Reporter |
Editor | Wen Shuqi
Back on January 16, 2020, the team behind the beloved MMORPG JX3 (Jianxia 3) hosted a special New Year’s Eve dinner for players at a bustling hotpot restaurant in Chengdu. This wasn’t a one-off stunt. Since 2012, game producer Guo Weiwei had made it a tradition to break bread with the community. For him and the dev team, it was the perfect stage for honest face-to-face chats, a move that also made JX3 one of the earliest games in China to truly invest in offline community building.
At that particular Chengdu dinner, both Guo and the core R&D team showed up. One player who was there still recalls the electric atmosphere: “When Guo Weiwei walked in, the place just erupted. Passersby and other diners were craning their necks, asking, ‘Is that a celebrity?'”
Fast forward to August 27, 2026, and Guo Weiwei dropped a bombshell on his Weibo: August 28 would be his final day at Seasun. It was the end of an era. Having first joined the studio back in 2004, he’d climbed the ranks to become the mastermind behind JX3 and eventually the company’s CEO—a remarkable 22-year tenure.
There’s a poignant detail netizens were quick to catch. Guo’s Weibo ID, which had long read “JX3 Producer Guo Weiwei,” was quietly changed to just “Game Producer Guo Weiwei” after the announcement. The timing is almost poetic. August 28, 2009, marked the game’s official public launch. Now, on August 28, 2026, as JX3 prepares to celebrate its 17th birthday at Seasun’s Zhuhai headquarters, its founding father is walking out the door.
You can’t simply sum up Guo Weiwei’s relationship with JX3 in terms like “producer” and “product.” This departure has sparked conversations that reach far beyond industry insiders. When a game IP survives for seventeen years, the bond between players and the game inevitably deepens and morphs. The characters, the guilds, the in-game friends, the patch cycles, even the dev team itself—they’ve all been constant companions through the years. And in that journey, Guo Weiwei himself carved out a place of irreplaceable significance in the hearts of millions.
The Producer Fans “Pushed to Stardom”
From the moment he joined Seasun in 2004, Guo’s career was on a steady upward trajectory. He served as Executive Lead Planner, Lead Planner, and Executive Producer on JX3 before officially taking the reins as Producer and Creative Director in 2010. But it’s his tireless, high-frequency communication with the player base that truly fused his name with the game, turning him into a cornerstone of player culture.
In 2018, Weibo launched its “Star Chart,” a daily ranking where users could boost their favorite celebrities’ or public figures’ popularity through check-ins, reposts, comments, and likes. That same year, JX3 was approaching its 10th anniversary. According to Kingsoft’s 2018 annual report, the company’s online gaming and other businesses raked in RMB 2.286 billion, a 13% year-over-year increase. The report specifically highlighted JX3 as a core product, crediting version updates, esports events, and offline activities for keeping players engaged.
Inspired, the game’s hyper-active community launched a campaign to get their beloved producer on the chart. They affectionately dubbed themselves “Wei-sheng-su” (a playful pun on his name) and rallied to “send Guo Weiwei to stardom.” The result? A game developer’s name was suddenly rubbing shoulders with A-list entertainers on a pop-culture leaderboard—a truly surreal moment for the industry.
When the buzz reached him, Guo responded in an interview with characteristic humility: “I’m just a guy who makes games. I don’t want to be an internet celebrity.”
However, when discussing the deep connection with players, he later elaborated on his philosophy: you absolutely have to communicate with your users. For someone steering a product’s core vision, he argued, spending time understanding how players genuinely experience the game matters more than any market research report.
This direct, no-filter approach became his signature. He was on Weibo constantly, talking shop with players, taking praise when things were great and absorbing the heat when a patch flopped. Players would boost his chart ranking on good days and unleash their frustrations on him on bad ones.
After his departure announcement, even lapsed players—those who’d quit or long since stopped logging in—came out of the woodwork to talk about him. One former player shared with our reporter, “Honestly, a lot of us didn’t agree with some of his later game design choices. But seeing the news of him leaving… I still feel grateful he stuck with JX3 back in the day.”
On the flip side of this emotional connection lies the cold, hard commercial reality: JX3 is a business powerhouse. It’s far from a nostalgia-driven relic. Kingsoft’s 2023 annual report revealed that in its 14th year of operation, JX3’s annual revenue still hit an all-time high.
Then came June 2024, with the launch of JX3: Boundless on mobile, featuring full data synchronization with the PC client. Seasun later reported that within the first month, the game boasted 11.46 million monthly active users. Crucially, 6.91 million of those were returning players—a staggering 60.29%—and a significant chunk of those returnees were veterans who’d left in the early years.
