NetEase CC

» see cc.163.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The category is one I was around for. The geography is not. In the Ankara internet cafes between 2002 and 2005 the game was Counter-Strike and the voice channel was the room itself, which is to say you turned your head and shouted. NetEase CC is the software version of that, built for a market I was never in: a voice client for Chinese players, shipped out of NetEase's Hangzhou research institute in December 2009 after YY and IS had shown there was money in one.

It stayed in that job for more than six years. In May 2016, with Chinese game livestreaming in the middle of its money-burning boom, NetEase renamed the product CC直播 and turned it toward cameras. The installed base came along with the rename, which is why voice clients in that market kept becoming livestreaming platforms and never once went the other way.

What CC had that Douyu and Huya did not was NetEase itself. The company makes the games, so CC became the official broadcast home for Fantasy Westward Journey and Naraka: Bladepoint, carrying their tournaments under license from the publisher one floor up. Registered user counts ran into the hundreds of millions.

~ the case file ~

~ the voice years ~

The 2009 product was called CC voice and it competed with YY and IS for the same job: get eight people into a channel so they can coordinate without typing. That business built the machinery the streaming product later ran on. Guilds signed up as organizations rather than as individuals, and when the closure notice came sixteen years later it had to name both, because both were still structural to how people got onto the platform.

~ the slide ~

The money model was virtual currency, and in 2022 Thepaper reported the platform among those pushing users toward recharging harder than the users had planned. By August 2025 CC had given up the Onmyoji livestreaming business entirely, which for a platform whose whole advantage was carrying NetEase games is not a small retreat. When the shutdown finally arrived, the Chinese gaming press led on the people who had put tens of thousands of yuan into an account that was about to stop existing.

~ the last day ~

The notice went up on 30 June 2026 at two in the afternoon. Downloads closed that hour across every platform and recharging stopped permanently. Registration shut at the same time, for new users and for the guilds that brought streamers in. Two months later, on 31 August at 15:00, the servers were switched off and cc.163.com went with them.

Balances were converted rather than refunded: C coupons and gold ingots at a hundred to one into NetEase points, spendable in other NetEase games. Type cc.163.com today and you land on NetEase Dashen, the company's game community app. The address survived the product by pointing at the next thing the same owner wants you inside.

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