(Bloomberg) -- After years of expanding overseas, video-game billionaire William Ding is hitting the brakes at NetEase Inc., the pioneering Chinese company behind hits like Eggy Party and its newest blockbuster Marvel Rivals.
Ding, 53, who founded the company and is chief executive officer, has cut hundreds of jobs, closed or idled game studios and pulled back on international investment as he refocuses on a smaller portfolio of titles. He reasserted his leadership with a series of dramatic decisions over the past year, according to people familiar with the company’s inner workings who asked to not be identified.
If successful, the reorganization could strengthen NetEase’s position against much larger rival Tencent Holdings Ltd. and upstarts like Mihoyo Co. If not, Ding risks undermining his own legacy. The company’s gaming business, one of the world’s largest, had $11.6 billion in revenue last year.
On Thursday, NetEase reported December-quarter sales that fell short of analyst expectations. Revenue at the games division climbed 1.5%, but gross profit fell 2.6%. The company’s topline results have been in decline for the past two quarters and growth has been in the single digits for most of the past two and a half years.
The upheaval inside NetEase runs in stark contrast to some recent success. The company had a smash hit with Marvel Rivals in December, accruing more than $200 million revenue so far, according to an estimate by Niko Partners analyst Zeng Xiaofeng. NetEase said the game already has over 40 million registered users.
But before it was released, there were discussions about it being canceled, one of the people said. Ding objected to paying Walt Disney Co. for the use of popular characters like Wolverine and Spider-Man, and at one point asked his artists to swap in their own hero designs. That ultimately aborted effort cost the company millions of dollars and was emblematic of the abrupt changes ushered in by the CEO. A NetEase spokesperson denied this account, saying the company has enjoyed a close partnership with Marvel since 2017.
This week, part of the Marvel Rivals creative team in the US was laid off.
“We recently made the difficult decision to adjust Marvel Rivals’ development team structure for organizational reasons,” the NetEase representative said in an email. The core development team for the game, led from China, continues, the company said.
One of China’s first internet billionaires, Ding has a net worth of $32.5 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. He set a goal in 2018 for his company to generate half its revenue from overseas. NetEase began investing heavily in game studios in the West and Japan that were helmed by respected creators. The company bought into proven studios, like Bungie Inc., and backed startups founded by game veterans from companies like Ubisoft Entertainment SA and Tencent’s Riot Games.
NetEase helped popularize Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft in China. It invested early in Devolver Digital, the studio behind the hit game Fall Guys, and Royal Match developer Dream Games, now valued at around $5 billion. Ding took a hands-off approach, one of the people said.
Now he’s back steering the growth of games like Eggy Party, a breakthrough multiplayer title that marked a hard-fought win against Tencent’s dominance in China. The game, where colorful round characters compete in an obstacle course, is the sort of title Ding now wants NetEase to focus on: an evergreen, mass-market game with recurring elements to entice spending.
Sales potential is a top priority, as he now deems any game unlikely to generate hundreds of millions of dollars per year unworthy of pursuing, the people said. NetEase doesn’t set “arbitrary blanket numbers for determining the viability of a new game,” according to the company spokesperson.
With the recent layoffs, remaining NetEase workers worry about Ding’s volatility, with some describing a CEO who changes his mind frequently, the people said. Although Ding doesn’t usually have time to play games himself, he has bragged that he can tell how a game works by watching it for a couple of seconds. Ding has asked staff in China to work until 9 p.m., including naps and meals, the people said. NetEase said there’s no mandatory time requirement and departments set their own pace.
Ding has curtailed support for about a dozen games and shut down so many projects that NetEase studios in China may not release any major titles next year. Xiaojun Hui, one of his longest-running lieutenants and president of NetEase Games, quit his management role over a year ago, the people said. He remains with the company after about 20 years of helping lay the foundation for the NetEase of today, overseeing development of its first few original gaming hits.
Among moves to shake up leadership at NetEase, Ding last year hired a small number of recent graduates from the finance sector to serve as his direct reports, the people said. Some of these 20-somethings have already been assigned key roles to lead or supervise gaming units, they added.
Outside China, NetEase has in recent months shut down or halted work at marquee studios that it opened just a few years ago, such as Japan’s Ouka, Canada’s Worlds Untold and Jar of Sparks in the US. The company is shrinking the team it has scouting overseas investment opportunities, the people said. NetEase said that fewer than 60 employees have left as a result of the shutdown of Worlds Untold and Jar of Sparks, and the adjustment at its investments team is not a “wide scale layoff.”
NetEase hasn’t made any new investments in studios or intellectual property since the start of last year. Seattle-based Simon Zhu, who has been with the company for more than a decade, remains in charge of NetEase Games investments. He declined an emailed request for comment.
Japan had been one of NetEase’s key outposts, with celebrated creator Toshihiro Nagoshi, responsible for the Yakuza franchise, a major hire to bolster the creative ranks. The decision to close Ouka was made in the midst of developing the studio’s first big game, Visions of Mana, for Square Enix Holdings Co. Ding overruled executives who had greenlit the project as he decided there’s no need for a team working for outside publishers, the people said.
Outside Ouka, NetEase-funded Japanese creators — Nagoshi among them — have been given time to wrap up ongoing projects. The message from headquarters in Hangzhou has been that there’ll be no additional funding or time, the people said. There’s no plan to spend on marketing or promoting the games currently in production in Japan.
That’s even though some of NetEase’s Western studios engaged in discussions with potential new game publishers, according to one of the people. Jackalope Games, NetEase’s first studio in the US, has been working on what’s known in the industry as a massively muliplayer online role-playing game tied to the Warhammer game franchise. At a recent trade show it received a positive reception from potential partners.
When asked about the status of the overseas studios on a conference call with analysts on Thursday, Ding said, via a translator, that the company remains committed to support “really high-quality studios and really master creators.”
“That is our strategy,” he said. “There’s no change on that.”
NetEase’s rethink may be justified by struggles in the wider games sector. A post-pandemic malaise has seen players downloading fewer new games and sticking with older titles for longer. Along with the escalating cost of development, that’s pushed industry executives toward a more risk-averse approach that has cost tens of thousands of jobs globally. In 2023, NetEase let go of almost 900 employees from its games division, according to exchange filings.
Ding became more hands-on in the gaming business soon after. His previous passion project had been the Cloud Music app, where he fought a licensing war against Tencent’s streaming services. After Ding settled disputes and sold shares in NetEase Cloud Music Inc. to the public, he refocused on gaming, the people said.
By Cecilia D’Anastasio, Zheping Huang and Takashi Mochizuki
