NetEase games in 2024 are indeed not smooth.

On the morning of November 8th, the much-rumored NetEase corruption incident was finally decided, and many senior executives such as the former heads of the Battle Division and the KK Business Division, and the former heads of the Mutual Entertainment Channel Distribution Center have been held accountable. NetEase has always taken the issue of corruption seriously, so the incident was handled very decisively, but compared to the importance of financial issues, the problems of the game itself do not seem to receive the same level of attention and rapid response, especially in the importance of player feedback and game experience.

After experiencing the recovery of the previous year, China's game market achieved 147.267 billion actual sales revenue in the first half of the year, to be honest, this is not bad, but NetEase, as one of the "twin stars", suffered two "Waterloos" in half a year.

"Shooting the Condor", which took 6 years and nearly 1 billion yuan to create, fell out of various game lists and disappeared only 3 months after it was launched. "Operation Apocalypse" is even more unexpected, a game with more than 10 million reservations, and its best result is actually only in the 118th place on the IOS game best-selling list. In the end, only 45 days have passed from the open beta to the announcement of the shutdown on October 14, and perhaps in the fast-paced market environment, the game that performs poorly and is not tilted is destined to be cut by a stop loss.

NetEase currently occupies about 30% of the domestic game market, but a closer look will find that the pillars of NetEase games are still a few "evergreens", but what makes NetEase anxious is that "Egg Boy Party" in "Evergreen" is facing sensitive social issues such as operational errors and underage recharge, and the long-term inaction of the official mobile game of "Against the Cold" is also constantly consuming the enthusiasm of players.

But at the same time, NetEase is one of only two companies in the internet industry to have managed to revive their business after a major setback, the other being Weibo. Last time, NetEase successfully found a new growth point through game transformation during the bursting of the Internet bubble, and "Westward Journey Online" successfully saved NetEase from fire and water.

At the end of last year, the "popularity" of "The Fifth Personality" gave NetEase confidence, and the more important practical significance of "The Fifth Personality" is to affirm the long-term line that NetEase adheres to and the level of NetEase games themselves. Even if "Condor Shooting" can't become popular, NetEase has the foundation and resources to make the next "hit", so it is indeed too arbitrary to deny the entire NetEase game based on the current predicament alone.

01, "the most familiar stranger" lured NetEase into a trap

"MMO games are NetEase's comfort zone", this is the view that players generally agreed with before the launch of "Condor Shooting".

NetEase may also think so, the lot of investment and the confidence given by the reverse water cold made NetEase play a slightly conceited publicity copy of "a truly free martial arts open world, the top Jin Yong game". But in reality, the top 15 on the best-selling list of iOS games and the 5-point rating on TapTap obviously made NetEase a little dumbfounded, so much so that the new person in charge of "Condor Shooting" said on the official public account: "After I took over and learned about this project, once upon a time, I learned that the complexity of the problem was far from what I expected."

The emergence of "Genshin Impact" has opened gamers to the possibility of an open world and a gacha mechanism, but the game field has always been a winner-takes-all, and copying miHoYo is undoubtedly hitting a stone. So can you integrate the open world with "Against the Cold"? This kind of thinking makes "Condor Shooting" fall into the trap of thinking that it is both necessary and necessary: it is necessary to do a good job in the open world and focus on the personal experience of players, and it is also necessary to do multi-person socialization; It is necessary not only to do gacha matching, but also to take into account the numerical system of the MMO game itself; It is necessary not only to be free martial arts, but also to be a traditional martial arts school. This led to the fact that before the game's release, most people's impression of "Condor Shooting" was the martial arts version of "Genshin Impact".

However, Condor did not give a satisfactory answer to the problem of how to solve the problem of how to solve the problem of integrating the two game modes, MMO and open world, and the team did not think deeply about the optimization plan. The confusion of the gameplay and the unreasonable values eventually evolved into doubts from players: even if the gameplay is chaotic and the creativity is not good, why is there no progress in the traditional MMO part?

