Shanda changed its business model for its cash-cow "massive multiplayer online role-playing games" from collecting revenue through hourly or monthly fees to a "free to play" system in 2005, which turned its turbulent business around, The Wall Street Journal reported.   Under the new model, users join for free but pay to enhance their online-game experience with special weapons and accessories, a little like luxury goods for the virtual world, said the paper. This bought the company an online-game revenue rose 21 percent to 46.8 million US dollars. A bigger worry, says William Bao Bean, an analyst at Deutsche Bank Securities in Hong Kong, is that Shanda could be a victim of its own success. The way its model works, he says, players with money to burn are basically guaranteed to win, while others keep losing, which "destroys the balance in the online-gaming society." Eventually, the losers will stop playing and the model could fall apart, he says. While Shanda makes the bulk of its money from online games, investors also should consider Shanda Chief Executive Chen Tianqiao's ambitions to turn it into an entertainment company modeled on Walt Disney. In 2004, the company introduced a home console that turns a television set into an Internet-connected entertainment system called the EZ Pod. "Shanda does need to work hard on this," says Liu Bin, an analyst with BDA China, a telecommunications consultancy. "In the long term, Shanda's entire business model is surely bright. Yet there are a lot of uncertainties."