The financial impact was undeniable. In Q3 of that year, Kingsoft’s gaming revenue hit RMB 1.708 billion, a 78% year-over-year surge. The company explicitly credited this growth to JX3’s stellar performance and the hype machine that was the Boundless launch.
The MMORPG genre, to which JX3 belongs, is fundamentally a business built on long-term relationships. Characters, gear, and cosmetics are valuable digital assets. But guilds, friendships, and shared memories form a social fabric with an even higher cost of migration. The trust and communication patterns forged between the dev team and players over the years are just as critical in determining whether players feel compelled to return or stay.
So, when players talk about their “Jianghu” (the game’s world), their “in-game family,” or “coming home,” those sentiments eventually translate into hard numbers like active users, return rates, and revenue on the company’s balance sheet.
But once Guo stepped into the CEO role in January 2018, his challenges expanded far beyond just keeping JX3 alive and thriving. He was now responsible for allocating company resources and pondering the future of Seasun beyond its martial arts fortress.
The Gamble That Didn’t Pay Off
Enter Mecha BREAK, the most ambitious and high-profile bet of his tenure. It’s a near-future sci-fi mech action shooter—a stark departure from the wuxia MMORPGs Seasun was famous for. First unveiled in late 2023 and launched globally in July 2025, it was Seasun’s ticket into the mech, esports, and international markets.
Pre-launch, the hype was immense. Mecha games aren’t exactly mainstream, but Guo’s passion for the genre was a primary driver. He was a self-professed fan of titles like “Super Robot Wars” and “Armored Core,” and his stated ambition was simple: to create “the best mech game ever made.”
During its global demo test in 2025, Mecha BREAK peaked at around 300,000 concurrent players on Steam. After the full release, SteamDB recorded a historical peak of over 130,000 concurrent users. The initial numbers were promising.
But the hype didn’t translate into sustained success. Following launch, players were quick to criticize the game for a lack of immersive storytelling and an overly grindy progression system. The player count started to slide, and slide fast.
Just over a month after launch, in August 2025, Kingsoft CEO Zou Tao delivered a blunt assessment during an earnings call: the game had “not met our expectations.” The following quarter, Kingsoft’s gaming revenue fell to RMB 898 million, a dramatic drop from the RMB 1.708 billion reported in the same period of 2024. The company’s language in financial reports shifted from celebrating “market buzz” to promising “continuous optimization of gameplay and operations.”
In November 2025, Guo himself penned a public letter as Mecha BREAK’s producer, acknowledging the game had “failed to meet all players’ expectations for a mech game.” He announced plans for a new “Breaker Edition” and openly solicited feedback on the game’s future direction. His message was clear: he wanted to re-establish “sincere, close communication” with the player base to chart a new path forward.
This approach was vintage Guo Weiwei. It’s the exact playbook he’d used so successfully with JX3. When facing a product crisis, his instinct was always to go back to the players for answers.
Except this time, he wouldn’t get the chance to see it through.
The team’s attempts at course correction didn’t yield the desired results. In late 2025, Guo stepped down as Seasun’s CEO, citing “personal career planning” reasons, but remained as Chief Producer. However, with Mecha BREAK’s disappointing performance fresh in everyone’s minds, it was hard for many to see this as anything other than a consequence of the project’s struggles.
A former Seasun employee who spoke to our reporter offered a nuanced view: “Guo’s departure is the result of multiple converging factors—Mecha BREAK’s poor market performance, JX3 entering a downward cycle, the company’s recent lack of competitive new titles… The pressure on the top person was immense.”
Regarding Mecha BREAK specifically, he believed the core issue was “fundamental mechanics and gameplay.” He supported the ambition to create a Chinese mech game, but lamented that the final quality was “hard to put into words.” Yet, when the conversation turned to Guo himself, the ex-employee’s tone remained kind: “The company is good, the people are good. It’s just that the times are tough.”
Seasun, now navigating life without Guo, is in a period of product adjustment. Kingsoft’s latest financial report shows that in the first half of 2026, gaming revenue was RMB 1.614 billion, a 19% year-over-year decline. The company attributes this to declining revenue from existing titles, only partially offset by new game contributions.
Meanwhile, resources are being re-concentrated on the mature IPs. In its 2025 annual results, Kingsoft pledged to increase investment in JX3’s gameplay and narrative experience. By 2026, the company’s language had shifted to a more cautious posture: focusing on core IPs, optimizing operational performance, and “prudently exploring” new genres.
Over the past 22 years, Guo Weiwei evolved from a young game designer into a producer and CEO. JX3 grew from a single R&D project into a 17-year evergreen hit. But outside of JX3, Seasun desperately needs its next growth engine. Perhaps, for both Guo Weiwei and Seasun, this is less an ending and more the search for a new beginning.
