On February 29, NetEase handed over its 2023Q4 and annual financial report to the market: 2023 annual revenue exceeded the 100 billion mark and reached 103.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 725%；Non-GAAP net profit was 32.6 billion, a significant increase of 4298%。
As NetEase's core business, games will perform well in 2023, with revenue reaching 81.6 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 94%, accounting for 788%。
2022-2024 NetEase's quarterly revenue (data**Tiger sniff).
This growth is not only due to the stable performance of old IPs, but also due to the strong impact of new products launched in recent years. Whether it is the mobile game "Against the Cold" or "Egg Boy Party", they have shown outstanding dominance in their respective tracks. It can be said that after years of trial and error and precipitation, NetEase Games may be ushering in the day of harvest.
But in recent days, especially after the release of the financial report, a large number of negative news about NetEase, especially for "Egg Boy Party", has suddenly appeared on the Internet, including the detection of a local police station using game props to defraud minors of property, minors deceiving their parents to recharge huge amounts in the game, etc.;
A typical "Egg Boy Party" related news.
This was followed by comments on these events by a number of so-called game ** accounts on major platforms. They tried to tie the revenue growth shown in the financial report to the consumption of minors in "Egg Boy Party" to question the legitimacy of NetEase's game business, accusing NetEase of "blindly pursuing profits" and "harvesting elementary school students".
A typical black draft of "Egg Boy Party".
This logic is clearly untenable. According to NetEase's current policy on the protection of minors, it is impossible for minors to use the account registered with their own identity to recharge large amounts, and the "Baby Egg" mode in "Egg Boy Party" can also provide customized game content for minors, block public screen chats and strangers to form teams, and protect children from criminals in the game.
In fact, in most cases, the specific fraud process and transfer process take place on communication tools, and "games" are just one of the useful means. In addition, under the premise that the manufacturer has done its best, if such cases still occur, the supervision responsibility of parents cannot be ignored.
It is actually very unnatural for normal journalists to tie local cases related to minors, especially fraud cases, to the game itself, and deliberately blur the position of scammers and game companies in the case—even veteran editors who have stereotypes about the game will not only name them when writing about "Egg Boy Party", but also hide the name of the game when talking about a shooting mobile game.
In fact, "Peace Elite" is also a high incidence of juvenile-related cases.
If these news and commentaries were based only on objective facts, they would not have such a clear orientation towards the goal. The effect they want to achieve is obvious: to guide netizens, especially netizens who have negative feelings about the game (such as a large number of parents), to become hostile to the game, especially NetEase games.
It can be seen that this wave of ** tide that began to rise before 315 has a clear purpose, and it is obvious that someone is manipulating it behind it——— in fact, these manuscripts and ** will inevitably show their butts while naming "Egg Boy Party".
The traces left on the Internet are easy to corroborate this view. You can see that these manuscripts have common characteristics, such as:
A manuscript is re-distributed by multiple marketing accounts (even on the same platform). On Xiaohongshu, you can see the same article on two or three related accounts, with an exact duplicate tag.
The logic and structure of all the manuscripts are exactly the same, almost all of them first mention NetEase's financial report, then move on to the protection of minors, and finally accuse NetEase of poisoning minors, the twist is quite blunt but uniform.
Confusing concepts and shifting responsibility.
The keyword "primary school students" is also uniformly used in the title, either "NetEase relies on primary school students to turn over" or "Primary school students support NetEase's financial report half of the sky", it is difficult not to wonder if the title must be mentioned in the requirements document with these three words.
What can't help but laugh is that even the post-00 group accounts for 27 of the egg boy users67%, the youngest post-00s (strictly speaking) are also about to enter the society, and the word "primary school student" seems outdated, outdated and overforced.
Egg Boy Party User Structure (Data **Tiger Sniff).
It's also worth noting that there are other party games and competitive games for young people, but there is no mention of them in these articles. NetEase has achieved results in the big DAU game for the first time, whose cheese has it moved? I believe the reader already has the answer in mind.
Normal business competition has always been market-supported. As long as they come up with better products and better services, players will naturally buy it - but people will never support merchants who don't put effort into improving their own quality and use indiscriminate means to discredit their competitors.
Manipulating **, playing word games, and smearing NetEase and Egg Boy in an illogical way are all nonsense in the eyes of discerning people. These clumsy performances will eventually become a red nose on the clown's face and stop laughing.