The author | Bai Qian
Edit | Tsukimi
In 2019, Sheng qu games merged into Century Huatong to achieve back to A, Wang Tuo once talked about the boutique culture of Sheng Qu games in an open letter:
"Fine products are the key variables to leverage industrial upgrading... The precision of quality determines how far our road to happiness can go. ”
However, from the perspective of specific products, the quality standards of Sheng Qu Games are obviously not high.
The "Qingyu Nian" mobile game, which was launched on March 25 this year, was described by Sheng Qu as a 3D martial arts MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing online game) with next-generation art quality, and has featured content such as "free martial arts", "parallel worlds", and "personalized DIY". When asked by investors, the secretary of the board of directors of Century Huatong refused to respond positively to the performance of the game, saying only that the product "is currently at the top of the iOS game free list and the 7th best-seller list of iOS games." ”
However, on the player side, the reputation of the "Qing Yu Nian" mobile game has repeatedly slipped. In the relevant review video of Station B, it is even difficult for users to find a positive review. Some players commented that the "Qing Yu Nian" mobile game "set a hundred short", in addition to the face pinching system, the work "exaggerated" can not be boasted.
This is obviously far from the boutique pursuit of Sheng Qu Games. The opening of the "Qing Yu Nian" mobile game is at its peak, exposing a series of deep questions - can the MMO advantage of Sheng Qu Games continue in the mobile era? Can big IP reserves create value for Sheng Qu Games? Do products that are difficult to gain a foothold in the domestic market have the ability to go to sea?
01 Boutique or peeling?
"The biggest value of this game is to push the Tiandao players back to the pit."
In the tapap, B station, App Store and other channel comment areas, the "Qingyu Nian" mobile game is being overwhelmed by one-star bad reviews, which generally point to the game's art, sense of blows, etc. lagging behind the times, and even less than the "Tianya Mingyue Knife" mobile game developed by Tencent Northern Lights Studio in 2016. Taptap data shows that from March 8 to April 7, the number of bad reviews of the game was more than twice that of the positive.
This is obviously contrary to the early publicity of the work. According to the relevant announcements, the development cost of "Qing Yu Nian" is 300 million yuan, the development time is up to 3 years, and the product label is "National Style Masterpiece". Responsible for the development of Sheng Qu Games' most prestigious heirloom studio, which once sent Shanda Games to the altar with the PC MMO "Legendary World".
The performance of the "Celebrating the Rest of the Year" mobile game is also not in line with the established strategy of Sheng Qu Games.
At the 2019 Shanghai Center press conference, Sheng Qu Games released a new three major strategies for enterprises - "boutique, globalization and new culture".
Among them, boutique-quality points to development, while globalization points to distribution agency. The strategy of Sheng Qu Games is to establish IP derivative product development and distribution capabilities in the global market, on the one hand, to promote the development of old IP such as "Legendary World", "Dragon Valley", "Rainbow Island", and on the other hand, to absorb high-quality IP agents or adaptations around the world.
In the planning of Sheng Qu Games, boutique means higher output standards, including planning innovation, art style differentiation and so on. Globalization emphasizes global distribution capabilities. In China, the release and operation of Sheng Qu game products cannot be bypassed by the Tencent system, and the heavy MMO category that it is good at is difficult to surpass NetEase, and going to sea may find a blue ocean for Sheng Qu.
As early as 2018, the parent company of Sheng Qu Games acquired Diandian Interactive, the latter is the head manufacturer of domestic mobile games to go to sea, known for its lightweight free social games. For Sheng Qu Games, the overseas distribution ability of Diandian Interactive is more worthy of attention, how to establish a localization operation strategy and link up with the popular IP in the local market? How to accurately place buy volume in overseas markets? The dot interaction that has represented the domestic head products "Dota Legend" and "My Name is MT2" overseas obviously has more mature experience.
In this process, Sheng Qu Games has adopted a method of big dry and fast, and has shown the characteristics of heavy operation and light products in specific operations. A former Sheng qu employee said that Sheng Qu could not come up with the average salary in the market, which dragged down management, technology, planning and art strength. According to Tan Yanfeng, vice president of Sheng Qu Games, Sheng Qu Games focuses on the pursuit of stable profitability of products, does not seek the best screen and technical performance, but seeks to have general market competitiveness.
