Former Head of Strategy for Meta Greater China, Went to The Sea to Create an Interactive Meta-Universe Platform

Could this be a form of the metaverse?

Why do we need the metaverse?

In the past year, a building called "Metacosm" has soared into the sky, and various major factories have entered the game, but there has been no sign of landing.

The heat wave receded and the voices of doubt rose. What exactly can the metaverse bring us? Do we really need to live in a virtual world?

Focusing on the gaming industry, many of the technologies involved in cloud gaming are also considered the infrastructure of the metaverse, but did we just develop cloud games to make the games a little smoother? That alone will certainly not convince the audience.

"If you really want to bring a new generation to a new narrative, a new scene, an interesting story has to be at the core." Pwnk founder Pu Guannan and CEO told Jingnuo.

Pu Guannan and his Pwnk are running fast on the road of live interactive games for this goal.

New forms of entertainment

The so-called live interactive game, that is, the audience can participate in the live broadcast of the game through the bullet screen function, control the action of the game character or become part of the game content, rather than the anchor unilaterally output content to the audience.

In Pu Guannan's view, this is not just a game type or live content, but may develop into a new form of entertainment.

To this end, Pu Guannan founded Starscape with the support of Funplus founder Zhong Yingwu to create a platform called Pwnk "Immersive Experience Live Interactive Metacosm".

Pwnk is not only the name of the platform, but also Pwnk's first game. The name is actually a tribute to one of the world's family video games, Pong by Atari.

But "Pong" is already a work of the 70s of the last century, which may seem a bit "Old School" for young people, so Starscape decided to cater to the habits of today's foreign teenagers, removing the vowels and creating the name "Pwnk".

At the same time, the game "Pwnk" will actually appear Pwnk, Pwnk and Pwnk on the screen, which can be described as killing two birds with one stone.

In "How the Live Interactive Games Bet by the Big Factory Are Not Moving", jingnuo divided the participants of the domestic live interactive game track into three categories: first, the underlying infrastructure category, mainly doing the game engine, the game bottom layer interactive innovation; second, the middle layer, mainly doing technical plug-ins, connecting CP and live broadcast platforms; third, the application layer, mainly engaged in gameplay level innovation.

In fact, Pu Guannan himself is a technical background, he studied in the Department of Mathematics of Tsinghua University and the Department of Computer Science of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He has served as the head of strategic cooperation and engineer at Facebook, and the core R&D engineer of DaVinci Resolve and various PC and console games. But Pu Guannan said that he still positions Starscape as an application layer company.

In his career in game development, the philosophy of Junpei Yokoi, the father of the Nintendo Game Boy, gave Pu Guannan a great inspiration. That is, to achieve the most things with the least resources.

Under this concept, Pu Guannan believes that whether it is traditional games, interactive games, cloud games, the current tools are enough, in fact, there is no need to create anything new, but it may be more fun to add some interactivity at the gameplay level.

At the end of the day, the essence of interactive games is still games, which arise from the game paradigm. Maybe it will have some new technology or new hardware devices, like AR/VR or the like.

But as long as it is a game, it is always to compete with content. As we often say, the pain point of VR is not in the hardware, but in how to create more content and build a good ecosystem. The development of technology is to solve people's demand for content, and it is content that drives the development of technology, rather than creating content with technology first.

Based on this, Pwnk is actively building a richer content ecosystem. Since the prototype product was launched for more than 3 months, the number of games available on Pwnk has increased to 7, and the Pwnk client has also been launched on the Steam platform.

In terms of the continuous supply of live interactive game content, Pu Guannan said that Pwnk plans to develop 4-6 games per month, and open the editor to players to encourage players to create more interactive game content.

"I would think that Pwnk is the new large-scale entertainment method of the next era, it is more similar to "World of Warcraft", and even we want to benchmark Disneyland," Pu Guannan said confidently, "We want to create a richer entertainment experience store (entertainment experience ecology) in this way, and Pwnk wants to play a first-party benchmarking role in it." ”

Go cloud-native

Content is driving the development of technology, and technology is also bringing more possibilities to content.

