3 new NTES games within the next 10 days, YSG, DT2, and CSXY

One can find my last NTES related post here:

http://chinese-net-gaming-stock.blogspot.com/2010/03/players-revolt-in-wow.html

Right now, everybody is waiting to see when GAPP and Ministry of Culture will approve World of Warcraft』s next expansion pact. But everybody is missing two much more important recent developments.

Within the next 10 days, three new games will enter unlimited Closed Beta with permanent player statistics. Unlimited means anybody can play. This 「Closed Beta」 is not by invitation only. In addition, all player statistics will be permanent. That is, player statistics will not be erased at the end of this 「Closed Beta」. Thus, compare to the west, this is really commercial launch.

On the other hand, I think there will be minimal marketing for the 「Closed Beta」. NTES had been well known to be penny pinching on marketing.

YSG will enter unlimited Closed Beta with permanent player statistics on 4/9/2010. YSG is a 2.5D Turn based MMORPG game, based on Tale of three countries. It will be a free to play. But it is not a true item-based game. There are no items to purchase in this game. On the other hand, player can pay to buy 「essence level」 (精力值). Any time a player wants to get any goodies (such as experience, in-game currency, in-game items, etc.), he has to use up some of his 「essence level」. One can still play without paying any money. But he won』t get any 「essence level」. Thus one can』t get experience or item without 「essence level」. One can also get 「essence level」 through playing as team leader (or more like baby-sitter to other players). There is only one item in the online store, the 「essence level」, you can』t buy any other items in the online store. For PK (player kill), it incorporates 「Battle Chess」 style of play. It emphasizes the usage of battle formations. Therefore, there is a lot of strategy involved in player combat.

Therefore, this game is really NTES』s attempt to investigate another paying model (other than time-based, and item-based).

CSXY will enter its unlimited Closed Beta on 4/15/2010. This closed beta will have permanent player statistics. This game』s development starts in 2005. It is a turned based 3D game, based on BigWorld game engine. It will be a free to play, item-based game. It will be the third game behind the two blockbusters, XYQ and XY3.

DT2 will enter its unlimited closed beta on 4/16/2010. Again, this closed beta will have permanent player statistics. It is a 2.5D real time game. It will be a free-to-play, item-based game. This game emphasize player PK. This game encourages PvP but there are also some PvE elements. Basically this is a game for PK.

DT2 has promotional video for its closed beta. One can find it here:

http://news.17173.com/content/2010-04-06/20100406143519287.shtml

I had always defined a game to be a blockbuster if its PCU can break the important 500k barrier. For MMORPG (without counting the casual game), one can count all the blockbusters in China with two hands. NTES has three of them, WOW, XYQ, and XY2.

Of NTES』s other existing games, TX2 will probably reach blockbuster status by 2011 (it probably has PCU closed to 300k and is still growing strongly).

But out of about 10 new games in the pipeline, I can only see two games that have the chance to reach blockbuster status. These two games are DT2 and CSXY.

A new WOW expansion pact is important in that it will probably give a 10% to 20% kick to the amount of WOW players. It will also indicate the closure between the unpleasantness between GAPP and NTES. But the additional revenue will be shared between NTES and Blizzard.

A brand new blockbuster on the other hand will contribute much more to the bottom line. Somehow, the developments of these two games (DT2 and CSXY) are completely ignored by Wall Street.

At this point, there doesn』t seem to be a major marketing push for the 「Closed Beta」. NTES will probably using this period to continuously modify the game design. In a few months time, NTES will probably conduct a major marketing push for the 「Open Beta」.

But in two to three weeks, we would have some indication of the potential of these two games.

FF will start open beta on 5/15/2009 and quick status on NTES’s new games

One can find my previous article on FF here:
http://chinese-net-gaming-stock.blogspot.com/2008/09/ntes-ff2-status-part2-open-beta.html

It is about time. The new FF went into closed beta on 2/1/2008. Most closed beta doesn’t last more than 1 year. In the above article, I predicted that FF will go into open beta at the end of 2008.

NTES sure take its sweet time. Finally, FF is going to conduct open beta on 5/15/2009. For more detailed information, see the following article:
http://news.duowan.com/0904/103892813170.html

By the way, I had always addressed this game as FF2 to make distinction between this new game (that is developed from scratch by NTES) to the FF1 that was licensed from a Korean company. But NTES address this game as new FF and its web address is http://ff.163.com/. Therefore, from now on, I will address this game as FF.