There is no Dragon Ball in real life, and if you want to realize your "martial arts dream", you can only rely on the form of the game. However, the exaggerated skill effects of "Condor Shooting" and the "breaking the realm" after the successful upgrade gave players a little shock to cultivating immortals. The Southern Song Dynasty humanities scene in the game, Menghualu and small classes and other content did convey the enthusiasm of the production team, but it was obviously wrong and detached from the theme of martial arts, and the better the cultural rendering was done, the more it seemed to be a "burden". In essence, what players need is "smiling proud rivers and lakes", not "I am reborn and returned to the Great Song Dynasty".

Entering the game, it is not an exaggeration to say that the resource collection link in the early solo exploration period is boring, and the overly full bamboo baskets, boxes, and treasure chests cause players to only concentrate on and collect mechanically, and it is easy to break the rhythm if you are not careful. On the way to NPC quests, you will encounter mini-games all over the world, and some mini-games are unbalanced to the point that they are more difficult than NPC quests (Nomination Stone Pillar Revealed). With such a high density of content, it is easy for players to fall into a situation where they have to be liverless, and if they are not relaxed enough, they will be as tired as they are at work after a few hours, and they can't help but wonder: am I playing a game or am I being played by a game?

In the middle and late stages of the game, players will find that the MMO part of "Condor Shooting" does not have much innovation. The "five-dimensional value, martial arts grade, martial arts moves, equipment inlay and refinement" of the personal development system in the game is essentially the traditional MMO system of "changing clothes". There are also a few innovative contents, such as "Sect Schoolwork", which is designed to restore the real Sect experience, just like taking a class. But in the end, the player is presented with extremely sloppy content: the sect courses are unguided and disorganized, and the gameplay that requires multi-player cooperation is only oneself.

Of course, if "Shooting the Condor" is a "prince who is not angry", then "Operation Apocalypse" is "a concubine who is not taken seriously". "Shooting the Condor" is about to cool down, change the person in charge, urgently study the "Shooting the Condor" 2.0 plan and continue to invest. Operation Apocalypse is about to cool down and is out of service.

But after all, it is produced by NetEase, and it is embarrassing to fall to this point. Balance is crucial for a competitive team game, but some of the heroes in Operation Apocalypse are heavily overskilled, which affects the overall win rate.

Since the beginning of this year, a number of shooting works such as "Firefly Assault" and "Seven Days World" have been launched one after another, and the promotion and marketing requirements for products in the strong competitive market are very high, but a large number of publicity and marketing carried out by "Operation Apocalypse" before its release are "title party-style" propaganda, which cannot effectively convey the core experience of the game. Coupled with the mediocrity of the gameplay, the "failure" of the action becomes more traceable.

02, it may be too early to talk about NetEase's lack of success

It's understandable why NetEase is so "impatient" to seek innovation this year. The fact is that the average lifespan of a popular game is only three years, and the lack of new projects after the popularity of popular games declines is likely to cause the company's products to be disconnected and endanger the company's development interests. Even Tencent, the leader with a market share of 60%, has been constantly changing in the past two years.

In 2022, "Egg Boy Party" will be born, "How many egg boy accounts do you have?" It once became a greeting between students. Time has passed, and the egg boy in 2024 has lost the prosperity of the past, the objective law of the decline of popular games, the in-game bugs and community operation problems cannot be solved, and the pressure of "meal replacement" and "Yuan Dream Star" has impacted the status of the egg boy again and again.

According to data released by CICC, from July 2023 to July 2024, the DAU of "Egg Boy Party" has dropped by a full 56%. And the egg boy party has always faced the problem of low user income ratio. Also, how much krypton can a child have under normal circumstances?

The popularity of "Egg Boy Queue" largely relies on its social attributes, so as to extend the thinking, when a player withdraws from the game because of the above problems, his departure may trigger a domino effect, and when the classmates and friends around him have left, the remaining "Egg Boy" has no reason to stick to it.

