**Tagline:** Two AIs. One conversation. Every episode, a real question about the game industry.


**Summary:** BlizzCon 2026 put five years on the table in one night: an open-world StarCraft shooter dated 2030, Diablo V opening on your defeat, Diablo IV quietly moved to seasons-only maintenance — and then a roughly 23-years-waited Warcraft III campaign that shipped the same day it was announced. Shawn and Serevnt read the keynote as a business-model shift: Blizzard stopped selling futures and started selling its present, with China's 442-day server blackout as the ultimate stress test.


**Hosts:** Shawn (publishing vet) & Serevnt (game dev)
* {{TC_01}}` Opening — the lights come back on in Anaheim
* `{{TC_02}}` StarCraft 2030: futures contract or structural bet?
* `{{TC_03}}` The inheritance problem — was silence the product decision?
* `{{TC_04}}` Diablo V: a sequel that opens on your defeat
* `{{TC_05}}` Diablo IV, politely abandoned: maintenance mode as triage
* `{{TC_06}}` The museum opens: Warcraft III ships the same day
* `{{TC_07}}` WoW Forever: the invoice for stillness
* `{{TC_08}}` The smoky cafe: DotA, the editor, and a maternity ward reopened
* `{{TC_09}}` 442 days of darkness — a comeback on a birthday
* `{{TC_10}}` The trust contract: behavior evidence, not promises
* `{{TC_11}}` The 2030 contract: three clauses and a self-written penalty
* `{{TC_12}}` Verdict: the museum is open — annual license, audited at 2030
* `{{TC_13}}` Keep the lights on — closing

Title: Quarterly Quest QQ2 — What the Market Is Arguing About (Tencent & NetEase Earnings)
Series: Gamers With Attitude PODCAST — Quarterly Quest
Tagline: The business of games, for the people who invest in it.
Summary: Two earnings reports, three loud debates — and one of them isn't real. We replay July's single-day selloff (down 7.1% on rumor) against August's +17% domestic games print, then grade each debate with the three-question tool: Is the caliber right? Is the indicator leading or lagging? Did management's wording change? The season's loudest arguments turn out to be mostly a translation problem — currency, line items, and language — and we confess to falling for one of them ourselves.
This episode: The Playbook ｜ Deep Dive (27:54)
Hosts: Shawn (publishing vet) & Serevnt (game dev)


Scenario Room: Three doors — A) the confirmation clock and the demand clock converge in Q3 and the debates dissolve; B) NetEase's new-title gap migrates from seller notes to front pages as the flagship pipeline slips; C) AI capex swallows the games narrative and the market re-prices Tencent as an AI infrastructure company. Shawn leans A; Serevnt leans B; both admit C has the strongest gravity and the weakest evidence. Which one do you think? [Vote link placeholder]


Three checkables on the watch list before the next print — none of them a forecast, all of them observable:
1) Whether Q3 filings repeat the "gross billings grew faster than revenue" style language (its absence leans A).
2) The third-party charts of Where Winds Meet / the flagship pipeline's launch schedule (a sliding trajectory and late dates lean B).
3) The Q3 capex line versus Non-IFRS profit, and whether the "investment ceiling" language holds (a widening gap leans C).


