The mainland game market has officially entered the stock era. It is foreseeable that in the stage of pressure and accumulation of the game industry, high-quality R&D and refined operation are becoming "must-answer questions" for game developers on the road to development.
Recently, Huawei Game Developer Salon Petal Game Developer Service Session was held in Chengdu, where developers such as CMGE, Ant Gathering Internet, and Hero Games were invited to share product cooperation cases and experience of Petal Gaming Services (hereinafter referred to as "PGS"), and discussed with developers how to reduce costs and increase efficiency to create high-quality games and maximize benefits in the existing market environment.
PGS is a developer service covering the whole life cycle of project establishment, development, testing, distribution and operation, and this salon focuses on the continuously upgraded industry vane project establishment service and game super score development services, and gives the whole process development solution for battle games. Teahouse believes that the advantages of PGS lie in the fact that it can provide industry-leading algorithms, AI models, and self-developed engines based on the underlying technology of Huawei terminals, and on the other hand, based on the global player scale and channel operation data of Huawei Game Center, it can provide more comprehensive industry insights and predictions and more accurate user reach. In the context of the continuous increase in the existing market and development costs, PGS may be able to empower more high-quality game production and long-term operations, and is a "booster" to promote the game industry towards excellence.
01
Project
Be the first to gain insight into the market and players
As the first step in game development, project establishment is also a key step that determines the success or failure of a game project.
For example, the explosive 3D ARPG mobile game "Soul Street: Born to King" jointly published by Kashgar Arcane Research and Development, CMGE and Aofei Games, the team behind it determined the game product positioning, player fundamentals and core innovative gameplay through industry vane tools such as PGS game industry portraits and game industry insights at the project establishment stage, and finally handed over the outstanding report cards such as "Soul Street: Born to King" on the first day of the launch of "Soul Street: Born to King" through omni-channel new additions of more than 2 million, the first day of the whole platform turnover of 22 million, the first week turnover exceeded 100 million, among which, Huawei's channels account for the largest proportion of hardcore channels and third-party channels.
According to the distribution producer of CMGE's "Zhenhun Street: Born to King", PGS industry vane provides the R&D team with key data covering target user attribute analysis, competitive product and benchmark product data reference, etc., and provides insight into market development trends, category competition status and core player preferences. Based on the preliminary evaluation of the data model, the scale of core users, sub-core users and potential users is obtained, so that the R&D team has a "clear idea" of the target market and players. After understanding the basic situation of the target market and players, the R&D team quickly locked the entry point of product development and created an innovative gameplay that is highly compatible with IP content.
Innovative ideas are important during the game project development phase, but data is the best tool to assist developers in making scientific project decisions. Relying on Huawei's game center's huge product distribution and channel operation database, PGS provides developers with multi-dimensional data such as industry indexes, industry portraits, industry insights, material indexes, and turnover estimates, allowing developers to make scientific project decisions that are adapted to the team under the guidance of data, thereby reducing trial and error costs and increasing the team's success rate of project establishment. The salon revealed that the above industry vane services will be opened one after another this year, and developers can access and use them more comprehensively.
02
exploitation
Build match-based games efficiently
Entering the development stage, game developers have to achieve the target gameplay determined when setting up the project, and there are still many technical problems to overcome. How to quickly build high-quality online battle gameplay in games is becoming an urgent problem for more and more game developers.
After all, online battle gameplay has become popular in the market. From the perspective of the list, more than half of the products in the industry's free list and the top of the best-selling list contain online battle gameplay. And whether it is heavy FPS and MOBA, or light casual IO products, developers can increase the interactivity and interest of the game by building online battle gameplay in the game, improve the richness of players' game experience, and increase user stickiness.
At a glance at the head of the list, the green is a product with online battle gameplay
(Statistical time: February 16, source: Qimai Data)
However, in the process of building online battle gameplay, developers still face many pain points, Ant Gathering Internet Technology Yang Xu summarized it into "four ones" and shared the use effect of PGS online battle service with the casual action product "Stickman War" as an example: a "reliable" battle engine, a "silky" battle feeling, a "high participation" business, and a "continuous optimization" monitoring.
If developers want to climb the above "four mountains" through self-research, they will spend a lot of time and labor costs for technical exploration. Stickman Wars, on the other hand, efficiently solves the core problem of frame synchronization, the core problem of matchmaking gameplay, and efficiently solves the matching scene coverage and matchmaking rule customization through matching computing capabilities, providing players with a stable and smooth online battle experience and effectively improving player retention rate. According to statistics, using PGS to build online battle gameplay can save about 75% of development costs and increase player dwell time by 19%.
In fact, the industry has also launched and continued to iteratively upgrade the online battle engine, and to the surprise of the teahouse, Huawei Game Center predicts the trend of battle gameplay in a forward-looking manner, and more comprehensively proposes a set of development services and tools covering the whole process of combat, communication, and sharing, providing services such as online battle, game multimedia, and embedded community to help developers build a complete PVP battle scenario.
