With the pirate-themed Sea of Remnants, Joker Studio and NetEase are staking a claim not just for their approach to design, but on what is possible in both the genre for storytelling, and the cross-market potential for monetizing their work beyond the game itself.

The Chinese market for games is growing at a rapid rate, with some reports expecting it to surpass $50 billion in 2025, and more notably, generating $20 billion in revenue outside China. Ever since the first major global breakthrough of a Chinese-developed title with Genshin Impact, numerous developers have aimed at translating the live-service free-to-play games that dominate the domestic market onto the global stage. NetEase has had a major hand in this with a number of titles – most recently the wuxia-inspired Where Winds Meet – and Sea of Remnants is their latest swing for an international hit.

Sea of Remnants has been developed by Joker Studio, which was previously behind Identity V, a Dead by Daylight-like PvE game populated with unnerving dolls. The studio’s new project is a seafaring pirate RPG with wooden puppets instead of humans, although like the previous game, it’s a free-to-play title with gacha mechanics.

GamesIndustry.biz visited NetEase’s large campus in Hangzhou, China, to meet Joker Studio and get hands-on time with Sea of Remnants. Walking through the office, guided by staff working for NetEase (and told not to take photos), instant differences in the scale of the business as well as working habits between the West and China immediately become apparent. Joker Studio is in the second of two large campuses that are home to companies across various parts of NetEase’s business, from gaming to e-commerce, with each campus housing close to 10,000 employees – all working in-office rather than remotely.

The facility has a team dedicated to employee welfare, and there’s an extensive gym area with basketball and badminton courts, as well as an in-house canteen with large tables for employees to eat together. Employees receive an allowance for six lunches a week, but if they want something else, a café offers themed drinks, bubble tea and cakes, with in-house recipes based on NetEase games and products (the company runs a food business, too, which is the source for the ingredients). There’s also a range of services offered to employees from the various companies under the NetEase umbrella: items ordered from NetEase’s e-commerce platforms, for example, can be delivered on-site.

The scale of the campus is incomparable to even the largest international studios, which often tend to be split across multiple buildings, or even cities, with some offering remote work. And there are few game companies with tendrils in so many other areas away from games.

The growth of NetEase as a multi-industry conglomerate and one of the largest companies in China has necessitated a massive increase in the size of the company’s offices. The campus we visited only recently opened as part of a phased expansion of the company’s HQ in Hangzhou, where NetEase has been based since its founding in 1997. The campus serves almost as a multi-purpose living facility, with the chance to meet other teams and discuss work in communal spaces.

After noting the scope of the facility to Sea of Remnant’s creative director, Alfie (all creatives interviewed for this article are referred to by an alias upon their request), they enthuse about the benefits of working in a large campus such as this. “It’s an environment ideal for creating,” they explain, making note of the shared spaces in particular. “There’s an openness encouraged here that’s ideal to create – especially with very good canteens to eat with everyone! It supports an open-mindedness to create freely as we want to achieve their goals, which is important in developing good products.”

Pirate adventure

Sea of Remnants is a game that’s grand in scope – and the result of nearly seven years of development, with work starting in October 2019, shortly after the release of Identity V. The team summarize it as being almost like two games. One is based in the town of Orbtopia, which features hundreds of characters and various minigames, from drinking challenges to mahjong to Rhythm Heaven-like music games. The other is the open world of the sea, packed with puzzles, looting, turn-based combat, and mysteries to uncover.

But it’s in the design of the characters that Sea of Remnants reveals its international outlook. “We wanted to bring a refreshing pirate image,” explains Kairos, the lead artist on Sea of Remnants. “We looked at previous pirate characters like those in Pirates of the Caribbean with their gold teeth, looking dirty, sweaty, smelly, as well as One Piece, with its more manga-like style. We wanted 16–17th century pirates, but with a trendy element to them.” In short, this is a game that draws its influences from around the globe – and that is aiming for a worldwide audience, not just a domestic one.

The team is working closely with Japanese artists like Takayuki Takeya and Ryu Oyama, alongside Ashley Wood, with whom the studio worked on Identity V. These international insights helped the team create something with a unique visual flair – and in free-to-play titles such as this, creating engaging characters that people want to invest in is key to sustaining the experience. In fact, the ability for players to invest in these characters beyond the screen has evolved in recent years: in-person events, for example, have become a growing pillar not just in terms of sustaining and building communities, but also in increasing revenue.

Investment beyond the game

The biggest Chinese free-to-play games rack up hundreds of millions of players domestically alone, giving the characters nationwide recognition. Such prominence allows opportunities to bring these characters into the real world through pop-up stores, food and drink collaborations, blind boxes, and merchandising.