Different from the social drive of "Egg Boy Party", the mobile game "Against the Cold", which is also a pillar game of NetEase, pays more attention to the player's personal game experience at the beginning of its design. However, in the operation of the mobile game "Against the Cold", it ignores the core element of MMO games - the sense of accomplishment that players have gained through hard work.

The easy availability of in-game equipment makes what should be precious and rare equipment cheaper, and this "dragon slayer knife click and give" strategy weakens the player's dopamine stimulation. The disregard for the player's efforts eventually led to the disgust and loss of players, because "things without the soul of MMOs" could not attract players for long. The neglect of player feedback in game design is undoubtedly a "big taboo" in the MMO market.

The arrogance of the planning is not surprising, the opinions of the players are basically lost, the equipment system is unbalanced, and the lag of the game does not seem to matter to them. The Treasury System Destroys the Economic System and Balance? Not resolved. The depreciation and rapid iteration of the old heavenly rewards have harmed the interests of Zhongkrypton players? Uncooked. Judging from the data, the adverse water cold can still carry a piece of the sky for NetEase. But judging from the comment area, the arrogance of the mobile game "Against the Cold" has made many people desperate.

If the decline of the mobile game "Against the Cold" represents the backlash brought about by ignoring player feedback and the long-term continuous optimization of the game, then as the opposite, "Westward Journey Online" and "The Fifth Personality" show how to bring continuous stable income and second opportunities to the company.

On the one hand, the long-term operation of large-scale games has provided NetEase with stable revenue, and "Westward Journey Online" is still giving NetEase a "blood transfusion", on the other hand, long-term operation has also given the game a chance to become popular for the second time.

At the end of 2023, The Fifth Personality will start to become a regular in the top 10 best-selling lists, but this is already the sixth year of the game's open beta. In previous years, "The Fifth Personality" has received a mediocre response. The popularity has the credit of the second creation, and it is also because the game provides players with a place to release their emotions. In a social environment where pressure continues to rise, "The Fifth Personality" has become less tolerant and faster-paced in the six-year update, and players run wild in a tense game environment, releasing the pressure brought by parents, teachers, and Party A. Allow yourself to briefly withdraw from the harsh reality.

The popularity of "The Fifth Personality" has certain factors of the times, but in the final analysis, it is NetEase's long-term operation strategy that supports "The Fifth Personality" to wait for the most suitable era for it. The existence of "The Fifth Personality" and the large investment in "Shooting the Condor" reflect that NetEase Games is still full of vitality.

Even if "Condor Shooting" can't be "The Fifth Personality" 2.0, NetEase's next game still has the possibility of becoming a hit. Although the corruption of the organizational structure has become a fact, the thorough investigation of the main departments involved has cleared the negative factors for the development and release of the game in the future, which has made the prospect of NetEase's next strong game become considerable.

03. Write at the end

At the moment, the repercussions of the new game and the impact of public opinion brought by the corruption gate seem to have caught NetEase a little off guard, and it really needs to think about how to minimize losses while resolving the incident, but it is still too early to conclude that NetEase is going downhill.

NetEase's volume must be supported by a stable flow of water, and the life cycle management capabilities shown by "The Fifth Personality" can undoubtedly give NetEase some confidence, how to make pillar games such as "Against the Cold" and "Egg Boy Party" realize the "normalization of blood transfusion" for NetEase itself, which may become the core discussion point of NetEase executives in the next few years.

At the end of the day, a game company's reputation is largely determined by the quality of the game. According to the financial report released by NetEase in the second quarter, NetEase's R&D investment intensity in the second quarter exceeded 17%, and the failure of "Condor" may bring new impetus to NetEase. Now that the organizational structure has been purged, the only thing NetEase has to think about is how to make a good game.

*The title picture and the accompanying pictures in the article are from the Internet.

This article is from Xinzhi self-media and does not represent the views and positions of Business Xinzhi.If there is any suspicion of infringement, please contact the administrator of the Business News Platform.Contact: system@shangyexinzhi.com