In March 2006, CCP made a deal with Optic Communications to start working on bringing "Eve Online" to the Chinese gaming audience. Closed alpha testing was held on a small cluster for some time, with about 3,000 players chosen from an initial pool of 50,000. The Chinese open beta test began on June 13, 2006, and proved to be very popular, gaining numbers comparable to "Eve Online"'s main server cluster. In order to avoid the shock of quickly adding thousands of new players to the current server (Tranquility), CCP Games decided to launch "Eve" in China on its own server (Serenity). In 2011, CCP allowed its licensing agreement with CDC Games, which had acquired Optic in July 2007, to expire. CCP created a new partnership with TianCity to relaunch Serenity on December 11, 2012.