Sources (public; attributed with publisher + date):
- Tencent IR / filings: Q2 & H1 2026 results — revenue RMB 401.24 bn H1 (+10.07%), domestic games RMB 47.3 bn Q2 (+17%), deferred revenue RMB 135.80 bn (+20.7% vs start of year) (tencent.com investor relations)
- NetEase IR / filings: Q2 & H1 2026 results — revenue RMB 60.7 bn H1 (+7.0% official RMB), games segment gross margin 76.1% (+590 bps), attributable net profit Q2 −18.6%, contract liabilities RMB 19.30 bn (−5.9% YoY); official FX note US$1 = RMB 6.7851 (ir.netease.com)
- 7·22 session coverage: Bloomberg via The Edge Malaysia (single-day −7.1%, largest in over a year); BNP Paribas sales-desk narrative ("rumours"); Bernstein estimates (Q2 mobile −2.6%, three flagship titles' gross billings −13%); Citi expectation (domestic +8%); Morningstar counter-view — all third-party views, attributed
- Management call remarks (via third-party transcripts, marked as transcript quotes): Miniclip IAA revenue booked in marketing services — international games growth ~4 pts higher on a like-for-like caliber; Ma Huateng on core-business cash flow funding AI; Martin Lau on investment-ceiling language
- Chinese-language reporting on investment-loss holdings and Ding Lei's Where Winds Meet remarks — attributed to Chinese financial media, referenced as reporting facts only
- Licence approvals: NPPA monthly notices, March 133 → August 215, 1,362 year-to-date
- Overseas estimates: Sensor Tower Q2 estimates (PUBG Mobile ~US$676 m; China publishers' overseas mobile ~RMB 12.37 bn, +30.2% YoY) — third-party estimates, marked as such
- Consensus references marked as LSEG-compiled where cited


Cross-promo: If you enjoy this podcast, check out the original Chinese version, 游戏人有态度.
Disclaimer: This episode was entirely AI-generated; AI opinions do not represent the views of this show.
Disclaimer (finance): Nothing in this episode is investment advice. We only discuss publicly available information. Always do your own research.

Title: Quarterly Quest QQ3 — The 20 Billion Handshake (Kaiying Buys Into Wemade & the End of a 20-Year Legend)
Series: Gamers With Attitude PODCAST — Quarterly Quest
Tagline: The business of games, for the people who invest in it.
Summary: Two numbers open tonight's filing: one Hong Kong dollar and 298 million US dollars — both real, both prices, same document. Kaiying Network, the Shenzhen-listed heaviest hitter in China's Legend-adjacent business (first-half revenue about RMB 4.8 billion, up 86 percent), plans to spend 2.03 billion yuan — about 43 percent of its June 30 cash — to come indirectly into 49 percent of the chain that reaches Wemade's 40.25 percent controlling stake. Not one listed share changes hands: what changes hands is a seat. In this Deal Desk special we read the contract like a contract — the math chain the filing itself prints, the defensive clauses (pay second, escrow everything, refund within ten working days), the 4.4-times price anchors, and the single most valuable line: Nexpulse's promise to endeavor toward an exclusive Legend license, priced no higher than existing standards, with damages attached if it fails.
This episode: The Deal Desk ｜ Special (30:25)
Hosts: Shawn (publishing vet) & Serevnt (game dev)


Scenario Room: Three doors, everything if-then. Door A — full delivery: approvals land, the founder's 39.33 percent settles, and the exclusive-license promise executes at no higher than the existing price standard (watch: the completion announcement, then a signed license with disclosed pricing; Korean media reported a planned October 30 delivery). Door B — approvals stall: the agreement terminates itself and refunds everything within ten working days, no interest — the failure cost was engineered down to nearly zero; the price is time (watch: any termination or extension notice; the 39.33 percent has not yet changed hands as of the filing date). Door C — the slow door: the deal completes while Wemade's recovery stays cosmetic — this half-year's swing leaned on bad-debt reversals, not new hits — and the premium lives in one accounting line (watch: quarterly reports and the long-term equity investment footnote). Shawn leans A; Serevnt leans B. Which one do you think? [Vote link placeholder]


Bounty Board — four new lines posted tonight, none of them a forecast, all of them public documents waiting to exist:
1) An ownership trace on Shanghai Xingjuda, the undisclosed partner in the RMB 2.1 billion pre-injection (the filing does not disclose the split).
2) The status of the Korean merger filing.
3) Whatever Nexpulse's exclusive-license negotiation yields, and at what price standard.
4) The completion announcement for the 39.33 percent.


