“Battle Royale” as a genre is one of the three pillars of Chinese financial well—being NetEase. And the company is doing its best to strengthen its position within this niche. The novelty of Cyber Hunter is proof of that.
Cyber Hunter
Today, NetEase teams in the mobile market work in three main directions:
- classic role-playing MMOs;
- cooperative survivalists in the spirit of Dead by Daylight;
- royal battles.
The last segment is the second most important and cash register for NetEase, which was one of the first to bring several high—quality mobile clones of the original PUBG to the market at once. Since its release in November 2017, its Knives Out and Rules of Survival, excluding the Chinese market, have earned about $500 million, according to the DataMagic analytics service.
In parallel with their development, NetEase launched Cyber Hunter yesterday, April 25. Another possible commercial hit built on the old patterns.
That’s just despite the preservation of the former royal concept (as well as mechanics and controls), the novelty strives to distance itself as much as possible from PUBG in terms of style and positioning. The realistic setting has given way to a fantastic future, and the graphics have become a little more cartoonish.
The latter is due to both a legal conflict with PUBG Corp., which more than a year ago accused NetEase of imitating PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and an understandable desire to enter Fortnite territory. Moreover, if we talk about borrowing from Epic Games, then Cyber Hunter adopts not only some style solutions, but also some gameplay finds.
The success of Knives Out and Rules of Survival was largely due to the fact that they appeared long before the mobile versions of PUBG and Fortnite. Now, when it is already possible to play original projects on iOS and Android, it is completely unclear how the audience will react to the next royal battle, whether it will be ready to spend its time and money on it.
Recall that on Steam in 2018, only one project in this genre was able to increase the audience after launch. Everyone else lost both in users and in money.
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