Chicken Eat Mobile Game "PUBG": The Story of Three Survivors worldwide

Business is not a game, and competition never ends.

Wen 丨 Duan Xu

Editor 丨 Song Wei

Few games have been able to impact the global game industry in such a short period of time and with such strength as PUBG (PUBG, commonly known as "eating chicken").

Creating a new category of games is so difficult. Take the popular Moba genre, for example, which originated from 2003's Warcraft III custom map Battle of the Ruins (DotA). After eight years of continuous updates, DotA has finally become an indie game. This was followed by more familiar game products such as League of Legends, Dota 2, and Glory of Kings. In the more than ten years from its birth to its popularity, countless game producers and players around the world have contributed wisdom to its final formation.

The emergence of PUBG is highly dependent on one person. In 2013, inspired by the Japanese movie Battle Royale, Scotsman Brendan Greene made a mod called Day Z in a custom mode for Armed Assault 2, which was popular with players. Since then, Bryden has developed a "battle royale mode" for the survival game H1Z1. In 2016, the Korean company Quixote (then known as Blue Hole Studios) appointed him creative director and equipped him with a professional team to produce a brand new game.

After a year of development, in March 2017, PUBG was released on Steam, one of the world's largest comprehensive digital distribution platforms. At that time, it was not yet completed, and bugs were frequent. By June, PUBG had peaked at more than 350,000 people online. In December, the peak exceeded 3 million, an increase of nearly 10 times, surpassing Steam's housekeeper product, the eighteen-year-old Dota2.

The official name of this new gameplay created by PUBG is "Tactical Competition". In terms of design, it will both stimulate the player and keep the player nervous at all times, but the stimulation is not too high, and the real battle time in a whole game is no more than three minutes; it has a low threshold and a moderate rhythm, which is suitable for almost everyone to play.

Soon, "eat chicken" swept the global gaming industry. By 2018, according to Superdata, the total revenue of "eating chicken" games worldwide was $12.6 billion, accounting for 12% of the industry's revenue.

Numerous companies began to enter. They predict that in the new category of tactical competition, there will be games with user ratings comparable to "Glory of Kings".

In tactical competitive mobile games, players are thrown into the arena at the same time, fighting each other and striving to become winners. This scenario has also reappeared in the Chinese mobile game industry: from 2017 to 2018, Chinese manufacturers alone developed (or implanted) at least 100 chicken-eating mobile games in existing games. Among them are the entrepreneurial teams of several people, as well as large companies such as Tencent and NetEase.

In addition to the core battlefield, there are also startups with pragmatic product strategies, low-key rise in the marginal battlefield, and eventually become players that cannot be ignored.

Five years on, globally, three games have become the ultimate winners. They are PUBG Mobile (tencent) of photonic studios (and another game in the Chinese mainland area, Peace Elite), Garena's FreeFire, and NetEase's Wilderness Action.

They lived up to the expectations of the industry. According to Sensor Tower and other Android markets, since its launch in 2017, all three games have received more than 200 million downloads and have generated more than $2 billion in revenue for their respective companies. Most of the other games that came on stage at the same time as them have disappeared.

Here's the story of how they became survivors.

NetEase rushed to land on the beach, and Tencent attacked later

In March 2017, shortly after the launch of "PUBG", Ding Lei, CEO of NetEase with a keen sense of smell, prompted the heads of studios at the high-level meeting of the month to let them "pay attention to this game".

At that time, game live broadcasting was just emerging. The "Thousand Broadcast Wars" from 2015 to 2016 cultivated a group of game streamers and viewers. The low-threshold and high-stimulation "PUBG" is very suitable for live broadcast and online viewing. In July, Douyu appeared in the scene where "all Overwatch anchors are broadcasting PUBG".

According to third-party statistics agency Steamspy at the end of 2017, more than half of PUBG's players are in China. This makes China the first main battlefield of the chicken-eating mobile game war.

By November 2017, game industry media Gamelook estimated that there were no less than 100 tactical competitive products on mobile game platforms around the world.

But the quality of these hundreds of games is generally poor. Even the "Xiaomi Gunfight", which was recognized as a good quality at that time, still had problems such as "the map was too small" and "the feel was bad". Moreover, they all "borrowed" from pubgs. At that time, the Kuismith Troupe had repeatedly said that it would take legal measures against more than a dozen pirated mobile games in China.

NetEase moved quickly. In September 2017, NetEase Pangu Studios selected 100 people from the project team of the survival game "After Tomorrow" that is being developed to form the "Wilderness Action" project team. Three months later, "Wilderness Operations" was released in public beta.

