Inside a Chinese game company’s shot at the global VR market

At Google’s annual I/O conference last week, the company unveiled Daydream, its upcoming mobile VR platform. The American firm has lined up a number of partners who are working on developing VR apps for the platform’s fall launch, but one of the games on the screen may not have been too familiar to I/O attendees: Netease Games.

Netease is a household name in China, of course. The company runs a variety of businesses from its email service to its popular news portals. But perhaps it’s most famous for its PC gaming operation. Netease develops and publishes its own games, but it’s also been the China partner for a number of high-profile (and wildly popular) Western-developed games, including World of Warcraft. In fact, it was just recently announced as the China publisher for Minecraft.

But Netease isn’t content to just import content from the West. It also wants to produce its own Western-targeted content, and to that end the company opened a US office early last year. “We’re taking it very seriously,” Netease North America head David Ting told Tech in Asia last year.

VR future

He wasn’t joking. A year later, Netease is working on a VR game called Twilight Pioneers that got featured at I/O and that may become one of the Google platform’s major selling points.

There is no question that VR is the next big thing in tech

Netease Games senior director Simon Zhu told me that the company has high expectations for the game. “This is an action role playing game (ARPG) with next generation graphics set in a detailed and in-depth universe,” he said. ” We want players all over the world enjoy the game and to see the level of quality they can expect on mobile VR. Thus our target is anyone who is looking for a truly console-level experience on a mobile VR platform.”

Twilight Pioneers isn’t a one-off, either. It’s no coincidence that Netease is getting in on the ground floor of Daydream; the company sees virtual reality as hugely important to its future. “There is no question that VR is the next big thing in tech,” said Simon. “It is ramping up to reshape not only games, but the social, tourism, and entertainment worlds.” Netease has plans to produce VR content beyond Twilight Pioneers, and those plans aren’t limited to just the Western market. Simon said he couldn’t share any details yet beyond the fact that the company’s focus will be on quality, but it sounds like Chinese and Western gamers should both be excited.

Not just for mobile

If you’re a PC gamer, all this talk of consoles and mobile VR platforms might be concerning. But there’s no cause for alarm, Simon said. Netease is, after all, a PC gaming company, and many of its most successful products have been PC games. When I asked whether Netease was looking into producing VR games for PC platforms like the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive, Simon didn’t specify a platform, but he did say that’s on the table. “We are definitely looking at future PC development for VR as we believe this is a huge drive for future PC market growth,” he told me.

Of course, Netease isn’t the only gaming company interested in virtual reality in China or globally. Also featured in the Daydream presentation were massive global players like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft. Netease may have its hands full trying to compete with them, but for the moment the VR market seems to be suffering from a dearth of high-quality content, so it’s quite possible Netease can coexist happily with all the other major players training their sights on virtual reality.