If you want to get rich, you are doomed to not be able to give birth to great games, but once a great game is born, getting rich is a certainty.
Written by | Shi Yang
Responsible for the | Yin Xiaolin
On January 18 this year, a merger news detonated the long-dormant game circle. Microsoft said it would buy Activision Blizzard in cash for $95 per share, with a total deal value of $68.7 billion, or about 430 billion yuan.
For Microsoft, this is the largest acquisition in the company's history; for Blizzard, in the face of years of declining word of mouth and revenue, God closed a door and opened a window (Windows); for players, Microsoft can't save Blizzard because money can't solve all problems.
Unsurprisingly, in the early morning of May 4, the mobile game adapted from the legendary IP "Warcraft" was officially announced. However, players did not wait to expect the original end game experience, this mobile game called "Warcraft Arc Light Battle" has become a group ridicule object of fans and players, known as "no intention, no sincerity, no creativity" of the "three no masterpieces".
Blizzard's last return to light was in 2019. At 6 a.m. on August 27, 2019, millions of Blizzard fans around the world shouted "For Azeroth" and flocked to the World of Warcraft: Old Classics server. In China, a large number of middle-aged people who use thermos cups to soak goji berries have taken leave to get up early, ready to regain the simple happiness of 15 years ago.
Throughout the history of games, it is difficult to find an online game that has a history of 15 years and can achieve higher popularity through "emotional dimensionality reduction".
However, the appearance of player revelry cannot hide the nature of declining decline. Since Blizzard announced in 2018 that Diablo was going to develop a mobile game, a variety of problems have followed. First, all offline competitions of "Heroes of the Storm" were forced to be suspended, resulting in the loss of all Heroes of the Storm teams around the world overnight, and then it was exposed that the company had laid off a large number of employees.
I have to admit that Blizzard is no longer the Blizzard of the past. Once blizzard was great because it was in line with the trend of the times, combined with engaging storytelling ability, insisted on near-perfect innovation and a good player experience; the current decline, from all indications, is to blame for the loss of its original intention, and hesitation at the strategic level, even overcorrection.
Today, the gaming market has undoubtedly moved from the PC era to the game era. In the "headwind" environment, Blizzard did not keep pace with the times, but internally chose to sacrifice the player experience to achieve the purpose of game balance in terms of game iteration; in terms of pushing new, it fell into the deadlock of "fried cold rice", coupled with the collapse of stock prices and sexual harassment scandals, which eventually made it fall deeper and deeper on the road of "avalanche".
Perfectionism vs The Mobile Game Era
Once upon a time, perfectionism was a central factor in the legend of blizzard games. Blizzard's "obsessive-compulsive disorder" for perfection is mainly manifested in its endless harshness on itself, and "skipping tickets" is even more commonplace. For example, when Diablo was planned to be released in 1996, other companies rushed to release the game on Christmas Eve in order to increase sales, while Blizzard thought that its game was not in its best condition and chose to postpone the release.
Time has proven that Blizzard's choice was correct. "It's been postponed, but the players really like it and the sales throughout 1997 were very good. Now if we ask players what they think of Diablo, they won't say that the game missed Christmas that year, they'll just remember that they had a really good gaming experience. "In the eyes of Blizzard founder Mike Mohan, insisting on making great games at any cost is Blizzard's ultimate goal.
Blizzard founder Mike Mohan
"At Blizzard, the brand is our most important asset. If a player walks into a store and sees a game on a shelf, just seeing the word Blizzard is enough to convince them to buy it. One of our goals is to make players believe in our game. Mike Mohan said.
Of course, perfectionist innovation also needs to be on the pulse of the times to give birth to great enterprises. In 1993, when Blizzard was first named "Best Hosting Software Developer," the console market began to experience a decline in sales. Blizzard's founding team realized that high-quality games also need to be accepted by more people on platforms with high popularity. So Blizzard decided to switch to PC games.
Mike Mohan once recalled: "Our first PC game was Warcraft, followed by StarCraft in 1996, and these games were recognized and accepted by the majority of players with the advent of the PC era. Later, with the popularity of the Internet, Blizzard began to consider how to make full use of the advantages of the Internet to let players play games together, which also provided the background and soil for the development and hot sale of "World of Warcraft".
