Text/Qiuqiu

Yesterday (November 13), NetEase's four games released announcements at the same time: "Pokémon Adventure" announced that it will terminate operations in February 2025; "Mobile City Alpha", "War Cry", and "Epic of Taiya" announced that they will stop new content development and close some servers in January 2025.

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Among them, "Pokémon Adventure" announced in September this year that the game was about to be discontinued.

This game is a casual adventure single-player game developed by The Pokémon Company and GAME FREAK; After NetEase acted as an agent for the national server of the game, it was fully iterated on. Including broadening the depth of Pokémon cultivation, enriching team collocation with entries, and adding a variety of gameplay methods such as simulation management/social/PVP/roguelike levels...... Try to build the game into a long-line operation mobile game.

PVP friendlies

Nowadays, NetEase's strategy of long-term and commercialization of stand-alone games is not successful. Although "Pokémon Adventure" quickly topped the iOS game free list and ranked 20th on the best-selling list after its launch in May 2021, it quickly fell out of the best-selling list.

The two-dimensional mecha shooter mobile game "Mobile City Alpha" also landed in the domestic market in 2021, after it was launched in some overseas markets in 2019 and topped the Japanese free list.

Game screens

When the game was launched in China, Grape Jun analyzed that its two-dimensional, mecha theme was more attractive, but it still needed to be optimized in terms of character modeling, image quality, and some details of the operation experience.

"War Cry" is an RTS mobile game launched by NetEase in May 2022. Perhaps due to the focus on classic RTS products such as Warcraft, Red Alert, and Interstellar, and the high experience threshold, the commercialization of this game has not been good since its launch, with the highest ranking on iOS being 6th on the free list and more than 300 best-selling lists.

"Taiya Epic" is a medieval magic MMO terminal game launched by NetEase in 2019, the game's retro realistic theme, and the difficult threshold to get started, so that many people feel that this is a product that is not in line with the mainstream at the beginning - it is understood that "Taiya Epic" also has a mobile game project under development, and obtained the version number in June this year.

Game screens

The mobile version is getting the version number, and the source of the picture is good and fast

Truth be told, these four games didn't find a place to force attribution, and the cessation of a game was affected by a number of factors, including the expiration of the agency agreement, the results were lower than expected, and the team's strategy was adjusted.

Among them, the product performance is not as good as expected, which is a relatively easy outage factor for us to observe. Of the four games announced by NetEase this time, except for the terminal game "Taiya Epic", which is difficult to observe, the long-term performance of the remaining three mobile games is not very good, and they are basically outside the best-selling list of iOS games.

But it is not as expected and it is also a relatively black box concept. For example, the best-selling list of "Mobile City Alpha" did not perform very well, but it has maintained a relatively stable list performance for more than 3 years after its launch, which proves that the game has a fixed source of users and income, and has achieved a certain long-term trend - as for whether this situation meets NetEase's expectations, we are not very clear.

"Mobile City Alpha" has a relatively stable performance in the list of subdivided tracks

It can only be said that survival of the fittest and innovation have always been one of the basic rules of the game industry, and it is also the norm in the industry to decide to suspend operations after comprehensive consideration after the product is not as expected.

Grape Jun once did not fully count the global game outages, and came to the conclusion that there are basically hundreds of popular games that are suspended every year. For example, NetEase has stopped operating or stopping development of more than 10 games this year, including "Cake Story", "Super Fighting Dream", "Quantum Special Attack", "Shendu Night Travel", "Marvel Super War", "Apocalypse Action" 6 games, and 4 games announced yesterday.

At the same time, there was no hesitation for a moment because the four products were on the verge of suspension yesterday, and today NetEase announced that "Yanyun Sixteen Voices" and "Marvel Brawl" are scheduled for December, and "FragPunk Outsider", "Destiny: Rising" and "Codename: Infinity" are or will be tested at the same time as the Q3 financial report...... The comparison of new and old products shows the cruelty of industry rules, market competition, and even internal competition within the company.

Sixteen Voices of Yanyun

Of course, some manufacturers are also trying to break the iron law of survival of the fittest.

For example, Grape Jun once talked about that after Blizzard withdrew from the Chinese market, NetEase had "resurrected" games such as "Secret Realm Showdown" and "Endless Warzone", and at that time we speculated that this move may be to take over the newly released "Hearthstone" and "Overwatch" national server players and seize market opportunities; In addition, games such as "The Legend of the Grey Cat", "Rachel", "Mountains and Seas Mirror Flower", and "Devil May Cry - The Battle of the Peak" have also ushered in a "resurrection" due to various factors.

There are also manufacturers who continue the value of products and maintain the player experience through strategies such as remake, nostalgic clothing, linkage, and long-term conversion to stand-alone. Just like this time, NetEase has 3 products that will exist in the state of "stopping the development of new content, retaining a few servers, and stopping registration", although there are still many restrictions, but compared to directly stopping operations, it still finds a way to retain the right of players to experience the game.

This is not the first time that this unique adjustment strategy has appeared, in February this year, NetEase's social management mobile game "Cake Story" also issued a similar adjustment announcement - perhaps with the exploration of more products in the future, this unique "suspension method" will be continuously improved and become a better choice for more games.

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