According to the latest data from Sensor Tower, the revenue of China's iOS mobile game market in January 2025 increased by 33% month-on-month, of which Tencent's five games, including "Honor of Kings", "Peace Elite" and "CrossFire", took the top five in terms of revenue, with a significant head effect. Under this competitive landscape, NetEase's new work "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" is positioned as a "martial arts open world + stand-alone online game integration", and it entered the 20th place in the revenue list in the first month, becoming the only new product on the list.

Although "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" didn't make a big splash in the charts in its first month, its popularity was noteworthy, topping the iOS free charts on its first day of launch and holding the top spot for a week in a row.11 It should be noted that this achievement was achieved on the mobile side after the end game version of "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" was launched on the mobile side more than a week earlier.

Paid: The "contradictory symbiosis" between stand-alone and MMO

"Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" takes "no career restrictions + free martial arts combination" as the core, trying to combine "wolf"-style hardcore combat with open exploration. The game restores the ecology of the rivers and lakes in the last years of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms through a dynamic weather system and destructible scene design, such as players can climb the Bianjing City Wall with light skills, or change the behavior of NPCs through "empty points".

Despite the abundance of game materials, the outside world is generally pessimistic about the revenue of "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" - "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" is a "contradictory symbiosis" product that integrates single-player and MMO, and its commercialization follows the gameplay to abandon most of the MMO revenue framework to be more compatible with the single-player and MMO experience.

In Sixteen Voices of Yanyun, there is no progress tracking and explicit value payment of traditional MMOs, and players can even explore the initial map for a longer period of time if they wish, and they do not need to top up to buy rare equipment to allow them to play smoothly enough.

Judging from the current version, "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" is still focused on the in-app purchase framework of single-player games, such as vanity and mount purchases, etc., which is very reminiscent of Ubisoft's "Assassin's Creed" series.

However, Sensortower's data still strongly proves the revenue potential of "Yanyun Sixteen Voices", and this result shows that after the client recharge and diversion.

The hidden worries behind the high opening

But despite this, the outside world is more cautious about the long-term performance of "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" - Goldman Sachs predicts that its first-year full-platform revenue will be about 2.4 billion yuan, which is only half of the turnover of the mobile game "Against the Cold" in the first month.

At the same time, "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun", which has gone through many rounds of optimization and even reproduction, is still in the midst of controversy among players. For example, the "unloading" judgment mechanism as the core of action combat is vague, and some boss battles are unbalanced due to the delay in mobile operation, etc., and the stand-alone exploration rewards coexist with online game-style daily tasks, which is ridiculed by players as a "martial arts job simulator".

Although the market has proved that the mix of single-player and MMO gameplay and the open-world exploration of extreme stacking materials have a lot of commercialization potential from the existing achievements, the controversy of players is still an urgent need to be resolved by "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun", and players are more pessimistic about whether "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" can solve these controversies.

A third way in the open world?

The attempt of "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" reveals the transformation dilemma of domestic mobile games: when "Genshin Impact" established the paradigm of "content-driven payment", NetEase tried to open up a new track through "stand-alone immersion + MMO sociality". However, mobile performance limitations and traditional MMO payment logic are exacerbating the rejection of this convergence model.

As one player wrote in the TapTap comment section: "I want the narrative depth of "The Witcher 3", but I am reluctant to let go of the gang blood of "Sword Network 3", but now "Yanyun" has made me lose both at the same time." "The ultimate success or failure of this experiment may determine the evolution direction of the domestic open world in the next three years.

However, on the whole, players generally have a high evaluation of "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun". Many players were attracted by the beautiful scenery of the game and shared screenshots and videos of the game on social platforms. There are also players who praise the game's open-world gameplay, believing that they can truly experience the fun of exploring the rivers and lakes freely in the game; The plot also touched many players, and the game showed the pain of big history through the life narrative of the little people, so that players felt a different martial arts story.

Players made some suggestions to the project team, such as in terms of the aesthetics of the paid appearance, some players think that the free appearance is better than the paid appearance; In terms of gameplay, some players hope that the game can further optimize the cultivation system, adhere to the direction of light cultivation, and avoid players from excessively "bursting their livers". If the above controversy can be resolved, "Sixteen Voices of Yanyun" may have more everlasting vitality and stronger payment potential.

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