Sources (public; attributed with publisher + date):
- Kaiying Network announcement 2026-058 (September 12, 2026, Shenzhen Stock Exchange; 16 pages): structure (indirect 49 percent of Neosphere within Wemade's 40.25 percent controlling stake), HKD 1 nominal consideration, subscription USD 298 million (441 shares) vs Nexpulse USD 310.2 million (459 shares) at 49/51, June 30 FX lock, payment order + joint escrow + ten-working-day no-interest refund, currency-gap allocation, and Nexpulse's exclusive-license endeavor promise with damages clause; funding "own and self-raised" funds; Wemade financial tables (2025 net loss about KRW 18.6 bn; H1 2026 net profit about KRW 32.19 bn, unaudited, attributed in the filing to cost cuts and bad-debt reversals)
- Kaiying Network H1 2026 results: revenue RMB 4.797 bn (+86.06% YoY), attributable net profit RMB 1.428 bn (+50.34%); cash and equivalents RMB 4.692 bn at June 30 — company filings
- Blazing Awakening H1 2026 revenue about RMB 2.3 bn — company investor-relations record (H1 briefing, notice 2026-002); profit accounting caliber undisclosed
- Per-share consideration KRW 68,910; June 30 close KRW 19,330; September 11 close KRW 15,650; planned October 30 delivery — according to Korean media reports
- Wemade licensing-line revenue about KRW 30.5 bn in Q1 2026; "first time Chinese capital took control of a Korean game company" framing of the June deal; Tencent's Korean minority positions (Netmarble 17.52%, Krafton 14.40%, Shift Up 34.46%) — according to Korean media reports
- WEMIX-related revenue about 1.4% of 2025 revenue — Korean media (TheElec)
- 2023 Actoz × ChuanQi IP five-year mainland-exclusive license: KRW 100 bn per year, KRW 500 bn across the term, Century Huatong standing behind the payments as guarantor — Chinese financial media (Jiemian, Securities Times)
- February 2026 settlement: RMB 198.6 million, clearing RMB 481 million joint liability and the ICC final award of RMB 224.5 million (April 2025) — Kaiying announcement 2026-006
- Court-found facts: Legend of Mir registered 2000 in Korea as co-owned property (Wemade + Actoz); 2001 Shanda license USD 300,000; by 2002, 68 percent of China's online-game market; December 2021 Supreme People's Court rulings upholding the 2017 renewal — public court records
- 2004 Shanda takeover of Actoz, about KRW 96 bn — Korean media retrospective
- Legend IP market sized at RMB 35.55 billion in 2025 (gray market included); monthly payer rate 93.1 percent; about 40 million cumulative registered players by end-2002 against 48.5 million internet users nationwide — Gamma Data report (January 2026)
- Chinese state-affiliated financial press framing ("securing the source of the copyright, rebuilding the Legend IP landscape") — attributed, quoted as framing only


Cross-promo: If you enjoy this podcast, check out the original Chinese version, 游戏人有态度.
Disclaimer: This episode was entirely AI-generated; AI opinions do not represent the views of this show.
Disclaimer (finance): Nothing in this episode is investment advice. We only discuss publicly available information. Always do your own research.

Title: Quarterly Quest QQ1 — Why Wall Street Keeps Misreading NetEase
Series: Gamers With Attitude PODCAST — Quarterly Quest
Tagline: The business of games, for the people who invest in it.
Summary: A Chinese self-developed, self-published game company keeps surprising Western analysts — not because the numbers lie, but because the model's leading indicator is wrong. We unpack the structural mismatch between a user-acquisition model and NetEase's deferred-revenue-driven, long-life-cycle loop, with a China-industry lens on channel splits and self-publishing.
This episode: The Playbook ｜ Deep Dive (30–40 min)
Hosts: Shawn (publishing vet) & Serevnt (game dev)


Scenario Room: Three doors — A) evergreens steady, new cycle lands, model error narrows; B) new-title cycle disappoints, the June deferred dip was the first domino; C) non-game (Youdao, Cloud Music) becomes a second engine and the valuation frame changes. Shawn leans A; Serevnt leans B (with partial endorsement of C). Which one do you think? [Vote link placeholder]


Three checkables on the watch list before the next print — none of them a forecast, all of them observable:
1) Direction of the deferred-revenue balance (a rebuild toward ~RMB 21.8bn leans A; a second straight drop toward the ~19bn range leans B).
2) The open-world title's launch-window news (on-schedule beta with a healthy first month leans A; a slip or soft reception leans B).
3) The channel-fee line in the next filing (lower Android distribution cost supports the A margin story; returning channel pressure thickens the cost base and adds weight to B).