A former member of Operation Wilderness recalled that in order to catch up, programmers practiced "three shifts", each programming eight hours later to relay to the next person to continue. The NetEase Building in Guangzhou is lit up all night.

"Wild Ops" has good picture quality and can support 100 people on the same map game relatively smoothly, as well as features such as "1000 meters of visual distance" and "fog mode". It was also the only chicken-eating mobile game that could be adapted to all mobile phone models at that time.

On the day of the release of "Wilderness Action", the total number of anchors of "Wild Action" on the four major platforms of Huya, Tentacle, Fighting Fish and Panda exceeded 1,000 people, attracting more than 400,000 people to watch. A month later, Operation Wilderness registered more than 100 million users, and mobile PHONE PC double-sided online users surpassed PUBG. Operation Wilderness was also introduced to the Japanese market under the name Knives Out.

Employees of NetEase Games recalled that at that stage, Ding Lei showed rare generosity and encouraged the Wilderness Action team to do more DAU, "Don't think about revenue." ”

"We almost thought we had won." said the above-mentioned person.

Tencent is feeling the pressure. At the Tencent Q3 financial report meeting that year, 4 brokerage analysts collectively asked Tencent President Martin Lau's views on tactical competitive mobile games. Martin Lau said it would follow up aggressively.

In November, one of Tencent's oldest games, the Crossfire mobile game, announced that it would launch a new model called "Desert Island Special Training". In addition, a mobile game called "Glorious Mission: Mission Action" was also determined to be released by Tencent when it was officially released in public beta on November 8. Behind it, Big Monster Studio officially joined Tencent's Aurora program.

In the same month, Tencent also announced a cooperation with PUBG to launch genuine mobile games around the world. Tencent's two studios, Tianmei and Photon, will simultaneously launch two genuine mobile games, PUBG: All Army Attack and PUBG: Stimulating the Battlefield. The overseas version of PUBG Mobile is handled by Photon.

The two largest mobile game companies in China and even in the world have pushed the competition for chicken mobile games to a climax.

In December 2017, Ding Lei ordered that all NetEase studios must develop at least one chicken-eating mobile game, which makes NetEase have more than 10 chicken-eating games on different platforms developed by colleagues. The same is true of Tencent.

The two companies began to compete for talent across the industry. A technical leader at Operation Wilderness recalled, "Often we interviewed a person and thought it was like that, and then we called in a few days and found out that he had joined Tencent." ”

An industry insider analyzed that Tianmei and Photon have formulated different product routes: Photon's goal is to "perfectly restore the terminal game experience" of the difficulty of the program; while Tianmei hopes to reduce the difficulty of the game and attract more novice players, which is also their successful experience in "Glory of the King".

Photon also hired Rocket Boy, who had just retired at the time and was China's first FPS (First View Shooter) game world champion, as the planner. "The most metaphysical thing about shooting games is the feel. You shoot with the mouse is one feeling, shooting with the buttons on the screen, it's another feeling. There is no way to simply convert the two. But this feel is one of the core pleasures of the game. One practitioner said, "How to reproduce the feel on the computer on the mobile terminal, and how to ensure gameplay?" You can only try it over and over again. ”

People close to the project team said that Meng Yang would often play games for several hours in a row, feedback the slightest difference in the sense of the hand to the development team; after the development team adjusted, it was handed over to him and the internal test players to re-test and collect feedback. Photonic's president, Chen Yu, came to the development team's office every night to inquire about the specific progress.

On February 8, just one week before the Chinese New Year's Eve Night, "All Forces Attack" and "Stimulate the Battlefield" were officially launched.

A week later, the results were announced: Chinese New Year's Eve night, three chicken-eating mobile games in the top 5 of the AppStore game download list were "Exciting Battlefield" in The First Place, "All Troops Attack" in the Second Place, and "Wilderness Operations" in the 5th place.

"As soon as Tencent's two mobile games came out, the DAU of "Wilderness Action" had a cliff-like decline." Memories of a NetEase Game employee.

Photon Studios' strategy of "perfectly restoring the end game experience" has been successful. At the same time, Photonic is also preparing to take this as an opportunity to enter overseas markets that Tencent has not directly conquered before. To this end, Photon has also set up a separate project team for PUBG Mobile and jointly developed it with Korean IP licensors.

In March 2018, PUBG Mobile officially landed in overseas markets, and was sought after by users for its super high quality, and was named the best mobile game of the year in the Golden Joystick Awards that year. The month after its launch, PUBG Mobile immediately topped the AppStore list in more than 100 countries and regions. By December, its total number of users exceeded 100 million.

