Tencent's high-level internal sharing was exposed for the first time.
Recently, at an internal company event organized by Tencent Game Academy, Ma Xiaoyi, senior vice president of Tencent, talked about his understanding of the future opportunities in the industry. Some employees commented that this sharing was "a lot of dry goods", so Grape Jun communicated with Tencent Game Academy and obtained authorization to share the abridged and finished content with everyone here.
In the past few years, Ma Xiaoyi has also been interviewed by us several times to share his thoughts on globalization, industrialization, organizational structure adjustment, category innovation, and the future of the industry. This year, however, things are a little different.
Ma Xiaoyi, Senior Vice President of Tencent
On the one hand, in the face of more standardized regulatory policies, increasingly saturated market space, high research and development costs, and rising difficulties in playing... It seems to be getting harder and harder to make games; on the other hand, the development of new technologies and concepts such as VR games, cloud games, and metaversics has brought more imagination space. At this time stall, Tencent, which has always been good at strategic analysis and track layout, will say and how it will do, and may be more valuable than ever.
What are the possible keywords for future blockbusters? How difficult is category innovation? Is there really enough space overseas? Do we want to compete with AAA? What does the metacosmic boom mean? How will technological advances disrupt industries? Where does the relationship between games and society go? In sharing, you can find answers to these questions.
You may feel that as an ordinary practitioner in a small and medium-sized company, these "big words" have nothing to do with yourself. But believe the grape king: even the smallest island is in the tide of the industry and the times.
Here's what to share:
01 Growth drivers of the game industry
First of all, I would like to share our recent observations: you may also be concerned that the growth rate of the entire Chinese game industry is declining, in the face of such a situation, where are the future opportunities?
Core gameplay
When we look for the growth momentum of the industry, we will split into several modules, the first is the "core play".
In the past, the mining and interpretation of MOBA, tactical competition and other gameplay has helped Tencent Games achieve certain success in the era of mobile games. Of course, we have also noticed that since the "tactical competition", the entire game industry has not seen a breakthrough in the core gameplay of a similar level. Therefore, I also mentioned in previous interviews that the breakthrough of gameplay is actually very precious and does not always appear.
We tracked keywords such as open world, sandbox, craft, co-op, survivor, roguelike, and roguelike, whether it's the popularity of player searches or the hashtags of successful game products. The Temple of Heroes is a good example.
Temple of Heroes
In the future, for a holistic gameplay breakthrough, we believe there are two paths that can be tried:
The first is to form a new way of playing through the arrangement and combination of the above several gameplay keywords. It's a high-investment, high-reward, high-risk path, with a very low probability of success, but once it's successful, it may be the next "tactical competition." So, we're also constantly discovering and helping teams around the world who are willing to take risks like this, and internally, there are measures to support you, because we know it's difficult.
Another more mature approach is to do "half-generation" iterations in existing products or categories. If you dismantle the main source of revenue and user growth in the entire industry in the past two years, more is from the interpretation of mature gameplay and mature IP, that is, in the existing gameplay, integrate 1 to 2 of the 6 key gameplay just mentioned, so that the product has a refreshing feeling. For example, "Original God" and "Horse Racing Lady" are very good examples.
Doing "half-generation" iteration also means to do continuous evolution on an existing category, and continuous evolution requires continuous accumulation on a certain track. There will be some challenges, such as after the launch of a product, the commercial returns in the previous years are not very good, how to motivate the team to be willing to continue to invest in this direction?
On the other hand, the breakthrough of fixed direction play, in addition to continuous accumulation, and the scale of investment is getting larger and larger, it will also bring some new challenges. We see some domestic teams, the number of R & D people in a single project has exceeded 300 people, some even close to 500 people, but throughout our internal, in addition to the most head products, the number of investment is relatively small compared to the industry. In the face of this trend, how do we balance internal inputs?
There may not be a good answer to these two questions at this time, but we may as well try a few things first.
First of all, it is through the company's sponsorship to encourage everyone to do some high-investment, high-risk attempts in the early stage.
Second, whether it's the challenges of future AAA games, or Metaverse, it will require game development at a sufficiently large scale and the ability to make high-production value products. We can make sufficient technical preparations through the experience of some large projects and accumulate experience in larger-scale production.
Narrative skills
The second more obvious growth point is the development of IP, or more strictly, the development of narrative ability.
