Where Winds Meet has taken the Chinese market by storm and is now attracting countless bad copies that do not understand what makes the title so brilliant. For our Grindfest-Theme Week 2026, MeinMMO author Cedric sheds light on this.
If I want to know where the future of open-world games is heading, I have been looking almost exclusively to Asia for years. And there, one title is currently making waves, which you cannot ignore: Where Winds Meet. This is the title that has dusted off and turned the traditional martial arts genre Wuxia on its head.
The numbers behind the hit are bordering on madness: A slim 15 million registered players in the first four weeks in China, which exploded to over 30 million after two months. In just the first quarter of 2025, the game generated around 190 million euros across platforms for NetEase (Source: finance.sina.com.cn).
With so much money, it doesn’t take long for the competition to try to replicate the success. Since the release, clones of Where Winds Meet have been sprouting up and impressively failing at the same time.
Where Winds Meet is a brilliant money machine
What makes WWM so successful? The developers have invented an enticing gameplay loop that first makes players happy and then never lets them go:
You start in a massive, over 150-hour long singleplayer campaign. The genius part: You can enjoy the story completely for yourself and do not need other players. You finish the game with a really good feeling – but that’s exactly when the trap snaps shut.
Instead of throwing the game off your hard drive after the credits, you smoothly transition into an endless multiplayer sandbox mode. There, you will find so much more content that brings variety and fun.
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The monetization completely avoids brazen pay-to-win. Instead, you are slowly asked to pay through extremely cheap minimal expenditures. Really nice premium skins often cost just 13 to 78 cents in China. In Germany, they start at one euro.
This hurts no one, but sums up to gigantic amounts of microtransactions with millions of players. Meanwhile, the developers are pushing out updates and new content just fast enough to ensure that boredom does not set in.
For filthy rich hardcore gamers (Whales
), there are pure status symbols like a flashy server yacht for a mere 36,000 euros. This provides absolutely no gameplay advantages, but guarantees the studio absurdly high revenues.
The Clone Wars
This brilliant business model has completely driven the competition crazy in China. As I observed the Chinese market in the past few months, one thing became clear: Everyone wants to build their own Where Winds Meet.
However, instead of delivering gripping worlds, publishers usually only provide soulless content mush that falls back into ancient, annoying MMORPG patterns.
Here are two particularly extreme examples of how to burn millions of euros in record time:
39 Million Euros for “Leftover Meal”
Under the name Sword and Fairy World, Starry Studio sent a clone into the race that wanted to force endless gaming joy with a budget of over 39 million euros and 240 developers (Source: i.ifeng.com). The result was a disaster.
Instead of offering their own ideas, the creators simply stole the cherries from other hits: The combat system was copied from Genshin Impact and mixed with a monster taming system that is identical to that from Palworld or Pokémon.
When I first heard about this bizarre gameplay cocktail, I had to shake my head in disbelief. And I was not alone: Players in China felt the same way. On the platform TapTap, there were devastating reviews. The community dubbed the game irritably as a “loveless hodgepodge electronic leftover meal” (Source: finance.sina.cn).
The huge world was yawningly empty and shone through five minutes of flying in one direction, only to have three seconds of fun there. There was also an aggressive gacha payment system that demanded too much money even for the Asian market.
The receipt: While Where Winds Meet pocketed millions during the same period, Sword and Fairy World completely sank. Shortly thereafter, a brutal wave of layoffs followed, with 80% of the entire development team being set outside. But another game can top that (Source: finance.sina.com.cn).
Who still plays with dolls?
Even more bizarre was the situation with The Legend of the Condor Heroes. Here, an internal team from NetEase essentially tried to surpass their own hit Where Winds Meet. They invested six years of work, 600 employees, and an absurd mega-budget of over 130 million euros in the project (Source: news.pedaily.cn).
The absolute breaking point was a design misstep, whose disastrous consequences I, as an Asia expert, can relate to all too well: Instead of relying on the epic, adult graphics of WWM, the developers gave the characters a large cute doll head style (“Ball-Joint-Doll”).
The adult Wuxia target audience was shocked and fled. Moreover, it hid what was probably a boring old-school MMO with automatic gameplay loops. This has long been out in China and only lives in a niche for mobile.
When the marketing team also started to instigate toxic mudslinging against the competition on social media, the title was finished. The game lost 80% of its players in the first month (Source: tmtpost.com).
NetEase pulled the emergency brake, completely took the game off the market, and fired the top management. A rescue attempt failed spectacularly: On iOS, revenues are now languishing at a pathetic under 4,600 euros per month.
Where Winds Meet has also impressed our experts:
“How to WWM” Killer
The failure of the clones shows: The times when you could simply present players with a huge map with a well-known brand are definitely over in 2026.
It is clear to me: Gamers see through lifeless backdrops that hide nothing but greedy pay-to-win mechanics faster than ever before. If developers want to pose a real threat to Where Winds Meet, they need to pull entirely different calibers.
You need a genuine, standalone game. Titles like Crimson Desert show how it’s done: They deeply engage players with a bombastic singleplayer experience. Players do not want to stop playing and hesitate to leave the starting area even after hundreds of play hours.
Some upcoming games have understood this and are targeting exactly the right elements. A hot candidate is the open-world MMORPG Honor of Kings: World, which is also set to appear in the West soon.
The creators promise an engaging singleplayer world that you can explore entirely on your own – with an optional MMO component for everyone who wants even more afterward.
Anyone wanting to unseat Where Winds Meet must not misuse the open world as a pretty veneer for outdated cash grab mechanics. Gameplay freedom, a world that reacts to you physically, and fair monetization must form a unit. Until the competition understands this, WWM remains the undisputed king in the ring. Why Honor of Kings: World could become the next WWM, you can find out here: In China, everyone is currently playing the biggest new MMORPG of 2026, and I sneaked onto the servers for you
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