Everybody knows the exciting news of WOW and how it will accelerate the growth of NTES. But I don’t think most people know the exciting development of new NTES games.

Between 2005 and now (2009), only two games went into commercial operation. DT went into commercial operation in 2006 and XY3 went into commercial operation in 2007.

DT was a failure and the development had been stopped. XY3 had become a medium game and is pulling about $5M per quarter.

In 2008, both TX2 and XYW went into closed beta and monetization had started. But it was very low level monetization and they are definitely not in commercialization mode.

In 2006, NTES got caught in the transition from paying game to free-to-play game in China’s gaming industry; she has to pull all her games in development back to the drawing board and re-started the development cycle.

For 4 long years, NTES had virtually no new game (except a mediocre XY3) for growth.

But the waiting is over. In the next year or so, an explosion of new games will be in commercial operation.

Starting with DT, NTES had restarted the development of DT from its death bed. On 4/15/2009, it released its 2nd expansion pact.
On 5/15/2009, FF will going into open beta. For item-based free-to-play games, open beta is the same as commercialization.

On June 2009, NTES will get the license for WOW. Commercialization shouldn’t be too far behind.

On June or July 2009, whenever the movie “Transformer 2” will be in theatre, NTES’s new game BB will go into open beta.

The two games that went into closed beta in 2008, TX2 and XYW (both had already have 120k to 150k players during the weekend), shall go into open beta some times this year.

2010 will be a busy year for NTES also. Star Craft 2 will probably go commercial that year. In addition, 3 new games will probably be out that year. QN, DT2, and CSXY are all major titles. Keep a special eye out for CSXY, it has blockbuster written all over it.

I didn’t count the two Warcraft 3 games, I don’t think they will be successful.

Out of those 10 new major games (DT is not new, but its re-birth is new), most likely WOW will be a blockbuster. Besides WOW, some of these games will fail, but 2 or 3 may become blockbuster (like that of XY2 and XYQ) and others will be medium games (like that of XY3).

Therefore, while everybody is excited about WOW, the 9 other new games will probably have much more impact than that of WOW.

CSXY – Another major game developed by NTES

In February, NTES announced they will have a new major game called Transformer, (I called it BB). I wrote an article about it here:

http://chinese-net-gaming-stock.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-major-netease-game.html

In the above article, I suspected that they will try to get the game out by June 2009 to coincide with the release of the movie 「Transformer 2」.

I was right, from the following article:

http://bb.163.com/2009/3/18/5166_198394.html

BB's developer say June 2009 is current planned date for the open beta for the game. Because BB is going to be an item-based game (free to play), open beta is the same as commercial operation.

On 4/3/2009, NTES planned to have the 2^nd technical closed beta for BB.

Now, I just found out that there is another major game that is ready to go.

On 4/3/2009 (4/3 is going to be a busy day for NTES), there is going to be another new game developed by NTES that will go into Alpha testing. The name of the game is called Genesis: Journey to the West (「Chuang Shi Xi You Online」, 創世西遊). I will call it CSXY from now on. It is an in-house developed 3D MMORPG game. The game engine the same 「Big World」 engine used for TX2. That game engine is licensed from an Australian company. It is going to be a turn-based game. At this point, it is not known whether this game will be item-based (free to play) or paying game (time-based).

NTES started the development of this game in 2005. Therefore, this is a major game that NTES had already spent a lot of resource on.

The game's web site is http://csxy.163.com/

The following are some in-game graphics:

As can be seen from the graphics, this is a very beautiful game. Even though CSXY is another branch of the 「Journey to the West」 series of games (XY2, XY3, XYW, XYQ), it is clear that CSXY looks nothing like other Westward Journey games.

NTES uses the popularity of XY2 (the 3^rd most popular game in China) to give XYQ a push at the beginning (XYQ was an offshoot of XY2). Eventually, XYQ is able to stand alone and grows to be the most popular game in China.

Similarly, NTES is going to do the same thing as CSXY. CSXY is going to be the 3^rd leg of the 「Westward Journey」 series of games. Hopefully, CSXY can be as popular as XY2 or XYQ.