Through the Supercell-style reform of middle-stage, Sheng Qu Games is pursuing the ability to mass-produce "boutique" games in an assembly line, and the production cycle of individual products is shortening. "Dragon Valley 2" from the project to the official launch, the time is about two years, compared with the previous work has been greatly shortened.
This is related to the big IP strategy of Sheng Qu Games, at the first strategic conference, Sheng Qu Games came up with six new products, of which "Fallout: Sanctuary Online" originated from the IP license of the American game company Bethesda, the "Qingyu Nian" mobile game originated from the IP authorization of Yuwen, and "Dragon Valley 2" was derived from the continuation of the popularity of the Dragon Valley end of the IP.
Similar to Supercell, the Finnish game company emphasizes the use of middle-end development tools to reuse, and front-end products can be faster to trial and error and verify business models; for Sheng Qu Games, the purpose of middle-stage is to compress production time and improve mass production capabilities to meet the popularity of IP to release products, pursue the maximization of market feedback, and lock in the maximum increment of limited resources.
This is incompatible with the strategy of high-quality products, taking the "Qingyu Nian" mobile game as an example, the product release time is set between the first and second seasons of the TV series, focusing on the concept of the 1.5 seasons of Qingyu Nian, trying to undertake the plot and extend the popularity of IP. The product claims to have invested much more time and energy than ordinary MMO mobile games, and has produced a main plot that fits the original work and a plump three-dimensional character story line. However, from the perspective of specific effects, mobile games not only do not extend IP, but consume the value of IP.
02 Big IP is not a talisman
If from the perspective of the genes of Shanda Games, the self-developed genes originate from the private service contradiction caused by the agent "Legend", for Shanda Games, the self-developed "Legendary World" does not need to surpass competitors in the market, only need to simply reproduce the original work, and realize user diversion as an operator.
A similar story also happened to "Dragon Valley", compared with the latecomer Tencent, both companies started with the agent of Korean games, but Tencent COO Ren Yuxin insisted on the investment of the self-research team, in the end of the PC game and the era of mobile games, Tencent used the architecture of the studio and the studio group to develop itself, and confirmed its self-research ability with a number of explosive products.
In contrast, Shanda founder Chen Tianqiao is more inclined to inject resources into the hardware scene, which makes the "cash cow" attribute of Shanda Games more obvious - the team focuses more on derivative works of mature IP, rather than independent self-research to fight "hard battles". By the time of the Fun Games era, there hadn't been much of a shift in this trend.
Today, Sheng Qu Games' mobile game products are mainly divided into the following categories:
1. The mobile game adaptation works of the traditional terminal game IP are represented by heavy MMO, such as "Blood Legend Mobile Version", "Legend World Mobile Game", "Legend World 3D", "Dragon Valley 2". In this regard, Sheng Qu Games adheres to the strategy of "protective development", emphasizing the development of derivative works with less and fine product ideas.
2. Self-developed original IP, such as "Codename: Expedition", etc., emphasizing the ability to go to sea.
3. Adapt self-developed works of popular IPs at home and abroad, such as "Blood Family", "Radiation: Sanctuary OL", "Qing Yu Nian" and so on.
4. Proxy games, such as "Love Live Gakuen Idol Festival".
There is no doubt that big IP is the object of Fun Games. The problem is that there are many big IP works in Sheng Qu Games, and in the traditional IP field, the purchase cost of the "Legend" mobile game is increasing day by day, in contrast to the slowdown in revenue growth, the self-developed "Dragon Valley 2" has been criticized by players for a serious decline in quality compared with the first generation; in the new IP field, the "Qing Yu Nian" mobile game that has high hopes has suffered a rating downgrade in major channels.
The reason is that the cost of USing IP squeezes the cost of innovation. The more popular the IP itself is, the more game manufacturers tend to undertake IP in a safe way. Whether it is a traditional terminal game IP or other popular IP, the first purpose of adapted works is to transplant the original IP audience, rather than planning innovation. In the blue ocean period of the game market, this strategy can often achieve stable results, and in the current red ocean period of the domestic mobile game market, skinning games without innovative capabilities will be quickly replaced by better quality works.
Retrospectively, "Qing Yu Nian" is not the beginning of the skin change of Sheng qu game, as early as the end game era, Shanda Game's self-developed "Star Change" was evaluated as a serious legendary trace, and the "Star Change" IP also came from the starting point Chinese network. This means that Sheng Qu Games still uses the logic of the previous era to operate the IP adaptation MMO.