At the same time, in terms of R&D efficiency, the game change in the PC era is slower. Because Blizzard games are of extremely high quality, they have a longer life cycle than other games, which coincides with Blizzard's 3 to 5 years of new product development, thus forming a relatively close product connection. However, such a new cycle seems too slow in today's mobile game era.
The stretched speed of research and development has made Blizzard anxious. On the one hand, the boutique games themselves have a long research and development time, and the player's information reception speed and the amount of mobile game output in the mobile Internet era are several times that of the PC era, which causes a heavy delay in the player's body sensation.
In addition, standing at the crossroads of PC games and mobile games in the era of mobile Internet, Blizzard has not been able to make strategic planning in advance as it did during the previous two era changes. Nowadays, competing for players' attention has become the main task of mobile games. According to the data, 92% of players can only maintain enthusiasm for one game for about a week, and 87% of respondents said that the total number of games they touch each month averages around 5. In the face of a dizzying array of new products, it's no surprise that players complain that Blizzard hasn't produced a new game for a long time.
Build IP VS Consume IP
As we all know, Blizzard is very good at telling stories for games, from Azeroth to the Sanctuary Lands, from the Queen of blades, Kerrigan, to the tribal chief Sal, from the Paladins of the Alliance to the Nephilim of salvation... Behind each huge game worldview are hundreds of heroic characters, and it is these IPs that make up the powerful magnet that Blizzard has attracted players for more than a decade.
Back in the early 1990s, when Blizzard was still developing console games for Nintendo and Sega, no game on the market would focus on building the backstory, "the game at that time was just fun." "But Blizzard's game makers find it difficult for a simple game to get deep into the player's heart and keep them focused on new works related to the future." Therefore, it is necessary to use a story to connect the content of the game.
"Why do orcs and humans go to war? What's at stake? We're going to use stories to explain why. In Mike Mohan's recollection, Blizzard first taught himself how to tell a story for the game when designing Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. Since then, the story has also become part of Blizzard's design philosophy. Mike Mohan introduced: "Whether it's Warcraft or StarCraft, we're constantly improving our narrative strategy and deepening the backstory. It turns out that the game experience is more meaningful, deeper, and more immersive with a story, because the whole world is built around the story. ”
Taking World of Warcraft as an example, the worldview, plot, and characters originally based on the expansion of Warcraft 3 have become larger and larger with the development of the game's plot, and have now become an epic work. Its strong IP appeal is also one of the reasons why "World of Warcraft: Old Classics" can be instantly popular.
However, Blizzard ignored the biggest enemy of telling a good story: time. It's like a popular American drama will never be allowed to end, and when he really ushers in the end, that is, the day when the fans are lost after its bad end. Although Blizzard's storyline will be enriched and extended with the iteration of the game, it will also lead to a logical contradiction between the new plot and the previous setting due to the long timeline, and the constant revision of the story plot will lead to logical confusion, which will affect the setting of the story in the player's mind.
For example, after the release of the new expansion pack "Shadowlands" of "World of Warcraft" in November 2019, many fans lamented that "there is no lich king in the world" at the same time, worried about the popular hero Sylvanas "will not be blackened into the book". (When the hero character enters the quest to become the boss, he will face the fate of being killed by the player) So with the blessing of feelings, the players miss the previous plot even more, after all, those popular IP is still alive and the plot is more rigorous.
The data is the best proof. Since 2019, the player population of the official service of "World of Warcraft" has been declining, and the daily active population of the official service in the first quarter of 2019 is still more than 1 million, and by the 8.2 version of "The Rise of Aisara", the global daily active population is only about 800,000. After the opening of the "Old Classic", the number of global players decreased by 200,000 in three days.
In addition, the "Old Classic" consumes the IP value of "World of Warcraft" greatly. In addition to accelerating the loss of players in official clothes, due to attribute limitations, the "Old Classic" is destined to have a short life cycle. 15 years ago, Azeroth was an unexplored continent, and players had a great gaming experience. It took two to three months to move from level 1 to level 60, and it would take 40 players to work together to complete the ultimate quest, from teaming up to running-in to strategy, and it was impossible to win without a few months of trying.
Nowadays, with various plug-ins, upgrading monsters has become fast and brainless. The plot of opening the "double speed" makes the ceiling of the "old classic" visible to the naked eye. In addition, most players have experience with quest raiders as early as a young age, so it is not surprising that the European Service Guild killed the final boss Ragnaros only 5 days after the start of the service.
