What does LEVEL INFINITE mean?
Text/Head of Thomas
In the early morning of December 8, Tencent Games quietly launched a new overseas brand: LEVEL INFINITE, and announced 6 new products on its official website.
In addition to new products, there are also products that have been launched
From the personnel arrangements hidden in foreign media reports, you can also see that Tencent attaches great importance to LEVEL INFINITE:
The CEO of Tencent Interactive Entertainment's international game business is Michelle Liu, who established the industry status of Tencent's publishing with the "boutique plan" in the early days of the mobile game explosion; and from public information, Pete Smith, who was the product development director of PlayStation, and Zoran Roso, a former executive of Activision Blizzard, are also in the team. Ma Xiaoyi, senior vice president of Tencent, once interpreted this: "For a large company to do transformation, it must call on the best team and give them the most resources... If whoever is available is going to do the new business, it is likely that the opportunity will not be seized. "
Many people do not understand this action: Tencent has not done overseas distribution, why should they launch a new brand? Will overseas players and manufacturers eat this set?
But after careful study, I think this incident may affect the development of Tencent's game business in the next 10 years.
01 LEVEL INFINITE
What products are announced?
First, let's take a look at several independently released new products announced by LEVEL INFINITE on its official website (the standard is the product that has not yet been launched).
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, a four-player co-op action-adventure game set in Warhammer 40K, will be available on Xbox and PC in the spring of 2022. Its developer is Fatshark, who has developed the Warhammer: Plague series.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt is an F2P tactical competitive game based on the Vampire: Night Hunt IP. Players can play as vampires, gain various abilities, and eventually return to escapism. The game will be released on PS5 and PC in 2022, and its developer is swedish studio Sharkmob, who has many members who have done The Division and Killer.
Metal: Hellsinger, a first-person rhythm shooter. Players can experience the story as metal beat shooters and get higher scores on the leaderboards in Challenge mode. The game will be available on console and PC platforms in 2022. Its developer is The Outsiders, and producer David Goldfarb served as the director of Harvest Day 2 and the lead designer of Battlefield 3 and Battlefield: Rebel Company 2.
Conan Chop Chop, a Stickman-style Roguelite action-adventure game based on the Conan Savage IP, supports a 1-4 player game mode, claims to have a combination of 14 trillion different pieces of equipment, and will be launched on console, PC and NS platforms in 2022. The developer of the game is Mighty Kingdom, and the publisher is Funcom, the developer of Conan the Barbarian.
There are also two new products released by LEVEL INFINITE worldwide:
SYNCED:Off-Planet(SYNCED), a PvPvE multiplayer tactical competitive game where players can use the "core control" to summon nano-humans with different functions to fight side by side, and the product will be launched on the PC platform in 2022. NExT Studios has been investing in it for more than 3 years, and in terms of the last round of EA testing, its technical and artistic quality has basically reached the overseas first-line level.
Don't Starve: Newhome, a famine IP mobile game developed by Fun Games, will add more multiplayer social elements to the survival sandbox adventure gameplay, and the launch time is yet to be determined.
In addition to the above 6 new products, LEVEL INFINITE's official website also has "Arena of Valor" and "GTFO" two products that have been launched. The former is the international version of Glory of Kings; the latter is a four-person cooperative horror action FPS developed and independently released by 10 Chambers, which has more than 20,000 reviews on Steam.
It is not difficult to find that the above products are mostly shooting or action games that support multiplayer collaboration, and can also find 1-2 themes and gameplay highlights; the team has mostly accepted Tencent's investment, and has a mature 2A, or even AAA game research and development background.
But people always have greater expectations for Tencent, and I guess after reading these products, you will have a series of questions: How meaningful is it to be this new brand? With these few products, how big a splash can they make? Why are some products classified as LEVEL INFINITE, but not issued by Tencent?
Next, we will analyze these issues one by one.
02 "Cooperation with Tencent" overseas
How much attraction can it have?
First, let's interpret the meaning of LEVEL INFINITE.
At the end of 2019, Tencent Games changed Slogan to "to discover, infinite possibilities", which should also be the origin of LEVEL INFINITE. The meaning of LEVEL related cards and levels may symbolize Tencent's desire to take the game world to a new level and set new standards; and the meaning of INFINITE is even more: open, breaking with tradition, and unlimited possibilities.
On the one hand, of course, this is a brand promotion for players; on the other hand, the name also shows the determination of Tencent Games' overseas business: I guess they decided to break the inherent cooperation model and solve the problem from a new perspective.
In recent years, people often mention the decline of the distribution business: the head CP is mostly self-developed spontaneously, because no one is willing to share with the distribution if they cannot get crucial help on the traffic or product side.
But in fact, this definition is a bit narrow, the turnover/profit sharing or agency fee is just a form of cooperation, and the essence of distribution is actually service: through the service to improve the success probability of the game, and then participate in the distribution of benefits.