There is massive demand in China for blind boxes – sealed boxes containing mystery merchandise – and it’s become increasingly common for franchises to design blind box figures based on their characters for people to collect and share with friends, the mystery being key to their appeal. The blind box market reached 10.1 billion yuan ($1.4 billion) in 2020, and was predicted to reach 150 billion yuan ($20.7 billion) by 2025, yet this is just a portion of a broader merchandising push.

In a market of 700 million players that is utterly dominated by free-to-play titles, game profits are driven heavily by physical and digital merchandising, and collaborations with brands are ever-present. In China, brand collaborations make a real difference in terms of revenue, not just in terms of PR for the game itself. In a local convenience store during our time in Hangzhou, we found blind boxes for Genshin Impact and League of Legends, and even Joker Studio’s own Identity V had a collaboration with a brand of bottled tea sold nationwide.

Naturally, this aspect of monetization has impacted the design of Sea of Remnants, although the designers have attempted to ensure such factors don’t impede on core gameplay mechanics. The success of Identity V has served as a proving ground for how Sea of Remnants can bring its experience into the real world in order to make it less reliant on in-game spend to turn a profit.

As Kairos notes, Identity V allowed them to gain experience of cross-disciplinary collaboration, and “learn what designs are welcomed or less-welcomed by players both inside and outside the game, as well as how to collaborate with companies in these other industries.” In particular, they found that players like to see their own experiences reflected in the characters.

One character’s backstory in Identity V focused on his insecurities over his bad teeth, “with people seeing him as ugly for this, when inside, he’s really honest,” says Kairos. “In Sea of Remnants, we also have a character similar to this called Captain Edward, who’s a very messy and dirty person that doesn’t care about personal hygiene. If you go deeper into his background stories, though, you’ll see that [he] has experienced ups and downs, and at one point sought true love that didn’t work out.”

With relatable characters like this, even those who don’t spend money in-game might choose to invest in a physical memento of their favourite character, bringing a new stream of revenue for the title.

Right now, however, the focus is on the game itself as it nears the beta stage, says Alfie. But merchandising opportunities outside the game are “certainly under consideration for potential future expansion,” they add. “These events have been very popular with Identity V players, and Sea of Remnants, too, needs monetization to keep running. We’re focused on designing a good game for players, and not every design is made with the intent of monetization. But if Sea of Remnants is a success, these sorts of events will become more important in extending the game moving forwards.”

Things like events are often not considered outside of the Asian market, but they can be an influential factor in making games both visible and viable long-term, as the makers of Sky: Children of the Light discovered.

The question of AI

Games are a major component of NetEase’s business, but the firm also includes e-commerce, food and drink, cloud music, online platform services, and AI. Indeed, NetEase Game Labs, the division focused on AI in game development, is credited in Sea of Remnants.

NetEase has a history in the use of generative AI in games. For example, the Fall Guys-like title Eggy Party integrated generative AI as part of its user-generated content system. Furthermore, the Chinese market is broadly more receptive to generative AI than elsewhere, with over 190 models in use in the country and over 600 million users.

However, despite the mention of Game Labs in Sea of Remnant’s opening credits, the Joker Studio team insists that no AI work is present in the game. They have experimented with AI, though, and note it could be used to shape a character or aspect of the game in future.

“AI is a very important business of NetEase, and they have their own independent department dedicated to AI development, but they’re very independent of us, so we don’t hear everything they’re doing,” says Alfie.

“The thing is, game development is highly complex, it has lots of pipelines, it has lots of professional procedures, so personally we don’t see any pipeline or procedure being replaced by AI yet. Maybe in the future, AI has the potential to do something for us, maybe it could replace one pipeline for us. We have looked at it and the possibility of an integration of AI into gameplay, but it’s currently not being used for design or anything like it at this time.”

Shaped by console bans and the rise of PC and online games, the Chinese games industry has always been at the forefront of free-to-play gaming, perfecting how these games are sustained and exist in broader culture beyond the screen. It’s mastered making a free-to-play game of grand AAA scale, and how to avoid overt monetization by creating something engaging enough that people will want to buy a plushie or visit a pop-up event after they stop playing.

Sea of Remnants, with its real-time, almost simulator-like ship battles, vast open world, and plans for hundreds of characters, feels like an indicator for how far the industry has come, going beyond Joker Studio’s previous benchmark and providing something genuinely new in an increasingly competitive space. It makes a global statement that goes far beyond NetEase’s Hangzhou offices.

NetEase paid for the author’s travel and accommodation for their visit to Joker Studio.