It can be seen that the ability to narrate, or the ability to build a worldview, becomes increasingly important in the success of a product. We've given a great example of that ourselves, which is League of Legends. From the end game to the mobile game, to the e-sports, to the "Battle of two cities" cartoon, to a series of various types of licensed mini-games, a more three-dimensional IP or a "League of Legends" world is slowly being built, I think this is a very good attempt, the effect is also very successful. And the happiest thing about this is that we see this series of actions gradually develop the game from a subculture of a small group of people to a more popular culture.
For example, "Battle of two cities", in the past, it is difficult to imagine that an animated series based on a game adaptation and produced by a game company can enter the top 20 of IMDb's highest-rated episodes, even in the film and television industry, this is a landmark work, and even Netflix has about 60 countries and regions to win the first ratings, once surpassing "Squid Games", which has received a lot of attention around the world.
"Heroes United" IP derivative animation series "Battle of Two Cities"
The social repercussions triggered by the "League of Legends" S11 finals after EDG won the championship can almost be compared with football matches. So we can see that as long as we do a good enough job in the construction of narrative ability and world view, we can really make the entire game IP more mainstream.
overseas
The third growth point worth discussing is opportunities overseas, especially in overseas emerging markets.
From our observation, in fact, the entire overseas emerging market is going through a process similar to the domestic mobile game explosion between 2011 and 2014.
Tell me a few numbers. We know that the Chinese population is about 1.41 billion, of which there are about 660 million gamers, and now the game industry is most fiercely contested overseas regions, such as Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, etc., with a total population of nearly 1.8 billion, and the total number of players is close to 700 million. There are also some emerging regions, such as Eastern Europe and Russia, coupled with the continuous growth of the European and American markets, and now the opportunities in the entire overseas market are in a period of bursting.
And these emerging market players are relatively young, curious, and willing to try. In terms of the number of game downloads, the total number of games downloaded by Chinese players in 2021 is 7.3 billion times, while the total number of games downloaded by Indian players is 9.2 billion times, and brazil has reached 4.4 billion, and the data in the Middle East is also very impressive. Although the current total revenue volume of these overseas emerging markets is not high, according to their growth trends and potential, it is likely to grow into a market of China's size in the future.
In these markets, there are several products that have achieved great success. One of them is our PUBG Mobile, which once again broke records in 2021 and will grow even further in the future. The second is Free Fire by our partner Garena, and the global data is staggering.
If you look at the success of Free Fire, their localization is very good, and there are a lot of local teams in these emerging regions to do the local market.
《Free Fire》
We have now begun to significantly strengthen regional capacities, including the deployment of local teams in multiple regions. They don't just help with promotion, they need to make more specific recommendations on local culture, content, and game optimization to help improve our games. For example, add some local festivals and local national heroes to the game versions and activities.
Therefore, the investment of teams in these areas into a structure and a scale is a very big focus.
AAA game
Fourth, we believe that high-quality AAA games are also a growth point, and the evolution of these games in the direction of GaaS (Game-as-a-Service), and the development of mobility and cross-platform.
We encourage people to not just watch mobile games, but to build up the ability to challenge AAA games through projects. Because now, although mobile games are a platform for large-scale market popularity, a larger screen, a richer experience, and better operation are better ways to create a new way to play or IP. At present, most of the better game IP and gameplay come from the PC and Console (console) platform.
Up to now, our overseas Console, PC game-based team has more than 3,000 people, and they will continue to try to make some AAA games in vertical categories to help us achieve greater breakthroughs.
On the other hand, the traditional manufacturers in Europe and the United States have begun to actively embrace GaaS and mobile games.
For example, with the blessing of Activision's GaaS model, the revenue of the COD series has doubled. In 2017, Call of Duty: World War II went on sale for $60, sold more than 15 million units, and generated more than $1 billion in global revenue, making it Steam's highest-selling new game of the year. In 2021, the revenue of a single product of the COD series may reach $4 billion according to the three parties. Therefore, it can be seen that the online game of high-quality games plus mobile has great potential in business.
Call of Duty: Warzone
EA is also actively deploying, their main series Sims and EA Sports have been very successful GaaS, and revenue is increasing at a very stable rate.
These big manufacturers will actively push in this direction, which is the window period that we want to seize as much as possible to help our team and these big factories cooperate more. On the one hand, it is to be able to seize the IP of AAA-level games, as well as the opportunity of online games and mobile games, on the other hand, to learn more from these top teams.
But we need to realize that this window period will actually close. And I think that this opportunity will become smaller and smaller over time, because these big manufacturers will start to do online games and mobile games themselves. That's why we've been stressing about building our own IP and top-notch products.