With this in mind, you can understand a lot of problems - level INFINITE's cooperation model is not necessarily only distribution, they can provide financial, technical, tooling and cognitive support to the R&D team, while obtaining a return on investment. In the future, they may have a closer cooperation – we will mention it in the last part of the article.
This raises the next question: How attractive can "working with Tencent" be overseas?
Many people think that the core competitiveness of Tencent's issuance is the traffic of WeChat and QQ, so no one overseas should be willing to cooperate with Tencent. But many research and development tell us that what impresses tencent the most is its ability in track research, product tuning, and large-user operation.
For example, in the track research, Tencent may be the first company in the industry to see the opportunity of tactical competition categories, as early as the era of "DayZ", which also laid the groundwork for their final investment in the blue hole. After in-depth cooperation with Tencent, many companies will get the track map they provide and share their insights.
《PUBG：BATTLEGROUNDS》
Another example is user research and product tuning. The head of a research and development company once told me that they were hesitant to learn from other companies and do Soft Launch overseas to accurately control the scale of the test. But then it was found that Tencent's testing process was accurate enough, "tomorrow to 2,000 test users, it is impossible to come to 2,001", so I dismissed this idea. As for the team cases that moved the team to Shenzhen and let Tencent accompany them to raise the retained and paid data a little bit, there are more cases.
With the development of the industry, the domestic team may feel that these are no longer mysterious. But for overseas teams that are accustomed to single-machine operations and have not been exposed to a large number of users, it is not the same. Yao Yuan, general manager of Tianmei J3, told a story: last year, they held a closed-door meeting with all the star producers of Ubisoft to talk about CFM's operation methods, such as how to use the survey data of user questionnaires to reverse the optimization idea. As a result, the other party listened very carefully, "took a lot of notes, all kinds of questions." "
The same may be true of the team working with LEVEL INFINITE. For example, Sharkmob once said in an interview that during the EA test, they were overwhelmed by the comments of 2 million players and did not know how to tune; in the later stages of development, they wanted to improve their anti-plug-in capabilities - these are Tencent's specialties.
Fatshark said that the knowledge shared by Tencent has helped them a lot - Ma Xiaoyi once told GrapeVine that they are creating a "global technology sharing menu" that provides a set of tools in commercialization, server, anti-plug-in, operation, R&D management, and company management. In Europe, they invest in studios that also have technical committees where people regularly discuss technology decisions and share technological breakthroughs.
From Tencent's investment style, it can also be seen that they are slowly lowering their position. For example, in many investment cases such as "Black Myth: Wukong", they have promised not to interfere in business decisions, not to seize the lead of the project, and not to seek issuance and operation. I guess this is also LEVEL INFINITE's approach to cooperation.
Therefore, in my opinion, Tencent chose to release LEVEL INFINITE now not to show muscle, but to tell the industry what resources they can provide for research and development, and to prove themselves with cooperation cases. And considering that in recent press conferences, the number of new products announced by Tencent has always been much lower than the number of product reserves, LEVEL INFINITE's actions in the dark may be more intensive.
03 Globalization in Tencent's eyes,
Maybe it's not just going to sea
But at this point, there is still one question that has not been solved: what can LEVEL INFINITE bring to Tencent? Does Tencent just want to support overseas teams and enhance international reputation? After all, when it comes to making money, it is the last word to release more mobile games like "PUBG MOBILE" and "Dragon Fantasy".
Previously, "Dragon Fantasy" was published well
This brings us to the question of how far away is the difference between "success at sea" and "success in globalization"?
If you only talk about going to sea, Tencent has achieved good results. According to the Q3 financial report, its international market game revenue increased by 20% year-on-year to 11.3 billion yuan, accounting for more than 25% of the total game revenue. In the list of Chinese game manufacturers' overseas revenues counted by App Annie, they can also rank in the top three.
However, as far as Tencent's layout is concerned, it is obviously not enough to send domestic products overseas, and the goal they hope to achieve is "global research and development + global distribution". That's why Tencent will invest so much CP, and Tianmei and Photon will also establish R&D teams overseas to explore Co-dev (joint research and development). Only in this way can they improve their IP creation and industrialization capabilities faster, make the best products, and compete with the top companies.
The emergence of LEVEL INFINITE has finally opened up the boundaries of Tencent's overseas investment, research and development and distribution, which also means that the company's global industrialization process has entered a new stage. I guess they prefer multiplayer shooters and action games because it's the beginning of a convergence of areas where Chinese and Western teams excel. After all, many people believe that the keywords of the most successful games in the future should be multiplayer online, F2P, mainstream categories, AAA quality and global.
Of course, NOW LEVEL INFINITE doesn't look that strong, but I guess they won't be in too much of a hurry, after all, it's aimed not just for now, but for the next 10 years of Tencent Games. As Ma Xiaoyi put it, they want global success "not big, but strong." It's not very easy, or very quick to reach... But once it succeeds, it should be a very big success. "
According to relevant sources, at the TGA held on December 10, LEVEL INFINITE will release more content. At that time, Grape Jun will also pay attention to its latest developments.
Game Grape Recruitment Industry Reporter/Content Editor,
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