The company NetEase has laid off some employees, according to Chinese media reports. The layoffs reportedly took place at the Shenzhen office and primarily affected developers who were working on the mobile shooter Operation Apocalypse (天启行动).
It is claimed that "not too many" people were laid off, but the exact number is unknown.
Operation Apocalypse was released in China on August 30, 2024, as the successor to the previously shut down game Hyper Front. To recall, NetEase had turned off Hyper Front's servers in April 2023 after losing a court case to Riot Games over allegations of plagiarizing Valorant. NetEase failed to achieve success with Operation Apocalypse. A month and a half after its release, NetEase announced that the game did not meet expectations and would be shut down on December 12, 2024.
According to the analytics service AppMagic, by mid-October, Operation Apocalypse had managed to generate $433,000 in net IAP revenue and amassed 798,900 downloads.