Sources (public; attributed with publisher + date):
- NetEase IR / filings: Q2 2026 results, 2025 annual report, SEC segment data (ir.netease.com, netease.gcs-web.com)
- fundamentals_brief.md — aggregate financials, HKD, marked � pending official review
- Blizzard / NetEase / Microsoft joint announcement, 2024-04-10 (via 36氪, 证券时报)
- Return-to-China post-launch metrics disclosed by NetEase in 2024Q3 (Hearthstone DAU +~150%, World of Warcraft +~50% vs 2022) — via 第一财经 2025-02-21, 36氪 2025-02-21
- Where Winds Meet / Marvel Rivals player-count milestones — via 观察者网 2025-11-17, CGTN 2025-11-17, owiki/Wikipedia 2026, GameVu 2026 (third-party counts, marked as estimates where applicable)
- Overseas studio closures / retreat reporting — 虎嗅 2026-03-13, 腾讯新闻 2025-06-11
- Chinese brokerage notes (Aug–Sep 2026): 国证国际, 东方证券, 中金, 开源, 中信建投, 国信, 国泰海通, 国海, 申万宏源 — third-party views, attributed with institution + date, used as narrative only
- Western brokers: JPMorgan (via AInvest, 2025-08), BofA (via StocksToTrade, 2026-08-21), Nomura (2026-08) — third-party views, attributed


Cross-promo: If you enjoy this podcast, check out the original Chinese version, 游戏人有态度.
Disclaimer: This episode was entirely AI-generated; AI opinions do not represent the views of this show.
Disclaimer (finance): Nothing in this episode is investment advice. We only discuss publicly available information. Always do your own research.

"The 87 accounts aren't a sob story — they're a legal grenade: China just ruled that the 'non-transferable' clause every platform hides behind does not survive your death."

For the Season 4 finale and the 40-episode milestone, Shawn and Serevnt refuse a victory lap. Instead they read the receipts — every reason across four seasons to walk away: KPIs, layoffs, piracy, AI that now builds games while you sleep, platform lock-in, and an aging player base the industry built for teenagers and forgot. The arc runs from Vol.001's misread 326-billion-yuan market, through the basement garage bands of Vol.002, the plastic bag to the global chart of Vol.030, all the way to Season Four's ten bets on the next decade. Each was a real reason to leave. Yet the engine keeps opening.


The episode lives in three conflicts. Shawn pushes back on the easy word "love" — the people still here include those with no other skill, those held by inertia, those simply unwilling to give up; "still here" is bigger than a greeting card. Serevnt counters that the taxonomy misses the action itself: whatever the label, someone chose to open the engine. Then the unplanned third conflict — for the first time in four seasons the camera turns on the hosts, who ask each other why they're still doing the show. The closer: a server keeping a small light on for a player who stopped showing up. The milestone is real. The ending isn't.

Most Western practitioners picture the platform war as Steam versus Epic, a fight about the discount. In Vol.039, Shawn and Serevnt argue China is fighting a different war entirely — a custody war. Inside the super-apps, WeChat and Douyin, games don't sit on a store shelf. They live inside the chat, the feed, and the wallet the player already opens forty times a day. In 2025, mini-games inside those super-apps generated about 53.5 billion yuan (roughly 7.5 billion US dollars), up 34%, with WeChat mini-games alone reaching over 500 million monthly active users on top of WeChat's 1.41 billion total.


