20 professional clubs, 5.2 million prize money, this time NetEase Esports seems to have come true.
On April 21, NetEase announced at the press conference that the Yonghao Infinite Professional League (NBPL) between the Koi Cup and the World Championship Was officially launched, and the new era of Yonghao Infinite E-sports officially arrived, and the NBPL also truly became the first martial arts battle royale e-sports league in China.
The launch of the NBPL highlights the determination of NetEase E-sports to revitalize its own e-sports brand outside the mobile e-sports market. There is no doubt that the game that has maintained a high degree of popularity at home and abroad since the 2021 public beta is qualified to bear this burden from the perspective of quality and audience, but the truth of the battle royale game e-sports double-edged sword will be born under the integration of "martial arts", "national style" and other elements What kind of effect still has to draw a question mark, how many opportunities and challenges are there in front of NetEase and his NBPL?
The ultimate form of eternal IP
As a popular IP of NetEase in 2021, Yonghao has been online for 90 days, and sales have exceeded 6 million copies. The data refreshed the new record of domestic buyout game sales, accounting for more than 50% of China's annual buyout game sales in 2021, ranking in the leading position in the same category. With the performance of Eternal Robbery in the market, NetEase's desire for Eternal Destruction's e-sports is naturally impatient.
In July 2021, the first official event, the Eternal Koi Cup National Elite Tournament, was officially launched, and the BAODA team's efforts to win the championship against the powerhouse GBL became the focus of the moment.
Subsequently, the launch of the Robbery Cup led to the further development of eternal e-sports, and 24 teams from 7 divisions around the world fought fiercely, and finally Jay Chou's team JTeam successfully won the championship.
The recently launched Yonghao Infinite Professional League accommodates 20 teams, and many well-known teams have also appeared in the lineup, including JDG and WBG, which are well known to domestic players, which are listed among them, which shows that the domestic industry has good expectations for Yonghao.
In addition, Alliance, an old acquaintance of the knife circle, has also entered the big family of the Everlasting Professional League.
Team A formed a strong squad as early as the cup robbery and successfully played in the finals as a representative team in the European division. This time, interest naturally occupies a leading role. The Wolves from the English Premier League are also worthy of attention, wolves with a wide layout in the field of e-sports, since two years ago, they have launched in-depth exchanges with NetEase Games, and are the giants of NetEase's fifth personality professional league IVL.
With the opening of the Everlasting Pro League, players from major clubs will be on a new platform to show themselves. The 2022 Forever Robbery Pro League has two seasons throughout the year, with a total prize money of 5.2 million yuan. Players will have ample opportunity to witness the growth of the players, and the players will also cope with the arrival of new challenges with the highest morale.
At this point, the final form of the annual event system has been fully revealed, in 2022, the eternal robbery of the endless e-sports will be composed of 2 Koi Cup National Elite Tournament, 2 professional leagues, and 1 robbery cup, these five events will cover the whole year, shouldering the heavy responsibility of playing the country for NetEase's e-sports.
Can a martial artist eat chicken break the battle royale spell?
Battle Royale has proven to be an excellent game mode since the 2017 explosion, but after five years of observation, its expressiveness in esports is difficult to say successful.
PUBG, one of the most popular massively multiplayer online games of 2017, its production company Blue Hole naturally thinks about how to keep the game hot. Esports is undoubtedly a good choice, but PUBG, as the battle royale game Big Brother, shows everyone the difficulty of the battle royale form in terms of competitive presentation with hands-on practice.
Material collection, commonly known as the long development period leads to the loss of part of the viewing of the event, the existence of the "shrinking circle" mechanism makes the luck component of the game higher, and the multi-person multi-team competition also greatly improves the difficulty of OB and commentary...
These are closely bound to the battle royale gameplay and difficult to modify the mechanics, but instead drag down the pace of the game itself in the e-sports, over time, almost none of the battle royale games have been spared the existence of fun and bad looks.
Some of the new battle royale games, such as APEX Heroes on the PC side and peace elites on the mobile side, have added the content of ensuring viewing and optimizing OB in their own esports competitions: increasing the early elimination points to encourage fights, developing technologies such as split-screen OB and first-view broadcast streams, but these measures are difficult to change the visual disadvantages of battle royale games compared to MOBA and traditional FPS esports events.
These disadvantages also exist in the eternal robbery project, the form of the eternal robbery martial arts fighting is faster in pace than other battle royale games, and the short-term combat replaces the long-range firefight so that the game is almost from the beginning to the end, but the OB chaos situation will still be an important problem that the NBPL needs to face in the future.
And these game perception puzzles officially limit the number of battle royale game esports audiences.
E-sports comes from games, and all the successful e-sports IP at present is quite experienced in the conversion of the e-sports population and the game population.
As the number one brand of NetEase's current end game, the large player base of gamers is a major advantage of its e-sports, but how to efficiently convert gamers into e-sports audiences is something that Needs to be considered by NetEase E-sports and the NetEase E-sports behind it.
Rooted in the mobile terminal MOBA e-sports for many years in the decisive battle of ping an Jing professional league OPL, the first asymmetric professional e-sports event in China, the fifth personality professional league IVL, these are netease's e-sports brands, but more or less face the problem that the e-sports support rate is obviously less than the total number of players.
Until today, almost a year after its inception, the eternal doom has made many deployments before the arrival of the NBPL, including training camps for players, Internet café competitions and even folk cups, etc., which have helped their own IP to cultivate a large number of e-sports audiences.
After making full preparations, the NBPL finally met with everyone in the near future, perhaps for NetEase E-sports, choosing a brand that has been hot for a long time, and the cup system has created a more satisfactory user ecology after launching a cyclical professional league that belongs to the eternal robbery, which is a favorable choice at the right time and place.
For this special martial arts battle royale game, this road that has been tested many times by predecessors and still has no clear direction is still full of challenges.