Within 4 months, Tencent completed a thrilling overtaking of NetEase.

"FreeFire", low-key development

When the tactical competitive mobile game developed by Tencent and NetEase swept the Chinese, European, American and Japanese markets, another chicken-eating mobile game quietly rose in the Southeast Asian market.

This mobile game is FreeFire. The company behind it was founded in Singapore and is currently listed in the U.S. stock market under the name SEA, with the game business Garena and the e-commerce platform Shopee, which once had a market capitalization of more than $200 billion.

But in the first half of 2017, its name was Garena, and it was valued at only a few billion dollars.

At the time, Garena represented many manufacturers around the world, including Tencent. It has hundreds of R&D teams in Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo and Seoul, the largest of which is more than 60 people, supporting AOV (Glory of Kings Overseas). With several successfully released games in Southeast Asia, Garena had a good cash flow and began developing its own games.

In 2016, Garena launched a shooter called BreakOut. Since then, the BreakOut project team has divided into a small team of only five or six people, who have limited resources, and some of the art materials are bought online for $200 by producers.

In July 2017, the project was completed and officially named FreeFire. But the game was slow to go live: there was another competitive game of better quality to go live during the same period, and the two sides had a certain amount of resource competition; and AT this time, PUBG was just getting hot in Southeast Asia.

In August, Garena held a meeting of project producers in Singapore. There is no objection to the release of another game. For FreeFire, the opposition and supporters were half each: colleagues from Places like Singapore and Taiwan thought the game's art quality was substandard and not worth trying; colleagues from Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand thought it was okay to give it a try.

In the end, Garena co-founder Ye Gang agreed to the latter. The Vietnamese manager took the initiative to take over the issuance task.

"At that time, our company was like this, there were few people, if you really insisted on anything, the above was still willing to give you space to try." A former Garena employee said.

On August 23, "FreeFire" was launched for testing; in September, "FreeFire" was officially released to the public in Vietnam. It became the first chicken-eating mobile game in the Southeast Asian market.

After going live, FreeFire was popular with locals, and the data skyrocketed, and it was quickly pushed to more countries. Many people in the BreakOut project team were transferred to the FreeFire project team. Since then, the FreeFire team has steadily expanded, and by the middle of the following year, the team has reached 100 people. A member of the R&D team at the time proudly stated that the project team had left only one person in the entire first year.

A person close to Garena commented that the project team was "unusually focused and very flexible."

"Unusual focus" means that the project team has some hard goals. For example, the first generation of FreeFire installation packages was only 80M in size, and for a long time thereafter, the installation package was stipulated not to exceed 80M.

"The 80M indicator was made into a slogan by us and pasted on the wall of the office, which is a red line that must not be broken." An early core member of the project team said.

FreeFire also emphasizes the adaptation of low-end phones. When early YouTube game bloggers introduced FreeFire to fans, one of its key selling points was that "only 1GB of memory can be played", and the minimum configuration of mobile phones on the market at that time was more than 8GB.

Things other than hard indicators can be handled flexibly. Usually, the art materials will be changed after the game is popular, but the $200 material bought has not been replaced for a long time after the release of FreeFire, even if the team has more artists coming in. "Because our core players are already used to this style of painting, there is no need to change it." A project team member said.

As mentioned earlier, in order to make the user experience the best shooting feel, Tencent spent a lot of time to optimize the feel. But Instead of taking the time to optimize, FreeFire went straight to the powerful assist system.

The powerful assist system triggered two very different reactions in the player base: some high-end players believed that the system made FreeFire shooting boring and weakened the gaming experience; another part of the novice players thanked it for helping them get started quickly.

In traditional shooters and PUBG, the player's perspective and the game character's perspective are consistent, which is called the first perspective, and it is the most substitutionary perspective. But in FreeFire, the player has a third perspective, a 360-degree view of the character and his surroundings, which is usually applied to RPG (role-playing game) perspectives.

A core member of FreeFire's early project admitted that this was the result of user research, "We sent out questionnaires in Southeast Asia, and a lot of new players reported that they wanted to see teammates around them. We felt that although this did not conform to 'common sense', it seemed that there was no experience loss, so we did it. ”

One practitioner believes that this is also a novice-friendly design: "It is simply too difficult for you to have a novice player, with two fingers, complete the three operations of moving, shooting and changing the perspective on the mobile phone screen at the same time." The third perspective can at least make it less difficult to switch perspectives. ”

FreeFire's data has exploded. A member of the development team at the time recalled that Garena had a TV set in the company cafeteria that displayed FreeFire user data in real time; every few days, someone would celebrate new milestones under the TV and take photos. Six or seven months later, FreeFire's DAU exceeded 10 million.