In addition to the "Old Classics", Blizzard has also announced the rework of StarCraft and Warcraft 3. In recent years, in order to attract the attention of veteran players, Blizzard has repeatedly "fried cold rice". Although players and fans are enthusiastic every time the news is announced, these old-fashioned content consumes the residual value of IP in the name of "feelings". It is true that this can increase popularity and income in the short term, but it cannot form a lasting virtuous circle model.
User Experience VS Game Balance
In almost all PVP (Player Versus) games, balance is an unavoidable problem. The phrase "kiss your son" has also become central to every game version update. In the PC era where single-player games are king, the semi-open online environment makes the game balance easy to adjust, so in the eyes of Blizzard in the past, sometimes the user experience and game balance can be equated.
However, in the eyes of the player, absolute balance is difficult to exist, and even if it does, the fun of the game will be greatly reduced. Blizzard has struggled to maintain a delicate balance between user experience and game balance.
In Overwatch, for example, in the past, before a match began, all players had to choose the hero role they wanted to play, and if other teammates had already chosen a hero, it meant that you had to choose another character that would help balance the team. The character queuing system helps simplify and speed up the teaming process for players, creating an environment that encourages teamwork and even more exciting events.
However, today's Blizzard doesn't seem to be able to achieve the perfect blend of user experience and balance for every game under its umbrella. In some games, Blizzard's original intention is to better enhance the player experience by adjusting the balance, and then achieve the purpose of attracting players to return, but in fact, it often backfires, which is the main reason why some Blizzard games have been "not on fire".
For example, Hearthstone is the truest portrayal of "one dynasty version and one god" in the Blizzard game. Hearthstone is known to have a high barrier to entry, but the game still puts some of players' favorite powerful cards into the "Honor Room" every year. This means that these cards cannot be used in Standard Ladder Mode. In this way, although the battle environment is balanced, it also directly burns the decks that players have racked their brains to build around these cards, and indirectly forces players to buy new cards instead.
"Heroes of the Storm" has become a classic negative teaching material for Blizzard to "overcorrect" in terms of balance. Some netizens once commented on "Heroes of the Storm": "This game is good everywhere, it is not fun." Two of the most obvious advantages of Heroes of the Storm are that the game's graphics and physics far exceed those of other MOBA games, but its "experience sharing" mechanics are too "anti-human".
The Experience Sharing mechanism distributes the experience points earned by each person on the team equally to all teammates. It perfectly circumvents the "snowball phenomenon" of MOBA games, where a player wins overwhelmingly due to their continued dominance. On the surface, this mechanism always gives the inferior side a chance to overtake, but in fact it is a fatal blow to MOBA games with "heroism" as a selling point.
Also, "experience sharing" doesn't mean that the game becomes easy, because a single talent system can be a headache for players. And each hero has his own talent, which creates an embarrassing situation: the player spends a lot of effort to study a hero thoroughly and spend time cultivating the technology, but in the end, his contribution will not get the slightest attention, making the player's game experience extremely poor.
Revolutionaries come
As former Blizzard President Alan Braque admitted in an interview: "We didn't keep up with the times in time, and it's really difficult for Blizzard to transition to the mobile game side now, but we want to see these difficulties as new challenges." "Since Blizzard missed the best time at the crossroads of the times, it should be calm to stop the loss in time and focus on choosing the right path."
Making the right choices often requires the courage to admit and confront your own problems. Lu Xun once said: A true warrior dares to face a bleak life and dare to face up to the dripping blood. Just like in 1926, Sun Yat-sen personally pasted a couplet on the gate of the Whampoa Military Academy. The upper link is: "Promote officials and get rich, please go elsewhere", the lower link is "Greedy and afraid of death, do not enter the door", and the horizontal criticism is "revolutionaries come". For Blizzard, it was once able to become a revolutionary and subversive in the industry because of the ingenuity of not forgetting the original intention, and today's Blizzard should not shake the original intention due to the sense of crisis of the times and the loss of players, let alone be panicked and chaotic due to the decline in revenue and stock price.
Do not enter the door of greed and fear death
There is an established game company that, like Blizzard, has been banned by players, riding the tide of the times, and has also been overturned by huge waves. It has the same stubborn spirit of perfectionism and persists in carrying perfectionism to the end at the most critical moment of the situation. Today, with this dedicated "craftsman spirit," it has reached the pinnacle of the mobile era, and the game company is a household name Nintendo.