Eight years have passed since the birth of the first live interactive game, Twitch Plays Pokemon. In the past eight years, live interactive games have undergone considerable changes in technology and interaction.

"Twitch Plays Pokemon" actually replaces the original instructions with the audience's instructions to control the game, and the operation of the game itself has not changed.

At that time, live broadcasting platforms such as Twitch used CDNs to interact, and the user's feedback time was more than 15 seconds, and the mobile terminal even had a delay of 25 seconds, and many game types could not be implemented on the live broadcast platform.

With the development of technology, there have also been many infrastructure platform companies, such as Agora, who provide RTC services that can actually support or even reach zero latency, basically maintaining less than 500 milliseconds.

The Pwnk technology path is also more cloud-native, sending the instruction set to the server for processing and then rendering on the client.

With technical support, in addition to fighting and shooting games, live interactive games can basically be involved in any category. Whether it's games or interactive videos, you've actually started doing cloud-native content.

In other words, the content itself is designed for streaming, or for the cloud, and it's more about setting up the game itself from the perspective of operation or user.

For example, the domestic "Invisible Guardian", the foreign "Detroit: Change", these games are designed for interactive games, the core experience has changed.

A very important point of live interactive games is interactivity, the current live interactive games are basically in the form of sending bullet screens, and user operations must be limited.

Pu Guannan said that Pwnk will definitely expand to more native, such as html5 consoles, and even native buttons and other interaction methods. In the future, there will be more convenient and diverse input forms such as face capture and sound capture.

Pwnk is not limited to only one form of APP, the future will gradually develop to the host side, VR side to explore more interactive experience, towards a complete cloud native model. And do not rely on the live broadcast platform, but play the characteristics of the hardware itself to derive more ways to play.

A new generation of experiences

Just as the era of terminal games has entered the era of mobile games, live interactive games and even cloud-native games will certainly bring a new gaming experience.

When talking about game production capacity, Jingquan has questioned Pu Guannan that 4-6 different games a month can indeed bring users a fresh experience, but whether the depth of gameplay of the game is lacking.

Pu Guannan believes that this is a strategy adopted for the characteristics of the new generation of users. "The consumption and experience of content by a new generation of teenagers is not the same as the previous generation, and it may be difficult for them to fully immerse themselves in a 15-minute game, let alone 45 minutes of game content," he said. ”

Based on this observation and judgment, Pwnk positions its current content experience as a "short video-like" model. Simply put, it is a fast-moving consumption paradigm, and the game content can be consumed in three minutes, which requires Pwnk's development team to continuously create enough short-term and stimulating game content.

The times and the environment have created the current demand for life and entertainment, and the birth of Pwnk is to meet the needs of more people.

Pu Guannan prefers to call it an "interactive meta-universe entertainment method" rather than live interactive games. Because live broadcasting is only a paradigm and a carrier, Pwnk's content will continue to change with the times and technology.

Pwnk will continue to create interesting content, with new interactions and experiences to attract more people into a new framework, a new narrative, which is the core attraction of the metaverse.

At the end of the interview, Pu Guannan raised a question about the value of live interactive games. Is the experience of live interactive games good or bad?

It's often said that this was an era of "entertainment to death", but Bozeman was in an era of "domination by television" when he wrote Entertainment to Death. He believes that under the discourse system of radio and television, the audience can only unilaterally accept the information conveyed by the television, losing the ability to feedback and think, and the television itself has been given the attribute of "entertainment" by Bozeman.

The Internet has changed all this, the audience has more power to interact and choose, there are channels for feedback and voice, and the communication is no longer limited to one-way.

The same is true of games, we pay for pleasure, but this is not passive acceptance but active choice, players through self-awareness driven to participate in the entertainment experience such as live interactive games, the harvest of content is not limited to entertainment.

People create games, games create happiness, and happiness changes people and the world.

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