There seems to be a correction in the Chinese game industry’s investment into Japanese games, according to Bloomberg—and reliable sources claim that Ouka Studios, a subsidiary of NetEase, has been near-entirely cut as a result. These reports come literally the day after Ouka’s latest game, Visions of Mana, released globally.
The report states that those familiar with these affairs claim “all but a handful of jobs” at the Tokyo-based Ouka Studios have been cut. One reporter at Bloomberg also reports that layoffs have been happening since the spring, so this is likely part of a trend to scale back the studio itself.
There is no comment from NetEase nor Ouka at the moment confirming nor denying alleged layoffs. The former claims there is “nothing to announce” at the moment, but that they are “always making necessary adjustments to reflect market conditions.”
Ouka’s latest game, Visions of Mana, was released globally today as is a highly-anticipated new mainline game, the first in fifteen years in the long-running Mana series. The series started as a Final Fantasy spin-off in 1991, and is distributed by Square Enix, though Ouka handled direct development for Visions.
The Bloomberg analysis discusses that Chinese companies made investments into Japanese studios, most prominently from NetEase and Tencent, especially as the anime and gaming landscape flourish abroad and in China. However, such investments didn’t seem to have the intended impact.
Meanwhile, Chinese games have done well in their home country, including Naraka: Bladepoint and very recently Black Myth: Wukong; NetEase has a 5% stake in the latter’s creator, Game Science.
This year, according to an unofficial count, 2024 game layoffs have surpassed those of 2023, currently over 11,500 versus last year’s approximate 10,500. Combining the start of mass tech layoffs in 2022 through 2023, via this site, there have been over 30,000 job losses.