The legend of Nintendo lies in the almost paranoid implementation of the ultimate philosophy of "everything is to make the most interesting game". In the first 20 years of its entry into the video game industry, Nintendo has spent its brains and suffered losses in search of its ultimate goal. As the first shot on the road to advancement, Famicom and the royalty system saved the video game industry on the verge of collapse.
Subsequently, although Nintendo was at a disadvantage in the first ten years of confrontation with the "old enemy" Sony, it gradually realized that "developing hardware that can match the unique gameplay of the game software" is the key to excavating the fun of the game, which also laid a solid foundation for Nintendo to enter the second round of the peak dominated by NDS and Wii.
It can be said that between the repeated life and death, Nintendo is groping for the king of a game entertainment company. Nintendo implements "abstinence management" through institutional norms. Since you choose to only do fine products, then stick to the end. Former Nintendo president Satoshi Iwata once said: "We should focus our energy on the places where we can play our best, and we can't compromise to get a so-so result." ”
Because of this, Nintendo's concentration has never been afraid of the changing times. In the era of mobile games, Nintendo launched a two-in-one switch with a platform and a handheld, selling 32.27 million units and selling nearly 200 million games in less than a year. In the face of the mobile game tide that emerged in the era of mobile Internet, the Switch became Nintendo's best way to break the game.
In recent years, Blizzard has only known the purpose of temporarily saving its life by repeatedly consuming IP value due to fear of player loss, but this is always a stopgap measure. Instead of "greed for life and fear of death", it is better to adhere to the spirit of excellence, like Nintendo, no matter how noisy the outside world is, no matter how severe the situation, we should concentrate on polishing a more perfect new game, returning to the user experience, so as to attract the attention of players, and extend the life cycle of the product with a high-quality game experience, win more time for new product research and development, and achieve an effective virtuous circle.
After all, the skinny camel is bigger than the horse, although the performance has declined, but with the current strong strength of Blizzard, it should be no problem to implement their beliefs.
Promote officials and get rich, please go elsewhere
Blizzard has never worried about money, and Blizzard's game is a "printing machine". Players even held the pious mentality of "Shut up and take my money" and knelt down to beg Blizzard to launch a new game product as soon as possible. And now the decline in both performance and stock prices seems to have left Blizzard at a loss. Whether it is constantly "fried cold rice" or "balance", it is actually a typical symptom of emergency medical treatment.
When it comes to making money, it is undoubtedly necessary to focus on the "gold mine" of the global game market - China, and mobile games are currently the most profitable game type in China. Since 2017, china's mobile game sales have exceeded $17.6 billion, accounting for more than half of China's entire video game consumer market.
So, which mobile game company in China is the most profitable? According to statistics, in the 10 most popular mobile games in China in 2021, Tencent occupies 6 seats in the top 10. However, Tencent seems to be making a lot of money, but in fact, the game that is popular is not necessarily popular. Because Tencent's success stems from its operations aimed at "generating revenue".
As we all know, Tencent's concept is to create happiness with "salary". Unlike foreign game buyouts, Tencent has seized the Chinese market through the operation strategy of charging props in free-to-play games. At the same time, in order to maintain the increase in revenue, Tencent has hundreds of mobile games, large and small, which are jokingly called "Krypton gold games" by players. The essence of these game designs is not based on the user experience, but to induce users to continue to consume, so the balance in the game does not exist, because Kryptonian players are "invincible".
If Blizzard's personality is a master craftsman who focuses on creating his own perfect work, then Tencent is an ambitious businessman who uses everything he can to expand and amass wealth. Blizzard should be clear that it and Tencent are taking two different paths. To truly return to the original intention of making great games, Blizzard needs to have a strong heart that is "not very sensitive to numbers".
Once Blizzard was willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to develop a game called Titan. The game has a near-real battle system, but after years of development, it has not been able to achieve the ideal state, and eventually Blizzard cut the entire project. At that time, the head of Titan proposed to use the existing engine and model to recreate a competitive 3DFPS game, which was later Blizzard's gold absorbing weapon.
This example is a good illustration of Blizzard's "revolutionary tradition" of "imperfection, rather death". Therefore, if you want to get rich, you are doomed to not be able to give birth to great games, but once a great game is born, getting rich is certain.