From our other sites
The story
Perfect World, the Chinese gaming giant behind titles like NTE, has announced a loss of 118 million yuan for the first half of 2026. While worldwide cumulative revenue from its flagship title topped 2 billion yuan, a 213% year-over-year surge in marketing spending is being blamed for pushing the company into the red.
On the thread, comments included “It’s ranked 8th on the PlayStation Store and still posted a loss?” and “Maybe they just spent too much on ads.” Discussion also turned to how differently sales break down between the PS5 version and the PC/Android versions.
China’s Perfect World falls to a 118 million yuan loss in H1 — Yihuan’s (the Chinese title of NTE) 2 billion yuan in sales couldn’t offset a 213% jump in marketing spend
Source: finance.biggo.jp / original article here
What people said
Didn't it rake in something like 30 billion (yuan) at the start?
Apparently they spent too much on ads.
So that includes the stealth-marketing (paid promotion disguised as organic hype) push before launch too?
Mugendai (another Chinese gacha title) is pretty bad about that too.
Calling everything 'stealth marketing' is so cringe.
Is the PS5 just… not selling?
Sales are great, but marketing costs put it in the red.
It only looks decent relative to a dying village (5ch slang for the PS5's shrinking market) — on trash-station (a mocking nickname for PlayStation) that's nothing special.
Most people are fine playing on their phones; nobody's going out of their way to fire up a giant oversized 'smartphone' [i.e. the PS5] just for this.
That's probably some sloppily-counted concurrent number anyway.
Unlike NTE, it's actually doing 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 a loss, huh.
Yep, trash-station strikes again.
There was an update and it only moved from 11th to 8th, so that's barely a rebound…
Judging by the trend, most people have already quit.
Feels like folks uninstalled NTE and reinstalled Genshin Impact instead.
There was a wave of 'it's Snezhnaya now, guess I'll come back' [Genshin's newest region, a big draw for returning players].
Given that kind of movement, it seems like most PS users haven't expanded their storage and are just juggling games on the built-in drive.
That might be true on PS, but across the whole market Fortnite has passed eFootball and is way out in front at #1.
The Gaming Legends season kicks off today too.
Even if it sold well, there's only 7 million PS5 owners in Japan at the most generous estimate — that's nothing to work with.
This is a game built around a 1.3-billion-person market [China].
Well, that's a game meant to be played on PC.
It's on PS5 too, but apparently you can't even use keyboard and mouse there.
According to Perfect World Games' official H1 2026 earnings released August 19, NTE's worldwide cumulative revenue — over 1.4 billion yuan as of June 30 — passed 2 billion yuan as of August 18. Official PC plus official Android together account for roughly 60% of the total.
Do you even need the PS5 version?
There's zero benefit to paying through PlayStation — they leak your personal info all the time, and there's no points or anything either.
NTE launched late on Steam and is already #2 in sales today — it was #1 yesterday.
That's basically all I remember about it.
Actually, the only people I remember playing it were the diehards (the original Japanese word here is ambiguous, possibly a typo for a harsher slang term mocking obsessive players).
Even if I saw it in a YouTube ad, it's just the same reskinned garbage game as everything else, so it doesn't stick in my memory.
Well, the plan was probably to blitz ads, reel in a ton of easy marks as players, and cash in big…
That's just how China does things across the board.
They can only compete on scale.
Background and Key Points
Perfect World is one of China’s oldest gaming publishers, dating back to the early 2000s, and NTE (its Chinese title is Yihuan) is the extraction-shooter/gacha hybrid it’s counting on as a flagship earner in 2026. The headline numbers look contradictory on their face: over 2 billion yuan in cumulative worldwide revenue, an 8th-place ranking on the PlayStation Store, and still a 118 million yuan net loss for the first half. The reconciling fact, which the thread does surface, is that marketing spend rose 213% year-over-year — in China’s gacha-game economy, aggressive paid user-acquisition (“stealth marketing” disguised as organic buzz, sponsored influencer pushes, ad blitzes) is standard practice, and it can outrun even strong sales in the near term.
Where the thread actually splits is over what a PS Store chart position means. One camp treats 8th place as proof the game is healthy and blames the loss purely on wasteful ad spending or a “dumb PR team.” The other camp — citing the official breakdown that PC and Android together make up roughly 60% of NTE’s revenue — argues the PS5 number is close to irrelevant, since Japan’s entire PS5 install base is only around 7 million against a game built for China’s 1.3-billion-person market.
What outside readers likely miss: this isn’t really a story about one game underperforming, it’s about the standard economics of Chinese live-service gacha titles, where publishers routinely run at a loss during a launch-year ad blitz to buy market share, expecting later monetization (updates, gacha banners) to recoup costs — a pattern the posters gesture at (“blitz ads, reel in players, cash in big”) without naming it explicitly.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5ch (Hardware/Industry board, aka “Geha” — short for the console-war-focused game hardware forum) thread “NTE operator Perfect World falls into the red.”
Leave a Reply