Platformer
Finally, there's an uncertain chance, it's about platformers. Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft, Sims, including Mini World, Jelly Bean Man, these relatively mild high-DAU games, will have some different developments from the previous game industry, which is actually a new trend. Platformers have a good chance of making a bigger breakthrough, although it doesn't seem clear yet.
"Jelly Bean Man"
02 Metaverse with new industry opportunities
The second topic is some reflections on metaverse. In fact, many companies are discussing what Metavalse really is, but we will be more cautious.
First of all, we think that Metavalse is still a relatively distant concept, an imagination of the Internet in the next era. At the same time, this is not new, because back in the late 90s, when I started to join the game industry myself, the description of online games at that time was not called online games, but persistent world, referring to a world that continued to function steadily. In today's parlance, it is similar to the metacosm, except that at that time, both the development technology and the consumption model were very immature. Today, in fact, some technologies have broken through the "eve", so that everyone can begin to imagine what the future form of the Internet will be, which is the reason for the rise of Metavalse.
On the other hand, the reason is some change in player behavior. The pandemic has made users around the world accustomed to using online services to solve real-life problems and communicate with real-life friends or family. Because more time is spent online, people are beginning to imagine whether our lives can be more closely integrated with the Internet, and whether Metaverse has more room for imagination.
If we further disassemble what the most important elements of Metavalse are, we believe that one is a substantial upgrade in experience and another in content.
Experience the upgrade
First of all, the great upgrade of experience, the most important thing is the experience we call "next generation", and the input and output mode of "next generation".
We go to see a screen experience, whether it is a 5-inch or 6-inch mobile phone screen, or a 40-inch TV screen, in fact, it is an experience that was born decades ago, which is a relatively one-way interaction, mainly visual perception. Also in terms of input and output, the best we use now is the gamepad and keyboard and mouse. The "bandwidth" of the keyboard is very low, in minutes, the speed is hundreds of keys, so the input efficiency is very low, and the output mainly relies on video and music.
In recent years, we have also seen some new technology applications, such as AR, VR, XR, etc., and when they mature, we believe they can bring more exciting future prospects.
So when these technologies break through, a very important question is, what will be the software and hardware ecology formed by these new technologies? Is it an open ecosystem like Android, or a vertically closed ecosystem like Apple?
We think there are probabilities for both answers. An open ecosystem will make the entire industry progress faster, which is a clear result. Looking back at the two most successful ecological openings in the history of the Internet, one is the combination of Intel and Microsoft, from DOS to Windows upgrades, and the other is the Android ecosystem created by Google and HTC and other hardware manufacturers. They are all formed in a special historical period, and all have a hardware manufacturer with a market share of more than 50%, choosing to do only hardware and not software.
In today's industry, most manufacturers do not seem to choose to only do hardware, and even some people think that more than half of the manufacturers choose a relatively vertical closed, soft and hard integration ecology like Apple. Therefore, from software to hardware, including content, systems, tool SDKs, etc., we should all actively try.
Content upgrades
Just said the experience upgrade, there is another part is the content upgrade. We believe that there are two aspects that are important:
One is immersion and realism, which is more immersive game graphics and interaction, as well as more immersive large-scale scenes.
Recently, there is a very good example, "The Matrix: Awakening" uses UE5 to make a demo, simulating a 16 square kilometer city, of which there are more than 30,000 digital people, each of whom behaves, facial expressions, and dresses differently. This gave us a lot of inspiration to imagine a more realistic, super-large-scale city of the future.
The Matrix: Awakening
So when we recently discussed the criteria for large-scale projects, we agreed that if you want to make a very large scene, you should at least achieve an effect similar to the "Matrix: Awakening" demo, and it should be generated by technical means, not by piling people and materials. We want to achieve this with stronger AI, stronger development tools, and stronger production pipelines.
In addition to immersion, another very important thing is the amount of content. This is actually a very difficult subject. There are several ways in which relatively large-scale content is possible.
The first is mass production, including the aforementioned one, which we can achieve with AI and machine learning, better production pipelines, and more efficient development tools.
The second is the ecology of UGC (User-Produced Content), which is also a problem for us.
WeChat and Roblox have done a good job on UGC, they are characterized by their own unique ideas, and they have insisted on them for many years, and they often share openly to ensure that all ecological participants can clearly understand. At the same time, the code of conduct and principles in the ecology are transparent.
