From a large number of mobile games, acting Minecraft to opening a coffee shop, what does NetEase want to do in the game?

Since last year, NetEase has designated May 20 every year as Game Love Day. The slogan "We never play games" and the emotional brand promotional video are impressive.

At NetEase's annual game launch on May 20 this year, they announced a series of actions, from vigorously developing mobile games to acting Minecraft, and even opening offline cafes.

NetEase Games, as a domestic veteran game company, has always had a good reputation: relying on agents to operate Blizzard games and the success of series of self-developed games such as "Fantasy Journey to the West" and "A Chinese Odyssey", although it lags far behind Tencent in terms of data, but its reputation is much better. They also regard maintaining the feelings of users as one of the ways of operation.

The theme of this conference, "for Special you", is such an emotional card. Let's see what it did.

"Dream Journey to the West" series is still NetEase's most important game.

"A Chinese Odyssey" and "Dream Journey to the West" are still the two brightest signboards under NetEase. These two client games, which have a life span of more than ten years, have once again become an important business of NetEase in the era of mobile games. In particular, "Fantasy Journey to the West" has hardly fallen to the top of the App Store bestseller list since it was launched in March last year. At this press conference, NetEase announced that the game has more than 100 million registered players.

These 100 million people are the users that NetEase has accumulated over the past decade and should continue to grasp in any case. Therefore, it is not surprising that there is a sequel to "Dream Journey to the West" and a second version of "Dream Journey to the West" in addition to the mobile phone, mobile game desktop and web version.

The intercommunication of "Dream Journey to the West" integrates the different ways of playing and painting styles on the computer version and mobile version of "Dream Journey to the West", and allows players to exchange data on different devices. In essence, the purpose of the game is to bring together players on computers and mobile phones to further strengthen the social nature of the game itself: sociality is an important factor behind the popularity of Fantasy Journey to the West. You will stay in the game because of your friends, your master and apprentice, your guild members and even your friends in the game. NetEase, who has been MMORPG for so many years, is well aware of the importance of this to their games. The game will open a test appointment on May 31 and start wire number testing on June 30.

NetEase obviously understands what is the most important connotation of "Dream Journey to the West".

The matchless version is more aimed at players who are not familiar with the series. As the latest work in the "Dream Journey to the West" series, it tries to attract new players and old players by instant action, rather than the most classic but now somewhat out-of-date return system. To put it simply, this is a fantastic Journey to the West, which is unparalleled in the three Kingdoms, and will be released by App Store on May 26.

In addition, the "Dream Journey to the West" client game will update an expansion this summer, and Liu Shishi will be invited as the latest endorsement of the "Dream Journey to the West" game series. At the same time, NetEase also announced plans for the third and fourth season of Fantasy Journey to the West-after inviting TF Boys to sing the theme song, they switched to SNH48 to sing the theme song "Dream". Compared to TF Boys,SNH48, it may be more suitable for the taste of "Dream Journey to the West" players. Previously, the stage play of "Dream Journey to the West" asked them to sing the theme song.

When you doubt whether NetEase should still devote so much energy to such an old game series, watching the on-screen comments on the live broadcast of the press conference will dispel your doubts: even two hours after the release of "Dream Journey to the West", there are still people asking, "when will the Dream Journey start?" They rallied in the barrage to say that dreamy players sent "1", and were proud of the importance of the game to NetEase, even intentionally or unintentionally belittling other games.

Mobile games, a lot of mobile games.

NetEase began to launch related products at the end of 2014, but NetEase's financial report in 2015 showed that net income rose 94.7% and net profit rose 70%-53% of which was mobile games, and successfully surpassed Tencent in November last year to become the most profitable game company in App Store that month.

At this press conference, except for the first few old PC games, the following contents are all about mobile games. And the updates to those old PC games are also related to mobile games. For example, A Chinese Odyssey will launch a hot-blooded version of mobile games in June, and there will be a lot of activities in the mobile game version of "Beautiful Girl" on May 20.

In particular, many of the new products released by NetEase this year are mobile games. In addition to a well-made "War", several new products "Code: S7", "Great Navigation Road", "Tank Company", "endless War Zone EX" and "Eternal Civilization" are all mobile games.

