inside one young company was characteristic of the moment. China's online games market was new enough that the audience, the media serving it and many of the games themselves were being created simultaneously, often by the same entrepreneurs. A portal gave NetDragon a direct relationship with players, a place to learn what they played and wanted, and a channel through which its own and others' games could be promoted. Fuzhou's role in the story is also significant: while Beijing and Shanghai dominate accounts of Chinese internet history, one of its most durable games properties began in the capital of Fujian province, where NetDragon remained based as it grew into a Hong Kong-listed company.

Sold to Sohu in November 2003

The portal's first change of ownership came quickly. In November 2003, NetDragon sold www.17173.com to Sohu.com Limited, an independent third party, for 20.5 million US dollars, a transaction recorded in NetDragon's Hong Kong listing documents. Sohu was one of China's leading portal companies, and acquiring the country's emerging game portal gave it a specialist property in the fastest-growing entertainment category on the Chinese internet. For NetDragon, the sale provided capital and focus for game development, the business that would produce titles including Conquer Online and Eudemons Online and make the company a developer rather than a media owner. For 17173, Sohu ownership meant operating inside a large portal group with national advertising sales, technology resources and a portfolio of content channels. Company histories summarising the period describe 17173 as founded by Hong Kong-listed NetDragon and later acquired by Sohu, by then a well-established news provider and advertising medium serving both game vendors and gamers. That dual service, informing players while selling access to them, defined the portal's business model throughout its maturity.

The game zone model

17173's defining product was the dedicated game zone. Rather than covering the games industry only as a stream of general news, the portal maintained a distinct, deep section for each important title, collecting its news, guides, screenshots, downloads, rankings, community material and service information in one address that players could bookmark and revisit daily. By the time of the Changyou acquisition in 2011, the site featured more than 650 dedicated game zones for popular titles. The number explains both the portal's usefulness and its cost structure. A zone for a massively multiplayer online game is not a one-off article; it is a continuing service that must be updated as the game receives expansions, events, balance changes and community disputes, for as long as the game retains players. Multiplied across hundreds of titles, that service made 17173 a habitual starting point for Chinese online gamers and a necessary advertising and cooperation partner for operators launching or sustaining a game. It also created a barrier to entry: a newer rival could publish news faster, but replicating hundreds of maintained title archives and their accumulated search visibility and community habits was far harder.

Serving the MMO era

17173 grew up with the massively multiplayer online role-playing game as the dominant form of Chinese online entertainment. Its news, guides and rankings served players of client-based MMORPGs and, later, web-based massively multiplayer games, in a market where a successful title could operate for years and support guilds, virtual economies and extensive secondary information needs. Guides mattered because these games were complex, localised and frequently updated; rankings mattered because players and operators alike treated popularity measures as evidence of a game's health; news mattered because expansions, server openings, anti-cheating actions and operator announcements directly affected the value of players' time and virtual property. Changyou, the company that eventually acquired the portal, exemplified the world the zones served: it was best known for creating and running the client-based MMORPG Tian Long Ba Bu, known as Dragon Oath in North America, and the web-based MMO DDTank. A media property organised around the daily needs of such games' players was therefore not an adjacent business for an operator like Changyou. It was the information layer of the market in which its own games competed.

Changyou acquires 17173 for 162.5 million dollars

On 30 November 2011, Changyou, a leading Chinese online game developer and operator and Sohu's majority-controlled games subsidiary, signed an agreement to purchase 17173.com for 162.5 million dollars from Sohu. Changyou had begun as a Sohu subsidiary before becoming a standalone company in 2007, so the transaction moved the portal from the parent portal group to its listed games arm, aligning the media asset with the business best placed to exploit it. Sohu and Changyou expected to complete the transaction in December 2011, and revised their existing non-competition agreement to prevent Sohu from challenging Changyou's 17173 business for five years after completion. Changyou chief executive Tao Wang said the deal gave Changyou a powerful base to jumpstart the company's services and platform initiative, and that 17173 had a strong media presence in the online gaming sector and a vast user base that Changyou could leverage to build a leading platform and become a one-stop service provider for games on top of 17173.com. Sohu chairman and chief executive Charles Zhang said the transaction would help realign Sohu's business activities and bring together its two leading game-wise businesses. Contemporary analysis noted that the acquisition offered 17173 an opportunity to expand from a news site into an all-round game platform.

