I am not sure whether it’s dawned on MMORPG fans yet, but NetEase is doing a lot more than jousting with Blizzard and milking Diablo Immortal over here: It’s been absolutely pouring rivers of money into game developers – especially western game developers – and it’s one of the few such companies increasing its investments instead of panicking and closing ranks. Greg Street’s Ghost, Bulletfarm, Rich Vogel’s T-Minus Zero, and Jack Emmert’s Warhammer MMO are all backed by NetEase money, to say nothing of Ben Brode’s Marvel Snap, which apparently was one of multiple sparks that busted up the NetEase-Blizzard partnership way back when.
All of this is really just preamble for a peek into the Chinese gaming giant’s Q4 2023 financials, which dropped at the end of February. The company saw the equivalent of $3.8B US in revenues this past quarter, a boost of 7% over its Q4 2022 haul. Its gaming sector accounts for 76% of that figure and indeed helped make up for losses in the cloud music segment.
“Leading franchises, such as Fantasy Westward Journey and Westward Journey Online, maintained enduring user appeal, supported by periodic new content introductions,” the company says. (Readers will recall that while the Fantasy Westward Journey franchise isn’t accessible in the west, it’s one of the top PC games by revenue in the world, or was last time we saw good comparative global data.) The company also talks up the Justice franchise’s “new milestone of 100 million active users.” A Justice MMO is still supposedly en route to the west.