The episode walks three open conflicts. Is WeChat mini-game distribution "democratization" — or a cheaper cut wrapped around total relationship lock-in (login, payment, social graph, discovery all owned by the platform)? Does the five-person team that earned ten times more on WeChat than on Steam prove the reach, or just prove they kept none of the relationship? And the personal one: Shawn once spent a year shipping a game to Steam — 50,000 copies in month one — while an unknown five-person team shipped a similar loop on WeChat the same month and hit 5 million monthly users. His thirty-page plan lost to their zero pages, because his map was missing a continent.


No politics, no blame — just a platform-economics breakdown and a custody checklist any studio can use: rank platforms by who owns the player, not by who takes the cut, and always build a back door. The platform that owns the player is still a person. The player you own is the only one who follows you to the next game.

Most players think a game is made by the studio whose name is on the box. Practitioners know the truth: every shipped title is the visible tip of a supply chain the player never sees. In Vol.038, Shawn and Serevnt draw that map out loud — five layers deep. The engine you build inside. The silicon in the player's GPU and console, concentrated in a single foundry that made roughly seventy percent of the world's advanced chips in 2025. The contract manufacturers — Foxconn, Pegatron, Goertek — who actually assemble every major console. The cloud and storefront where the game lives and sells, and the payment rail that decides how the money finds you.


The episode walks three open conflicts. Should Chinese teams build their own engine to escape dependency — or is the supply chain something chosen for you before you were born? Can a five-person team really build a working engine in two years for fifty thousand dollars, and what does "working" actually mean? And the personal one: Shawn once told a team "use Unity, it's the safest" — then the 2023 runtime-fee shock turned that safety into a question he couldn't answer.


No politics, no blame — just an industry-mechanism breakdown and a resilience checklist any studio can use: name every layer, mark the single points, duplicate the thread that would end you. The supply chain isn't a villain. It's a floor. Check the boards before the dance.

From Ubisoft Shanghai's thousand-strong, fifteen-nation team to a Montreal studio where a Chinese-built game was praised as "a refreshing take from a Canadian indie team," Chinese developers are everywhere in global game production — and almost nowhere in the review. This episode follows the diaspora developer: the Shanghai-trained engineer shaping Dead by Daylight in Montreal, the maker of *Yellowface: An Asian American Story* filed by press under "Asian American" instead of "Chinese developer," and Yang Bing, whose *Lost Soul Aside* is a love letter to Final Fantasy yet was branded a "Chinese PlayStation game" by the West.


Shawn and Serevnt pull the thread three ways. Conflict one: "you proved yourself" collapses the moment the proof is attributed to a country she's never lived in. Conflict two: "not being seen" reads as grievance to Shawn, but as freedom to the developer who finally felt the game was hers, not a KPI's. Conflict three — the unexpected intersection — that acclaimed Montreal loop was her Shanghai graduation project, which Shawn, as a guest reviewer, once dismissed in six words: "creative, but commercially dubious."


We close on the China-practitioner export: you can change the passport, the brand, and the credit line — but not who wrote the first line of code at 2 a.m. Identity doesn't live where the stamp goes. It lives in the build.

In July 2024, the CADPA Game Museum opened in Shanghai — two thousand square meters, over five thousand artifacts, and a dedicated zone for the development of Chinese games. It is the country's first permanent institution to call games cultural heritage. But the oldest item in the case is a pirated CD-ROM in a plastic sleeve, and the curator who presented it didn't laugh when a visitor did.


In this episode, Shawn and Serevnt ask what it means for a still-young industry to build its own monument. They map the West's ten-year head start — MoMA's 2012 "interaction design" acquisition of Pac-Man and Tetris, the V&A's 2018 Design/Play/Disrupt show (which collected WeChat as a design object), and The Strong's World Video Game Hall of Fame, running since 2015. They confront the preservation paradox: a museum can exhibit the box but often cannot legally run the game, while the Video Game History Foundation estimates 87% of pre-2010 games are already gone, and a 2024 US Copyright Office ruling kept remote access blocked.


The conversation turns personal — Shawn once sold those very bootleg discs — and lands on Black Myth Wukong, the 2024 Chinese 3A built on a 16th-century novel, as proof that heritage and a living industry can share the same room.