NetEase and Survios have reached a long-term strategic cooperation plan to introduce more classic products to serve domestic players. On May 20, 2018, NetEase Games launched the ‘2018 NetEase 520 Game Lover’s Day’ press conference. At this event, NetEase unveiled 25 game products at once, including 21 mobile games, 3 PC games, and the first VR (Virtual Reality) game to hit the market this year – ‘Raw Data’. This marks the introduction of NetEase’s first star-level VR masterpiece, which, with its unique overall game functionality and play style compared to other products, made the ‘Raw Data’ trial area a major attraction at NetEase’s ‘520’ event.
Breaking the game’s dimensional barrier and experiencing the ‘reality’ defined by VR, ‘Raw Data’ is a first-person shooter VR game developed by Survios. The game’s release at the event immediately drew spontaneous attention from players, partly due to its market performance before. ‘Raw Data’ made it to the bestseller list on Steam on its first day in 2016 and was later selected as a platinum-level VR work.
In 2016, NetEase ventured into the VR realm by launching its first self-developed mobile VR game, ‘Dawn Waker’, which garnered multiple awards, including recognition from the Unity-Vision VR/AR Asia Summit jury, and became one of the most popular mobile VR games globally. On the front of quality content introduction, NetEase Games actively negotiated with overseas AAA studio Survios, successfully introducing excellent content such as ‘Raw Data’, fulfilling the desire of domestic players to engage in online VR battles synchronized with global players. Currently, both parties have reached a long-term strategic cooperation plan to bring more classic products to serve domestic players. According to official disclosures from NetEase Games, following the introduction of ‘Raw Data’, three additional cooperative VR games will be launched in the near future, including the multiplayer racing game ‘Sprint Vector’, where players need to fully coordinate their body movements to overcome obstacles and surpass limits; the music game ‘Electronauts’, where players become DJs to create and share their exclusive music within the game; and the boxing game ‘Creed’, where players will experience the exhilarating reality of boxing. NetEase’s extensive experience in developing and operating PC and mobile games over the years is expected to become a continuous trump card in leading the domestic game trend in the VR era. By combining its profound understanding of the domestic game market, NetEase will partner with top-tier collaborators to bring multiple high-quality overseas content to China and provide high-quality localized content and operations tailored to the Chinese market, making it more accessible to domestic players. A particularly important point is considering the balance gap between the number of domestic VR game enthusiasts and the actual ownership of VR devices, meaning there are many players who want to play but fewer who own the equipment. NetEase Games will cover its products through offline VR experience centers and other channels based on the introduction of excellent content, promoting the popularization of VR games. Conversely, Survios, with its continuous stream of excellent works, can leverage NetEase Games’ rich market resources and channel advantages to expand the market capacity of the games it develops, achieving a strategic win-win. Speaking about the cooperation with NetEase, Survios CEO Seth Gerson stated, “Both parties share the same vision and high expectations for the development of VR games in China’s online and offline entertainment markets, and we are honored to work with NetEase to delve into the Chinese market.” This also implies that the current game introduction is only the first phase of the cooperation between NetEase Games and Survios. Subsequently, both parties will integrate their excellent resources to reach and cover users from online to offline in multiple angles and levels.
NetEase, a familiar name to both developers and users, has always been proactive in its exploration of the gaming industry. Despite the VR industry experiencing a chill in recent years, NetEase has chosen VR as a new direction for business expansion, possibly due to the following considerations. From 2015 to 2017, VR technology and its related derivative products, as the next generation of computing platforms, have been widely applied in education, healthcare, advertising, and other scenarios after years of effort.
International top-tier internet companies like Facebook and Google have also been investing in VR product research and development for many years, with Oculus Rift, one of the three major VR platforms, being born under these circumstances. However, for the complete simulation of virtual scenes and the maximization of interactive space that VR brings, interactive gaming modules are undoubtedly one of the core applications of VR. In 2018, the popularity of the virtual reality science fiction blockbuster ‘Ready Player One’ also allowed more people to see the potential of VR as a future gaming terminal. On this basis, although the domestic VR market was once trapped in a cold period and the C-end market did not fully mature, there is enough market potential. What is truly needed now is a multifaceted refinement of existing VR hardware, content, and underlying technology to activate this vast market scale. Against this backdrop, the encounter between NetEase Games and ‘Raw Data’ naturally occurred. ‘Raw Data’ itself is a work with excellent quality and a good international reputation and user base. Introducing it at this time is an absolute win for the domestic market, domestic players, and NetEase Games. It can be anticipated that NetEase Games’ strategic deployment will heat up the domestic VR gaming market. Similarly, with the introduction of more blockbuster VR games, it will further impact the existing domestic VR gaming market, leading to a winnowing process where only the best survive, leaving behind fine works, and ultimately benefiting our ‘game enthusiasts’.
