Meet NetEase, China’s second-largest game publisher

Beijing-based NetEase is a gaming giant, with exclusive rights to Blizzard titles in China. It also makes its own games including Knives Out and Onmyoji, and owns the Shanghai Dragons Overwatch team.

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Meet NetEase, China’s second-largest game publisher

Published: 7:29pm, 18 Oct 2018Updated: 8:09am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

With a market cap close to Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft and Square Enix combined, NetEase is China’s second-largest gaming company behind Tencent.

Founded in 1997 by William Ding, NetEase is an old guard of China’s internet business and one of the country’s earliest gaming companies. Although it’s been listed on NASDAQ since 2000, the company was little known in the West until recent years, when it started an aggressive expansion there.

If you’re a fan of the classic sci-fi shooting games Halo or Destiny, NetEase is a name you should know. In June 2018, NetEase announced it would pump US$100 million into Halo’s creator Bungie, to help it develop a new line of games apart from its Destiny franchise.

And if you are a fan of the MMORPG (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games), EVE Online, NetEase has said it’s working on an AR version of the game.

For viewers of the Overwatch League, you might know NetEase as the owner of the notoriously bad Shanghai Dragons who set an epic 0-40 lose record in the League’s inaugural season.

The Shanghai Dragons was the only Chinese team during the first season of the Overwatch League.

All this only scratches the surface of the massive gaming empire that NetEase has built. Back home in China, the gaming industry is increasingly looking like a duopoly between Tencent and NetEase -- both being fertile publishers of foreign games.