CC Live eventually became NetEase's "abandoned piece"; the golden age of game streaming has long since ended.
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Author | Huang Yu
After 10 years of operation, NetEase’s game entertainment live streaming platform, CC Live, will officially exit the stage of history.
On June 30, CC Live announced its shutdown, stating that due to adjustments in its product development and operation strategies, it will formally terminate operations at 15:00 on August 31, 2026. From today, the platform has closed its download portal, stopped recharging, new user registration, and new broadcaster/guild onboarding.
Whether for NetEase itself or the entire gaming livestream industry, this is not a sudden event, but rather an ending that seemed preordained.
Game industry analyst Zhang Shule told Wall Street Insights that from the gaming live streaming war to the ‘thousand platform’ battle, CC Live was never in the lead. Though it could serve as a promotion platform for NetEase games, and rely on NetEase game copyrights to create its own "reserved zone," overall it was always somewhat dispensable.
“Now, transforming from an idle piece to an abandoned one, is also a strategic contraction by NetEase regarding a gaming segment lacking the ability to generate revenue.” Zhang Shule believes that for NetEase, from game promotion to esports event collaborations, it can rely on much larger user-base short video streaming platforms. The complete decline of CC Live and its shutdown will almost have no negative impact.
As one of the earliest game livestream platforms in China, CC Live's predecessor can be traced back to NetEase CC Voice, launched in 2009.
At that time, players of large-scale multiplayer online role-playing games needed voice coordination, so NetEase launched CC Voice, essentially a piece of infrastructure built around the game community, mainly serving players of NetEase games such as “Fantasy Westward Journey” and “Westward Journey Online.”
Around 2016, mobile live streaming entered its boom period. NetEase upgraded CC Voice to CC Live, hoping to connect voice, community, and live streaming through its own game ecosystem.
Given the industry environment at the time, this decision was easy to understand.
In those years, live streaming was one of the most imaginative tracks on the internet. Showroom, gaming, esports, and pan-entertainment rapidly merged. Top streamers set new income records, platforms fiercely competed for exclusive content and user time, ushering in the “thousand streamer battle.”
Zhang Shule pointed out that CC Live could only be seen as NetEase’s strategic move, as a gaming giant, to personally enter the live streaming sector, much like Tencent did at the dawn of game live streaming.
NetEase was never short on entry conditions.
On one hand, it had a stable supply of games; on the other, it naturally possessed a pool of game player traffic. If player watching, interaction, and consumption could be retained within its own ecosystem, in theory, it could form a closed loop of "game publishing—content dissemination—user operation."
Public data shows that at its peak, CC Live had over 280 million registered users, more than 45 million monthly active users, and over 200,000 signed streamers.
Over the years, NetEase remained a leader in gaming and produced several blockbuster titles, but never managed to have CC Live break free from its identity as a “NetEase game supporting platform,” ultimately leading to its decline.
It had content, but lacked cross-platform influence; had stable users, but lacked the siphon effect of top streamers; had an ecological foundation, but struggled to become an industry-level entry point.
Of course, the shutdown of CC Live is not an isolated event.
In recent years, the game live streaming industry has already completed a thorough shakeout.
In the early days, several players competed: game live streaming platforms, variety show platforms, video sites, and internet giants entered together. The end result was that Panda TV, Quanmin TV, etc., closed down, and the market gradually centralized into a few top platforms.
To build a closed game industry chain, Tencent invested in Douyu and Huya during the “thousand streamer battle,” becoming the largest shareholder of both. The surviving Douyu and Huya subsequently took up most of the game live streaming market share.
Zhang Shule pointed out that the live streaming platform battle was already settled before 2020. Douyu and Huya now form a duopoly in gaming livestreams, but Douyin, Kuaishou, and other pan-entertainment short video platforms have expanded into gaming live streaming and have long surpassed “pure” gaming live streaming platforms in true market share.
Meanwhile, Zhang Shule believes that game live streaming, as the starting point for live streaming and live commerce, its vertical nature limits expansion space and makes it quite distant from mainstream current profitability methods like livestreaming sales. Now it’s merely a small vertical niche category, facing survival difficulties, and even issues like gambling have emerged, which is obvious.
From NetEase’s own perspective, its strategic direction in recent years has become increasingly clear: strengthen main gaming business, pursue globalization, develop AI capabilities, and continuously optimize non-core businesses.
Maintaining a standalone live streaming system requires long-term investments in technology, moderation, streamer operations, guild ecosystem, and commercialization teams; handing over content distribution to larger platforms might even be more efficient.
Therefore, the shutdown of CC doesn’t necessarily mean NetEase is abandoning live streaming content, but rather giving up “building its own platform.”
NetEase games will still need live streaming capabilities in the future, but these will likely be fulfilled through external platform collaborations, rather than internal products.
In the past, the internet believed “owning the entry point is owning the future”; now more and more companies believe “investing resources in truly moat-worthy capabilities.”
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