Chinese gaming giant NetEase continues its dominance in the mobile market, as the company has now announced its plans to partner with The Pokémon Company to bring its Pokémon franchise to a whole new market, virtually untapped: China.
This is part of NetEase’s overall outline, which looks to add more foreign content to its lineup as well. Just yesterday, the Chinese gaming company jointly announced a partnership with Marvel Entertainment to bring new content to China in the form of both video games and television series, as well as some comic books. While the greater focus is to bring the incredibly lucrative Marvel IP to China, the deal also covers padding NetEase’s portfolio of content available to the global market.
As for Pokémon, Chinese players can expect the first title in the franchise to be playable some time in the future, in the form of Pokémon Quest. Pokémon Quest is a mobile game that was first released globally in the summer of 2018, and was developed by Japan’s Game Freak. The title will arrive nearly three years after the mobile hit Pokémon Go, which in turn was developed by Niantic.
NetEase has expressed their enthusiasm at the partnership, with NetEase VP Ethan Wang saying, “The Pokémon Quest partnership is a new start and highly anticipated.” If all goes well, we could see more Pokémon titles being developed across all platforms for China, although expect to see focus on mobile – the region is very well-known for their high usage of smartphones, which has helped by titles like PUBG Mobile (recently pulled) to survive in a smaller format, especially with the battle royale market being cornered by Epic Games’ Fortnite.
The separate Marvel partnership – details of which can be found here – entails “five or six” mobile games based on the entertainment giant’s IP. With Avengers: Endgame breaking all kinds of records and the Marvel Cinematic Universe train showing no signs of slowing down, it would seem that Marvel is trying to capitalize in any way they can in order to bring new forms of its IPs to fans around the world.
NetEase has recently reached a milestone, with its iteration of Minecraft for mobile phones helping them reach a landmark of 200 million players in China.