Another game that once competed with FreeFire was removed after a month of testing.

A number of employees of NetEase Games and Tencent Games lamented that at that time, they all believed that each other was the most important competitor, and the Chinese and European, American and Japanese markets were the most important markets. When they reacted, the user scale climate of "FreeFire" had become extremely difficult to shake.

Since then, with small installation packages and product features adapted to low-end mobile phones, FreeFire has actively expanded into Latin America. "FreeFire" has become the mainstream tactical competitive mobile game in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico.

By the end of 2018, according to data released by Garena, FreeFire had 350 million registered users worldwide, more than 100 million quarterly active users, and more than 40 million daily active peaks. In terms of the number of registered users, FreeFire was three times the number of PUBG Mobile at the time.

Game Starts "Three in Two"

At the beginning of 2018, after determining that it could not compete head-on with Tencent in key markets, NetEase decided to take a step back.

A former employee of NetEase Games said the company was focused on commercialization at the time. The first step is to leave young people, celibacy and women behind through operational means, and wash out those users who are not willing to pay. This runs counter to photons and Garena's "dau as big as possible" strategy in the same period.

At the end of 2018, Operation Wilderness began to make money in Japan. According to Sensor Tower, 90% of Operation Wilderness's more than $2 billion revenue comes from Japan. Operation Wilderness also laid the groundwork for NetEase's subsequent release of a number of games in Japan.

Since then, NetEase Games has returned to the strategy of "doing fine products and re-monetizing". Correspondingly, Operation Wilderness entered a period of stability and did not continue to expand globally.

In 2018, PUBG Mobile and FreeFire exceeded 20 million, coupled with NetEase's strategic retreat, the global market became the stage for Photons and Garena, and their focus shifted to commercialization.

In May 2019, after PUBG got the version number in China, Peace Elite was launched, and Photon's domestic tactical competitive mobile game business began to commercialize. In June and July, Chinese iOS players alone spent about $241 million on Peace Elite mobile games, accounting for 28% of Photon's total revenue on chicken-eating mobile games at the time. 28% of revenue. The game is thought to contribute more than $100 million a year to Tencent over the next decade.

The commercialization of PUBG Mobile began earlier, and as a well-known IP, there are more requirements and stricter rules. A former photonic employee said that because of the genuine license, any major changes to PUBG Mobile must be agreed to by the Korean IP party.

The above-mentioned employees said that there is basically no way to solve this problem, even if Tencent is the largest shareholder of the Kuismith Group. Photons can only grind with them little by little.

"PUBG MOBILE" project team employees said that their cross-border cooperation also has another layer of ideas, that is, to find more high-end international IP to cooperate, such as Spider-Man, Alan Walker (internationally renowned DJ), etc., because this is also in line with the global influence of "PUBG MOBILE" big IP, as well as Tencent's market position.

Garena has the envy of photons when it comes to commercialization. One person who has studied Garena for many years believes that Garena once learned deeply about Tencent.

"The two companies have very similar paths in the game, starting in the end game era, from agency to self-development." "The only difference is that the Southeast Asian market is more barren than the Chinese market, and it also exercises Garena's stronger monetization ability," he said. ”

Unlike Tencent, which has placed its commercialization strategy at its headquarters, Garena has delegated more power to its marketing teams everywhere. Garena "recruits the best locals", the person in charge is often in Oxbridge and other prestigious universities have studied abroad, business negotiations by them directly responsible for, independent accounting KPIs.

This leads to greater flexibility. In Brazil, FreeFire launched a co-branded skin in collaboration with renowned Portuguese singer DJ Alok; in Colombia, Free Fire brought in the country's famous stars James Rodriguez and Ospina to broadcast the game live, attracting more than 1 million viewers; in Indonesia, "FreeFire" and local singer Jota jointly launched a new "hero".

Another obvious advantage is that FreeFire is entirely owned by Garena, and it has greater autonomy in the product.

One example is the launch of the Battle Pass mode. At the end of 2017, Fortnite launched a Battle Pass mode. This model allows players to purchase "VIP qualifications" that can last for a season, ensuring the fairness of the game while giving players an extra reason to pay. This new model was not the first of Fortnite, but it was very popular with chicken eaters: the following year, Fortnite broke the game industry revenue record with this model.

In early 2018, FreeFire launched Battle Pass mode. This model made FreeFire profitable for the first time. By contrast, PUBG Mobile didn't launch its royal Pass mode until June 2018, months after FreeFire.