With the help of PGS, developers can also efficiently build multimedia real-time voice, multimedia IM message module and embedded service community module according to the needs of different game scenarios, and on the other hand, based on multimedia advertising anti-pull service, AI algorithms can improve the accuracy and efficiency of content review in the game environment, reduce the manpower of the review team by 100%, save operating costs, and realize a healthier and purer communication environment between players and between developers and players, and a more efficient and convenient communication experience.
03
optimize
How game development reduces costs and increases efficiency
In addition to technical barriers, another peak that developers need to climb when building high-quality products is cost.
With the continuous development of the market, players have increasingly strict requirements for game quality, and higher pursuit of details such as game quality, and developers have to invest more time and cost to render and optimize the product in depth.
So how can game developers achieve higher quality optimization and polishing of games within a limited cost? Chang Nan of Hero Games ATG believes that most small and medium-sized R&D teams need to cultivate the following two capabilities in the process of pursuing efficient development: first, in terms of management, establish an efficient agile R&D process; The second is to establish a technical infrastructure based on a certain category of games in terms of technology.
On a technical level, choosing the right tools will help game development do more with less. During the development of Project Nebula, the hero game development team accessed PGS performance tuning tools to collect data at the engine, chip, and system levels in one run to improve tuning efficiency, and on the other hand, based on the accumulation of Huawei's self-developed capabilities, to achieve key tuning of XCode. In addition, with the support of Huawei's Game Center's leading algorithm, Project Nebula greatly reduces the running load of the main thread SO library by accessing binary library optimization tools and compiler optimization technology, improving the performance of the CPU side by more than 5%, and solving the problem of product performance monitoring and optimization with high efficiency and low cost.
Regarding the PGS performance optimization service, the salon introduced the interpolation service, binary library optimization service and super-resolution service, and it is particularly noteworthy that this year's new super-resolution service achieves GPU/AI single frame 1.5x super-resolution and AI multi-frame 2x through leading algorithms for low frame rate picture rendering, thereby reducing power consumption and improving rendering quality. The service is still in the testing stage, but it can be seen from the salon display that the two RPGs in cartoon style and realistic style have super-resolved the image quality resolution from 720P to 1080P and from 1782x864 to 2228x1080 through the super-resolution service, reducing power consumption by 5%-16%.
04
future
Keep up with globalization and cloud gaming trends
Looking ahead, the gaming market is moving inexorably towards globalization and cloudification.
The industry believes that there are "three mountains" for games to go overseas: policy and cultural differences, overseas purchases are expensive, and local players are difficult to reach. In this regard, Huawei's team goes deep into many global markets and is familiar with key information such as local policies, culture, and language, which can help developers easily manage products globally. The reservation, testing, and traffic services provided by PGS can also accelerate the growth of overseas game users; Through local communities, exhibitions and dedicated customer service, PGS also provides a variety of communication bridges between developers and global players, so that users can no longer "whip".
In terms of cloud gaming, Huawei continues to explore cutting-edge technologies in the industry, builds device-cloud collaboration, cloud development, and developer communities, provides high-performance cloud hosts, game databases, and game security operations, allowing developers to use cloud to help devices break through performance limitations at low cost.
END
As a creative content industry, the core competitiveness of the game industry is mainly divided into two categories: creative and technical. PGS focuses on the full-cycle needs of game research and operation, breaks through technical barriers with tools, and stimulates developers' creativity with data, which can effectively improve the efficiency and success rate of game research and operation, and promote the birth of more high-quality products. Therefore, PGS is a rare "research and operation assistant" for game teams that seek survival and development in the stock market; For the game industry, which is moving towards quality and segmentation, PGS is a "booster" for high-horsepower.
At the same time, with the continuous iteration and improvement of PGS services, Huawei Game Center has also connected developers and players more closely. Today, Huawei Game Center not only empowers game development, but also effectively improves the efficiency and success rate of game research and operation. It can cover different scenarios inside and outside the end, online and offline, bringing a leap in user reach efficiency; It can also fully meet the differentiated needs of various players through petal light tour and smart screen/car/PC full-end scenarios; Facing a broader global market, Huawei Game Center has launched a one-stop solution for game going global, helping more game developers to sail overseas with peace of mind.
In the past year, Huawei Game Center has covered more than 170 countries and regions around the world, released 58 new games with a grade A or above, and increased game distribution by more than 10%, bringing high-quality game experiences to more than 210 million players and providing developers with full lifecycle services. The teahouse believes that with the continuous and iterative technology empowerment, Huawei Game Center will work with developers to bring more surprises to players in the future, and further promote the healthy development of HMS game ecosystem.