The "Great Navigation Road" can be understood as the mobile version of the "Great Navigation era", and the "tank company" is like the mobile version of the "tank world". "Code: S7" (also known as "Land of oblivion") is a first-person shooter game developed by NetEase, while "endless War Zone EX" is a shooting game adapted from a PC game of the same name. NetEase has caught up with the craze of shooter games and MOBA games in the field of mobile games.

However, none of these are NetEase's best types of games: MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing games). In fact, if you listen to the whole press conference, you will feel a little disgusted with the word: because there are too many such games before NetEase, it is mentioned very frequently. This also makes MMORPG the type that NetEase is best at, such as the "Fantasy Journey to the West" series, but after jumping out of this type, whether NetEase's performance will still be as good as before remains to be seen.

What is more interesting is "eternal civilization". Although it is a MMORPG, "Eternal Civilization" sounds more attractive: the setting of the world outlook is based on various regional ancient civilizations into Egypt, China, Maya, etc., players will choose the influence of different regions to fight. The specific method of the game has not yet been announced, and the test time has not been determined. It is estimated that how many flowers NetEase can play on MMORPG will have to wait and see in the future.

Minecraft, it's Minecraft.

NetEase acting Minecraft was once thought to be a major event at the NetEase game conference.

After all, Minecraft is a game that will change the times, and it has gone far beyond the connotation of the game to become a tool, a way of thinking and a culture. NetEase can cooperate with Microsoft and Mojang to get the agency of Minecraft PC and mobile in China, which is a great credit to the brand image.

However, it is a bit disappointing that there is very little ink about Minecraft in the press conference. In addition to a slightly embarrassing trailer, Wang Yi, vice president of NetEase, and the head of Microsoft exchanged picks and swords with each other in the game. people are done talking in Mandarin-the former even has to speak while looking at the phone.

That's... no, no, no. Very awkward.

Perhaps the game is not well recognized in China. In the perception of most people, including on-screen comments, it is just a mosaic game for primary school students. "Why would it be better to replay 'Fantasy Journey to the West' than to replay 'Fantasy Journey to the West'? It may also be because the people on the Microsoft side left in a hurry, and the originally arranged interview was temporarily cancelled because it was said that there was not enough time.

Therefore, after such an important event, after a press conference and various manuscripts, we still do not know any specific news about the introduction of Minecraft to China: when to test, the specific means of operation, and what plans for the future have not been revealed.

This makes people all the more curious that NetEase will treat such a game like this: acting Minecraft is a very strange thing. Mojang, including later acquirer Microsoft, has been decentralized to the game, has no official server, and allows players to build their own private servers. At this time, how NetEase should position his national service is a very delicate matter.

This means that they have to use some means to attract players to use their servers and spend for them-all profit models must be based on players using NetEase's server. whether NetEase is going to make money by selling game software, selling skins and themes in the game, or whatever. However, a unified server is bound to limit the freedom of the game. And NetEase is faced with a group of users they are not familiar with before: compared with those experienced in PC games for more than a decade, most Minecraft players are younger or even less than 10 years old.

Of course, NetEase can also make money by selling or renting Minecraft servers. Ideally, NetEase seems to be able to provide technical support to a customer who has heard of Minecraft but doesn't know how to build his own server, but it doesn't seem to have much to do with the agent.

But in any case, NetEase faces the most immediate problem, which is how to deal with players who already have Minecraft: most of them have downloaded Minecraft computer and mobile clients in Steam and App Store, and have already paid for it. It is also a problem for NetEase to face these users and absorb them. For those players who have established a world in their own world, asking them to start from scratch in a new server is really a painful and difficult thing to do.

When it comes to pan-entertainment, NetEase is far worse than Tencent.

At the beginning, Wang Yi, vice president of NetEase Games, said of content alliance in her speech: "(NetEase) does not take hot spots as the wind direction, but cautiously seeks deep joint cooperation among content creators in different fields in the introduction and cooperation of IP (intellectual property rights)."

Don't praise NetEase's "calmness" yet. in fact, most companies have come out of the trend of "only IP is raised" earlier last year. People all see the value of IP, and they also know that it takes ability to play something around in games, movies, literature, animation and other fields, that is, to establish the so-called "pan-entertainment".

For NetEase games, this ability involves highlights: first, how many high-quality off-the-shelf IP resources they can get; second, their ability to original, incubate and operate an IP.