Overall, PUBG Mobile's monetization efficiency is still significantly higher than that of FreeFire. A game point card dealer who serves both Garena and Photon said the two games were popular in the Middle East at the same time, but the composition of the players was completely different: PUBG Mobile was popular among the more affluent local residents of the Middle East, while FreeFire was popular among inbound Indian and Pakistani laborers.

"PUBG Mobile's game point cards come in large denominations, all of which are a few hundred dollars, while FreeFire's point cards are up to a few tens of dollars." He believes that the players of the two games have a clear division of class and geography (ethnicity).

Sensor Tower's data also proves this gap: in the case of a small download gap, FROM 2017 to 2021, PUBG Mobile generated more than $7.6 billion in revenue, while FreeFire only earned more than $2.7 billion, nearly 3 times the former.

Two bans, the pattern has changed greatly

In 2019, Photon felt the rapid growth of FreeFire, and once again focused on doing long DAU.

A member of Tencent's overseas publishing team recalled that the first time he went to India, Indians told him that any game higher than 20M would be difficult to succeed in India.

In March 2019, Photonics Studios launched a game called PUBG Mobile Lite overseas, with an overall game size of just over 500 M, about a quarter of PUBG Mobile," and could accommodate most low-end models, including India's lowest-priced smartphone at the time, the Jio Phone. At the end of 2019, PUBG Mobile surpassed 15 million DAU in India. PUBG Mobile Lite has contributed a lot.

In addition to compressing the installation package, Tencent has also made many other efforts. The network conditions in South Asian markets are generally poor. The PUBG project team detected that users in a certain place would complain about the high network latency during the peak period of 7 to 8 pm, so they communicated with the largest local operator to expand their capacity during this time period. Moreover, they also cooperate with operators to achieve cooperation such as free traffic and SMS payment.

FreeFire's DAU reached 80 million in early 2020. With a breakthrough in the South Asian market, at the end of 2019, PUBG Mobile's daily active life overseas reached 50 million. The gap in user volume between the two has been narrowed a bit.

At the time, Photons and Garena were forming a stable two-headed pattern around the world: Garena had a dominant position in Southeast Asia and Latin America, while Photons dominated China, Europe, the United States, the Middle East and India; FreeFire gained a larger DAU, and PUBG Mobile had higher revenues without too many users lagging behind.

An investor close to Tencent believes that this is an acceptable result for Tencent: Tencent seizes the high-end market; Garena focuses on the low-end market.

The status of both games in their respective companies is also rising. PUBG is regarded by Tencent as its most significant breakthrough in overseas markets in recent years, and it has even begun to help Tencent's other businesses. "LatePost" learned that in 2021, Tencent launched a voice social product in the Middle East, and its early user introduction and subsequent operations are highly dependent on PUBG Mobile.

FreeFire became one of Garena's most important sources of revenue. After 2018, with Garena's stable and lucrative cash flow, SEA confidently and boldly invested in subsidies and infrastructure on its e-commerce business Shopee, making it quickly become the leading e-commerce platform in Southeast Asia.

As the new landscape grew more secure, something unexpected happened: in June 2020, India permanently banned 59 Chinese apps, including PUBG Mobile and PUBG Mobile Lite.

This sudden incident hit PUBG Mobile hard. It wasn't until the end of 2021 that PUBG Mobile returned to 50 million DAU.

Garena became the direct beneficiary. Downloads of FreeFire in India began to skyrocket. With this result, FreeFire became the world's number one mobile game in 2020. Throughout 2021, FreeFire is the highest-paid mobile game in India.

FreeFire is simultaneously expanding into the North American market. In September 2021, FreeFire launched FreeFire Max, which is considered a high-end version of FreeFire and is popular in North America. Sensor Tower data shows that although it has been in the North American market for less than two years, more than 30% of FreeFire's total revenue comes from the United States.

However, on February 14, 2022, India's Home Ministry "recommended" to ban 54 apps, including Free Fire, on the grounds that it poses a threat to India's privacy and security. FreeFire was then removed from Google Play and the App Store.

India's two bans have directly affected PUBG Mobile and FreeFire, breaking the original double-headed pattern to a certain extent.

Meanwhile, more new players are entering. The quills themselves have also developed the new mobile game "PUBG: New State", which will be launched globally in November 2021. Call of Duty: Mobile, which was licensed by Activision Blizzard, also had a tactical competitive mode built into the late 2020 and was very popular with players. And all these new and old players have a deep or shallow connection with Tencent.

Unlike games, business competition never seems to have an ultimate winner.