Naraka: Bladepoint sold more than 6 million copies in past 6 months. This was NetEase’s latest big adventure into the Battle Royale market, and a big step towards publishing single-purchase games. This martial art themed multiplayer game originated from the cult classic action game “Meteor, Butterfly, Sword”, with Guan Lei being the head producer on both titles.
In the past few years, Chinese developers have really been gearing up towards making their own AAA level games, with Naraka being one of the first to come to market as a result. Being a hero shooter battle royal, the game has interesting characters, gigantic maps, and has incorporated the latest graphics technologies such as NVIDIA DLSS and ray tracing reflections.
Despite NetEase having great success with battle royal games like Knives Out on mobile, a modern multiplayer arena game on console and PC is still proving to be a different level of challenge, and the game took several public alpha and beta tests to iron out some of its awkward design choices.
Naraka being a single-purchase game is also a far cry from NetEase’s typical free-to-play business model. Despite some micro transaction elements remaining in the game, all the in-game content can be unlocked by just playing and grinding. 6 million copies sold is still far from the true juggernauts like PUBG and APEX Legend, but already a huge leap forward for the upcoming waves of Chinese AAA games.