NetEase games rely on their own good products have obtained a lot of high-quality content resources thrown to them: "Kung Fu Panda" is an example. Oriental DreamWorks is willing to give this image and series, which is the most important to them, to NetEase for them to develop relevant mobile games, which shows NetEase's development ability in mobile games.

At this year's press conference, NetEase announced another movie game linkage project: Terminator 2. The 3D special edition of Terminator 2 will hit domestic theaters in October this year, while film licensee DMG Printing Film and Television Entertainment has handed over the task of the official mobile game Terminator 2: judge to NetEase. NetEase will release the game during the release period of the film and promote it in cooperation with the film. Judging from the good cooperation effect of "Kung Fu Panda" before, NetEase's cooperation this time should also be good, although the game itself is an integrated role-playing of action shooting, which requires higher requirements for special effects and action details.

In addition, they also got the game adaptation rights of the Sea Mu Yun Ji and Gulong series. The former is a TV series adapted from a fantasy overhead novel of the same name, which tells the story of families seizing power and vying for the throne in Kyushu (a bit like Nirvana in Fire), which will be released on Hunan Satellite TV in 2017. NetEase got the game adaptation right for this TV series, and this is also NetEase's first TV series adaptation game project. Needless to say about the latter, NetEase announced that he would create a "year of Cologne"-Jin Yong's series of works did not perform well in mobile games, and the "year of Cologne" in mobile games was exaggerated. To tell you the truth, after seeing so many schools and martial arts, fans are very prone to aesthetic fatigue.

However, although they can get cooperation with other external content, NetEase's biggest defect is still that their ability to operate these content is not strong. On the one hand, unlike Tencent's interactive entertainment animation, literature, video and games, which can adapt a work more effectively, on the other hand, NetEase lacks the birthplace of content-for Tencent, Tencent China Literature Group's novels and Tencent Animation and Comic's original cartoons are their subsequent content resources. NetEase is more like a processing plant, and his ability to mine raw materials is relatively poor.

However, this is not what NetEase is thinking about now. After all, NetEase has not yet dug up the value of several classics such as "Fantasy Journey to the West". After the establishment of NetEase Film, they announced that they would remake these classics, together with Chinese Film and Television and Huatze Film and Television, as movies and TV dramas. At the same time, they also set up a Prometheus project to involve players in the creation of film and television adaptations of the game. However, this does not seem to be a good move, this kind of video game linkage really needs to be done by people who know the game, and most players with rich game memories are not productive. It is too inefficient to expect them to write a good work.

And some strange user plans.

If the Prometheus plan is still a move NetEase had to make because of a lack of native resources, some of the next interactions with users seem to be cosying up to players.

The first is a $1 billion plus plan. To put it simply, players will earn points for their investment in NetEase's various games, and these points will bring players all kinds of feedback around the game, game gift packages, as well as a variety of exclusive services and so on. The plan, which will cover PC, mobile and gaming platforms, sounds like a Nintendo Account-like plan: the aim is to increase user loyalty through platform syndication and points rewards. However, compared with Nintendo, NetEase spent this money to do a 3A or high-level production, it is estimated that players really want and more beneficial to NetEase.

The other one is even weirder: NetEase wants to make an offline themed coffee shop. They solemnly brought in coffee experts and hotel management staff to create a space for players to communicate offline: Yi Jian. They announced a plan to open more than 100 stores across the country, and the first flagship store will open in Guangzhou in the second half of the year.

They also recruit player baristas.

It sounds strange to drink coffee while talking about Liu Yifei, the new spokesperson of "Beautiful woman Ghost". NetEase's games are far from the level that can be used as a public space to talk about capital. Maybe Blizzard's game can reach this level, but the agent of this aspect of the game is made into a separate system, which is not the responsibility of NetEase's game at this press conference. However, if Minecraft can run well under NetEase, it can become the topic of a themed coffee shop-as if seeing a public place for geeks and children to communicate. But before NetEase can promote Minecraft culture in China to the high level of Europe and the United States, you'd better try this kind of cafe or something.

+ plans and cafes, as well as various game adaptation plans, make us a little worried about a company that has won a reputation for its products. "to Special you", NetEase, who wants to play the game with peace of mind after playing the warm card, don't just do some messy things for the players: after all, what players like best is actually a good game.