The Chinese group NetEase has been making waves in Japan since it added the country’s game creators like Goichi “Suda51” Suda and Hiroyuki Kobayashi to its ranks. A recent interview in the Weekly Famitsu magazine revealed that both creators are separately working on new games after they have established studios inside the group. [Thanks, Ryokutya!]
When Suda51 joined NetEase in 2021, he brought his Grasshopper Manufacture studio together with him. The studio has since been working on multiple games, including a remaster of Shadows of the Damned and a collaborative title with Hidetaka “Swery65” Suehiro in Hotel Barcelona. The new interview revealed that Suda51 has almost finished developing a new game, and he hopes to be able to reveal it in early 2025. He also teases that the new title will not be a clone or copy of other existing games.
Meanwhile, the ex-Capcom game producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi is separately working on a new action RPG after he established the GPTRACK50 studio inside the NetEase group in late 2022. His team is about to polish up the game’s action systems. The studio is developing the new title with PC as the base platform, but it has also completed testing the game on consoles.
Besides Suda51 and Hiroyuki Kobayashi, NetEase is also hosting Nagoshi Studio, headed by the Yakuza / Like a Dragon series creator Toshihiro Nagoshi, and Studio Flare which is co-established by Toshimichi Mori of BlazBlue fame. The group-owned Ouka Studios is also working on Visions of Mana, which Square Enix will release for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X|S, and PC worldwide on August 29, 2024.
Published: Aug 7, 2024 10:00 am