《Roblox》
This way is actually completely different from the PGC (professional production content) we are doing now and developing high-quality game products by ourselves. We usually don't talk too much to the players at the beginning of the game's development, but we want to surprise the players and exceed their expectations, which is also right.
But if we want to make Metavalse-level products in the future and want to become an important player in this field, we need to do a better UGC ecosystem.
Another way to achieve large-scale content volumes is to broaden external connectivity. It's important that Metaverse isn't just entertainment, but should connect more external services and content.
In the past, people talked about Metavalse, and often talked about concerts in Fortnite (Fortnite). So the future is not able to do more in Metavalse. How to access more external services in an environment more like a game theme park, such as video conferencing, sports competitions, e-sports live broadcasts, and so on.
Fortnite and Travis Scott hosted an online concert
For Metavalse, we don't want to focus too much on external discussions. Metaverse will certainly not be implemented anytime soon, but in the face of this trend, we need to be prepared for the development of technology, hardware, core algorithms, game content, and some special functions and features.
03 Game Technology and Value
From the perspective of the general environment, as the Internet becomes more important, there is a need for clearer thinking and regulation, so we are also more active in embracing policy. In fact, in the domestic work of protecting minors, our investment is more active, earlier, and even more stringent than the entire industry in many ways, which is the best way for us to help the public answer their doubts.
On the other hand, with the growth of industrial volume and scale, the actual impact of games on the entire society is also constantly breaking through the original boundaries. At the same time, we also found that there is still a lot of untapped space for the ability and value of the game.
We used to talk about gameplay, story, and technology as the "troika" that drove the game. At the level of gameplay, based on the interactive mechanism of the game, we have launched many cross-border applications for vertical fields such as medical treatment, science popularization, and public welfare, and there are also programming products such as "Buckle Ding" to try to make the game carry more social functions; at the story level, the popular game IP has gone out of the product, driving the development of a series of cultural industries including online text, animation, movies, etc., and also more actively integrated into the offline, bringing a pulling effect to the real economy.
But on the technical level, I have also said on some occasions, we have always believed that games are one of the best scenarios to promote the development of information technology and large-scale application, and the technology developed by games can help more industries. For example, in the field of chips, the high demand for 3D real-time graphics operations in games has directly stimulated high-performance CPUs and GPUs to go out of the laboratory, which has greatly promoted the development of the chip industry. In the field of scientific research, as a controllable scenario with clear rules, games have also become an important training ground and data source for AI, and are helping the research and development of artificial intelligence generalization.
On the other hand, in the process of symbiosis and development of games with science and technology, they have actually accumulated very rich technical capabilities, such as game engines, virtual digital people, automatic content generation driven by AI, etc. These capabilities have a certain leadership in the entire technology industry, and the value they can create will be no less than the impact of today's game culture. However, at present, the application of these technologies is still at the level of game research and development.
Train strategic collaborative AI "Absolute Enlightenment" in Glory of Kings
Therefore, as a technology-driven enterprise, we hope to be more proactive in exploring the value of this. Therefore, we also put forward the concept that games are "super digital scenes", which is to further explore the positive role of game technology on scientific and technological development, cultural inheritance, real economy, social welfare and other aspects under the general trend of virtual and reality integration.
At present, we are trying to create some projects that directly apply the cutting-edge technology of games, based on the advantages of games in graphic rendering, simulation, human-computer interaction and other aspects, to help the development of fields such as industrial manufacturing, intelligent transportation, urban management, digital cultural protection, etc., and invest more resources. It is hoped that game technology can more broadly connect the needs of real society, play a role and value in different scenarios. In the face of these new opportunities and challenges, we need to invest more in technology and accumulate, and continue to develop key technologies such as our own engines.
At the same time, we also see that games can provide some unique digital solutions in terms of social public issues. Some time ago, a "sand control game" attracted widespread social attention. This game is called "Wasteland Linhai", which is the gold medal work of the Tencent College Game Creativity Competition Environmental Protection Track, produced by 5 "post-00s" college students, who used the game mechanism to restore the process of sand control very realistically. Recently, we have also joined hands with the company's internal carbon neutral laboratory and external professional institutions to launch the small game "Carbon Island", which attracts more players to support low-carbon behavior through the fun experience of the game.
Sand control game "Wasteland Forest Sea" created by 5 college students
These explorations and attempts can not only help us build a better digital society, but also usher in greater innovation space in the industry itself in the process.
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Game Grape Recruitment Content Editor,
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