On the other hand, the demand for going overseas is forcing Sheng Qu Games to get out of the traditional MMO big IP dependence.
In the Shanda era, heavy MMO was the signature of Shanda Games, and its representative work was "Legend". In the Sheng Qu era, the proportion of non-MMO products under the company has risen rapidly. To some extent, this sign comes from the overseas strategy of Sheng Qu Games, and the experience of countless mobile game manufacturers has proved that SLG (analog) mobile games are the first weapon to go to sea, and the MMO with high domestic popularity has a general response overseas.
In this regard, the solution of Sheng Qu Games is to develop MMO products of Western IP, and the globalized "Codename: Expedition" is based on american magic novels as the background of the work. But compared with the story, MMO is more important than the quality of the game, and the success of the Fun MMO depends on whether it can get out of the assembly line thinking since "Legendary World".
03 Ally or Opponent?
On February 8, 2018, Tencent Hao invested 3 billion yuan in Shanda Games, and this marriage led to the establishment of the "Qing Yu Nian" mobile game IP project. It is rumored in the outside world that the marriage between the boss and the third will be a signal to encircle and suppress the second NetEase game.
In this century marriage, Tencent got the latter's core IP resources, public information shows that as of the end of 2020, the cumulative flow of a variety of Sheng qu self-developed mobile game products issued by Tencent agents has exceeded 14 billion yuan, of which the cumulative flow of "Blood Legend Mobile Edition" has exceeded 10 billion yuan. In the early stage of Tencent Games' transition to the mobile era, Legendary IP provided Tencent Games with a steady stream of cash flow.
This prompted the cooperation between the two sides to further expand, in March 2021, Tencent increased its holding of 5% of the shares of Century Huatong, the parent company of Sheng Qu Games, becoming the second largest shareholder, and in the same year, it transferred its games to Sheng Qu Agent, with a sub-account ratio of Tencent 20% and Sheng Qu 80%.
But for Sheng Qu Games, Tencent is more of a partner with the same bed and different dreams.
First of all, in the domestic market, Tencent has become a strong distribution channel that small and medium-sized game companies cannot bypass, and almost all of Sheng qu games' domestic products are handed over to Tencent's exclusive agents, while its own domestic agent volume is minimal. In the 2021 semi-annual financial report, Century Huatong talked about its own overseas distribution prospects, while shutting down the domestic distribution business, which has explained the problem, Sheng Qu Games is not satisfied with fixing in the game production link, handing over the more profitable operation to others, and detouring overseas is the best option to avoid Tencent.
Secondly, the strategic complementarity between Sheng Qu Games and Tencent Games is difficult to maintain for a long time. Tencent Games' self-research capabilities are more concentrated in low-intensity Moba, FPS, FTG and other categories, while Sheng Qu Games are more inclined to high-intensity MMOs. On the surface, the two sides can form complementary categories, Sheng Qu Games to maximize users, Tencent has supplemented the heavy MMO shortcomings, but Tencent's agent MMO business suppliers are many, including Perfect World, Sohu Changyou, etc., Sheng Qu Games is only one of them. Whether it is the category to get rid of MMO dependence, or the market to get rid of domestic dependence, it requires Sheng Qu Games to go to the Tencent route.
In addition, the resource replacement with Tencent is the result of sharing the traditional IP mobile game dividend of Sheng Qu Games, and with the popular IP dividends such as "Legend" and "Dragon Valley" entering the end, the chips that Sheng Qu Games can exchange resources with Tencent are also less and less, which also forces Sheng Qu Games to accelerate its own de-Tencent process.
This decoupling still requires a long layout. According to the official announcement, the "Legend of the World" mobile game developed by Sheng Qu Games Beidou Studio will be launched on the whole platform on April 20, and will be exclusively represented by Tencent. In addition, in the field of cloud game transformation and IDC data center co-construction, Century Huatong is still inseparable from the support of Tencent.
This means that in the future, the honeymoon period between Sheng Qu and Tencent will continue, but the rift has emerged - not only from the transformation needs of Sheng Qu Games, but also from Tencent's thinking on the layout of large cultural entertainment. Sheng Fun, who is bent on "going far away", may not be the best collaborator for the adaptation of big IP mobile games.