A number of PC games, including QQ Tang, have laid the foundation for Tencent to lay the entire game industry chain, and it is indeed time to exit
Text | Liu Yiqin
Edit | Xie Lirong
On April 20, Tencent's leisure and entertainment game QQ Hall announced that it would stop Chinese mainland operations, shut down servers, and suspend the official website, forum, and exclusive customer service at the same time.
Launched in December 2004, QQ Tang is a landmark in the history of Tencent games and the first large-scale online game of Tencent. Prior to this, Tencent's main business was social networking, that is, QQ. The launch of QQTang is a key step in Tencent's development into a major game company in China.
Screenshot of the official website
Around 2003 was the rise of PC-side games. At that time, Shanda Games' Shengqu introduced the Korean game bubble hall, which quickly attracted a large number of users. The following year, Tencent launched a similar QQ Tang, and with the social network established by QQ, the number of users quickly exceeded that of Bao Pao Tang. In 2006, Paopaotang Korean developer NEXON sued Tencent for infringement, but this claim was eventually rejected by the court.
QQ Tang gameplay is simple and easy to use, players are divided into two camps, only need to operate the arrow keys to walk, space bar to put bubbles, bubbles will trap the player after the explosion, need teammates to rescue, one of the teammates all die then the game is over. The operation is simple, but it also requires certain skills, and at the same time requires teamwork, cute drawing style, and different ways of playing, which immediately attracts a large number of young players.
Looking back now, the core reason why QQ Tang can surpass the bubble hall of the earlier line is to rely on Tencent's strong QQ social ecology. Before 2003, the largest casual game platform in China was Lianzhong Games, with more than 200 million registered users at that time, mainly board games. In 2003, Tencent launched a similar function of QQ games, due to social functions, you can log in with a QQ account, quickly surpassing Lianzhong Games, by 2004 the registered users exceeded 400 million.
Soon after its launch, the number of people online at qq hall exceeded 200,000. The total number of registered users in the entire operation cycle exceeded 300 million. The success of QQ Tang has allowed Tencent's "social + game" model to be verified, Tencent hit the iron while it was hot, launching QQ Fantasy in 2005, QQ Sound in 2006, QQ Three Kingdoms in 2007, and QQ Flying Car and QQ Dance in 2008.
QQ Tang naturally became the big brother of the QQ game series, but soon there were a lot of negative reviews, and plug-ins were rampant, resulting in a poor experience for many players, and often a game ended in a few seconds, and the loss of users was obvious. A game industry source told Caijing Eleven that in the early years, China's game development team was not mature enough, so many games will have "plug-in rampant", "the industry environment is like this, and few companies will spend a lot of effort to crack down on "plug-ins".
2015 is another important turning point for QQ Hall. When Microsoft launched Win10, QQ Tang did not support the Win10 system and could not be downloaded normally. Since then, updates to the game have stalled.
If the rampant plug-in is the external cause of the loss of users of this game, Tencent's reduction of updates, investment and management of QQ Hall is the main reason for the shutdown of this game.
Players' feelings and loves need to end up on commercial value, otherwise game companies have no incentive to maintain. In turn, there is a lack of operations, updates, and players are reluctant to spend money.
A number of PC games, including QQ Tang, have laid the foundation for Tencent to lay the entire game industry chain, but it is indeed time to exit. A Tencent game person told "Finance Eleven" that for Tencent's entire game business, QQ Tang has no sense of existence, no commercial value, and no special team to be responsible, even if it does not announce the shutdown, there is no difference from the shutdown.
Tencent issued a notice in December 2021 that QQ Hall was about to shut down, and then in various related forums, a large number of old players said that "youth has ended". An old player told "Finance Eleven" that in those few days, there were suddenly many people online in the game, and everyone did not play, that is, they came up to change their names, chat, and remember their youth.
In the era of mobile games, the golden life cycle of a game is only 1-2 years, and in the PC era, a game can be popular for a long time, but it cannot compete with the changes of the times. Entering the era of mobile Internet, all kinds of mobile games, short video platforms, and content communities have blossomed, squeezing the living space of PC games.
2014 is known as the "first year of mobile games" because in this year, the number of PC game users reached its peak, and since then there has been a decline. At the same time, the number of mobile game users has gradually increased.
In the past few years, Tencent has tried to integrate many popular games that were once on the PC side into new formats. For example, QQ Show Dance, which was launched in 2008, has focused on tapping the potential of live broadcasting since 2013, and its popularity and revenue have rebounded significantly. But soon, all kinds of game live broadcast, show live broadcast, live broadcast with goods have appeared, QQ dance can only face the reality, in 2018, Tencent launched the QQ dance mobile game version, but it is difficult to save the heat.
A game industry insider told Finance Eleven that the core of determining the life cycle of a game is the content and gameplay. Casual games generally do not have a long life cycle. Even if you add various modes of operation, you must accept the laws of the market.
Tencent's game business has grown into the world's largest game company for more than a decade since its beginnings in QQ Hall and QQ Game Lobby. Over the past few years, regulations on games have been tightening, including a significant reduction in the number of version numbers, the protection of minors, etc., putting pressure on the game giant.
On March 23 this year, Tencent released its fourth quarter financial report, and the game business, which has always been Tencent's largest cash cow, experienced a month-on-quarter decline in revenue in the fourth quarter. According to the financial report, in the fourth quarter, Tencent's domestic game business revenue was 29.6 billion yuan, down 12% from the previous quarter.
On the evening of April 19, an old player logged on to the QQ hall for the last time, and the area where he was located showed that the flow of people was "full", many players were chatting in the "lobby", and he saw the plug-in again - the plug-in can brush the screen, immediately covering the chat content of ordinary players, "Sure enough, it is still a familiar taste." He saved a few screenshots and went offline.
The author is a reporter for Caijing