Competition and growing pains

The Changyou acquisition took place in a competitive and changing market, not at an unchallenged peak. Contemporary reporting on the deal observed that 17173 faced intense competition from Duowan and 178.com, citing Alexa rankings at the time in which Duowan ranked 104th among Chinese sites, 17173 ranked 142nd and 178 ranked 150th. Those dated rankings are useful as a snapshot of the portal contest in 2011: several large game media properties were close enough in reach that ownership, publisher relationships and new platform services could decide their relative futures. The strategic language of the acquisition reflects that pressure. Changyou did not present 17173 merely as an advertising property whose traffic would continue unchanged; it presented it as a base for services and tools and for a broader platform. The portal's next challenge was already visible in the market around it. Mobile games were about to displace client MMORPGs as the industry's growth engine, distribution was shifting toward app stores and platform accounts, and the daily information habits of players were moving toward video, social media and in-game or platform communities. A zone-based web portal built for the MMO era would have to adapt its authority to that new environment.

Why the portal mattered to operators

To understand 17173's repeated eight-figure and nine-figure valuations, it is necessary to understand what a game operator was buying. It was buying habitual reach among committed online game players, the audience segment most likely to try a new title and to spend in it. It was buying an archive and search presence around hundreds of games that generated returning visits without equivalent marketing spend. It was buying an advertising medium that game vendors already used and understood. And, in Changyou's stated plan, it was buying the foundation for a platform offering services and tools to players and developers beyond news. That logic was specific to the structure of Chinese online games in the portal era, when no single app store or social platform intermediated the whole player relationship, and when an operator's visibility depended substantially on specialist media coverage and community presence. The 2003 sale price of 20.5 million dollars valued an early portal with promise. The 2011 price of 162.5 million dollars valued a mature institution with more than 650 title zones and a decade of player habits embedded in it.

Place among Chinese games media

17173 is one of the small group of properties that defined Chinese games media's first era, alongside the player community built by GamerSky from 2003, the trade reporting of GameLook from 2009 and the long-form criticism of Chuapp from 2013. Its particular claim is seniority and centrality to online games. Where GamerSky's historical strength lay in comprehensive and single-player coverage, 17173 was the online game player's portal, organised around the live titles that dominated Chinese play in the 2000s. Where GameLook analysed the industry for professionals, 17173 served its audience directly and sold that service to the industry. Its ownership history also makes it a useful lens on the corporate history of Chinese internet games: created by NetDragon as it learned to develop games, held by Sohu during the portal group's expansion, and transferred to Changyou when a listed operator sought to become a platform. Each owner represented a successive organisational form of the industry itself, from entrepreneurial developer, to diversified portal, to specialist listed games company.

How to read and use 17173

For researchers, 17173 is most valuable as evidence of the online game era it served. Its game zones show which titles sustained enough player interest to justify dedicated, continuing coverage, and its guides and rankings preserve how those games were played, compared and discussed by Chinese audiences. Its corporate history should be taken from the primary record where possible: NetDragon's listing documents establish the 2001 establishment and the November 2003 sale to Sohu for 20.5 million dollars, while contemporaneous reporting of the 2011 Changyou agreement establishes the 162.5 million dollar price, the more than 650 game zones and the strategic rationale offered by both companies' chief executives. Readers should treat later summaries that compress that ownership chain with care, because the portal passed through several related but distinct corporate hands. Used carefully, 17173 offers more than nostalgia for an earlier web. It documents the moment when Chinese online games became a mass medium large enough to need, and to richly reward, a dedicated press and service infrastructure of their own.