NetEase Games has seemingly established a new global publisher for their mobile games, titled Exptional Global.

Fans had realized that various NetEase titles like Onmyoji The Card Game, Lord of The Rings: War as well as Dead By Daylight Mobile had all had their publishers changed to the new one, but only on the Google Play store.

That being said, not all of NetEase Games’ titles have been moved- LifeAfter and Identity V are all still listed as being theirs to publish.

It should be noted that there’s almost no public information about Exptional Global- the company has no website, and games like Dead By Daylight Mobile and Lord of The Rings: War still have NetEase Games on their sites.

Even the Investor Relations portal for NetEase makes no mention of Exptional, with the only proof it even exists being the Google Play store.

The only information about the company seems to come from AppBrain, who lists Exptional as being a Singapore-based operation, though it’s unclear where they’d gotten this information from.

Considering the app icons still contain the NetEase logo, it’s easy to assume that Exptional Global is an offshoot of NetEase Games for publishing overseas, not unlike HoYoVerse/Cognosphere for miHoYo. UPDATE: NetEase has confirmed that Exptional is a global publishing arm. Their statement has been published below.

The new name does seem to set it apart from NetEase Games’ Singapore office, however.

We’ve reached out to representatives of NetEase Games for clarification and will update this article with their response.

UPDATE: A representative from NetEase has confirmed that Exptional is indeed part of a new global publishing initiative by NetEase

Based on NetEase Games’ global publishing operation plan, moving forward players can also find us on Google Play at EXPTIONAL PTE. LTD. to access our library of global publishing content.

We look forward to engaging all of our fans at this new storefront on Google Play and continuing to deliver all of the high-quality games you expect from us.

They also confirmed that it’s a gradual rollout, but did not directly confirmed if that meant the entire catalogue would move over to Exptional Global.

Basically, publishers established outside of China are not necessary beholden to their rules- it’s part of why Genshin Impact characters had to be censored in the Chinese version of the game, while Global received the altered outfits as free skins.

NetEase Games gained attention early this year after a messy breakup with Blizzard Entertainment- the two entities were not renewing their contract to publish Blizzard’s games in China, leading to a livestream of the publisher destroying a Warcraft Statue.

However, due to a separate agreement, the two are still co-publishing Diablo Immortal.