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The story
Chinese gaming giant Perfect World, the studio behind NTE and other titles, has reported a loss of 118 million yuan for the first half of 2026. Its flagship title’s worldwide cumulative revenue topped 2 billion yuan, but a 213% year-over-year surge in marketing spend dragged the company into the red.
On the thread, comments ranged from “It’s ranked 8th on the PlayStation Store and still in the red?” to “Maybe they just overspent on ads,” with discussion also turning to the stark difference in sales breakdown between the PS5 version and the PC/Android versions.
China’s Perfect World falls into the red with a 118-million-yuan loss in H1 — “NTE” (Chinese title: Yihuan) racks up 2 billion yuan in sales, but a 213% jump in marketing spend weighs it down
Source: finance.biggo.jp / Original article here
What people said
Didn't it pull in something like 30 billion at the start?
Apparently they overspent on ads.
So that includes the pre-launch stealth-marketing (ステマ, undisclosed paid promo dressed up as organic buzz) push?
Mugendai (another Perfect World title, lit. "Infinity") was pretty bad about that too.
Slapping the "stealth marketing" label on everything is so cringe.
Wait, does the PS5 just… not sell?
Revenue's massive, but ad spend put it in the red.
It's only "good" compared to a dying village (限界集落, slang mocking the PS5's shrinking, aging install base) — on that trash console it's nothing to write home about.
Most people are fine playing on their phones; nobody's booting up their oversized glorified smartphone just for this.
That concurrent-player number's probably inflated garbage anyway.
Unlike NTE, it's actually landing well in China.
1. Genshin Impact
2. Apex Legends
3. eFootball
4. Zenless Zone Zero
5. Gundam
6. Fortnite
7. Wuthering Waves
8. NTE
9. Endfield
10. Overwatch
8th place and still in the red?
Yeah, garbage console (ゴミステ, a common PlayStation slur, lit. "trash-tation") strikes again.
It only moved from 11th to 8th after a patch, so it hasn't really surged…
Going by the trend, most people already quit.
Feels like folks just uninstalled NTE and reinstalled Genshin.
There was a "let's come back for Snezhnaya" wave (a Genshin Impact region/nation that got a content update).
Reading into that, it looks like most PS players never bought expansion storage and are just juggling everything on the built-in drive.
That might be true on PS, but overall, Fortnite has blown past eFootball for a dominant 1st place.
The Gaming Legends season kicks off today too.
Even if it sold well, there's only so much you can do with an audience of at most 7 million PS5 owners in Japan, generously estimated.
This game's whole model assumes a 1.3-billion-person market (i.e., China).
Well, that one's meant to be played on PC.
It's on PS5 too, but apparently you can't even use keyboard and mouse.
According to Perfect World Games' official first-half 2026 earnings, released August 19, NTE's worldwide cumulative revenue — over 1.4 billion yuan as of June 30 — passed 2 billion yuan by August 18. Official PC plus official Android account for roughly 60% of the total.
Do we even need PS5, then?
Zero benefit to spending money through PlayStation anyway — constant data leaks, and no points or rewards to show for it.
NTE showed up late on Steam and it was #1 in sales yesterday, #2 today.
That's basically all I remember about it.
Actually, the only thing I remember is Shouheki (apparently a streamer/YouTuber known for playing these titles) playing it.
Even from the YouTube ads, it's just another reskin of the same garbage gacha game — nothing memorable.
Well, the plan was probably "blast ads everywhere, rake in a bunch of suckers, profit"…
That's just how China does everything, though.
They can only compete on sheer scale.
Background and Key Points
Perfect World is one of China’s biggest private game publishers, listed on the Shenzhen exchange, with a decades-long track record in PC MMOs before moving into mobile and console gacha titles. NTE (Chinese title Yihuan, English title unclear from the thread but referred to by posters as “NTE”) is its current flagship, a gacha-style action game released simultaneously on PC, Android, and PS5 — a three-platform push that’s unusual for a Chinese gacha title, since most stay PC/mobile-only or add PS5 as an afterthought. The headline numbers: a 118-million-yuan net loss for H1 2026 against 2 billion yuan in cumulative worldwide NTE revenue, with marketing spend up 213% year-on-year. For context, Chinese gacha publishers routinely spend 50%+ of revenue on user acquisition and influencer/”stealth marketing” campaigns to break into saturated markets like Japan, so a loss despite strong top-line revenue isn’t unusual in this industry — it reflects the cost of buying market share, not a failing product.
The thread’s actual disagreement is narrower than “is NTE good or bad” — posters split on how to read PS5 chart position (8th on the Japanese PS Store) against the loss. Some treated a top-10 ranking as proof the game should be profitable, implying ad spend or mismanagement was the problem; others countered that PS5’s Japanese install base is small (estimated around 7 million units) and that PC/Android already account for roughly 60% of NTE’s total revenue (post #50), meaning PS5 chart placement is close to irrelevant to the company’s bottom line.
What’s likely misunderstood: readers may assume “8th on PlayStation Store” reflects meaningful revenue, when platform charts rank by units/spend velocity, not absolute market share — a small platform can produce a high rank with modest real revenue. Also unaddressed in the thread: Perfect World’s loss is a single-half figure against a multi-year live-service investment; gacha titles commonly post launch-period losses before ad spend tapers and long-tail monetization kicks in, so one bad half doesn’t necessarily signal the game underperforming its business plan.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5channel (Hardware & Industry, “Geha” — short for ゲームハード, the console-wars-focused hardware board) thread “NTE operator Perfect World falls into the red.”
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