Backed by Tencent, but not so "Tencent".
Text丨Gao Honghao
Editor丨Huang Junjie
Externally and internally, Tencent Games are two completely different looks.
Externally, Tencent Games is a whole, with "Honor of Kings" and "Peace Elite", with an annual income of more than 170 billion yuan, making it the world's most profitable game production business; it is also a super tool to monetize Tencent's platform and traffic, and it is the confidence that other products can not rush to stuff advertisements and protect user experience.
Internally, Tencent Games is a puzzle of four independent "small companies" with revenues of tens of billions of yuan. The four groups of studios compete with each other for the group's resources, and they can decide for themselves what games to play and who to hire.
In 2019, Tencent Games already accounted for half of all mobile games in China. With channels such as WeChat, QQ, and AppTreasure, as well as the IP and management experience obtained by the entire group investing in hundreds of game companies around the world, as long as the major studio groups put all their efforts to bring a mature gameplay to the mobile phone, success is guaranteed.
But the environment in the gaming industry has shifted in a few years. Players' requirements for mobile games have become higher, and competitors have new channel options such as Douyin and Bilibili. Making games in China is becoming more and more like making a movie, where you have to fight for creativity and content. Small companies and large companies have to rely on the experience and inspiration of a few people, and spend tens of millions or hundreds of millions of yuan before there is data feedback.
The new environment has reshaped the industry. NetEase's market value is behind JD.com and surpasses Meituan. miHoYo's Honkai: Star Railway, launched after Genshin Impact, continues to be successful. Even though it is still the world's largest game company by market capitalization, Tencent will have to look for a transformation.
Tencent Games' lead in China comes from four competing game studio clusters. How Tencent Games transforms today also depends on how these four highly independent teams take the next step.
In this transition period, "LatePost" plans to continue to report on these Tencent's self-developed studios, the first of which is the Rubik's Cube.
Tencent's four self-developed studio groups have their own strengths. TiMi has made "Honor of Kings" and "Call of Duty Mobile", Photon has "Peace Elite" and "PUBG MOBILE", and Northern Lights has "Tianya Moon Knife" series and "Love of Light and Night". And for a long time, it's hard to tell what the Rubik's Cube is for.
Rubik's first successful game was Rock Kingdom, a web community product aimed at children. Shifting to mobile phones, Rubik's Cube is best known for Naruto mobile, a 2D action game that might remind you of CAPCOM. Today, one of the key products of Rubik's Cube is called Dark Zone Breakout, a 3D hardcore shooter with cold graphics and an emphasis on strategy.
The Rubik's Cube Studio Group started with the production of children's leisure communities, the picture shows "Rock Kingdom"
Naruto, the first 2D fighting mobile game produced by Rubik's Cube
The third shooting mobile game "Dark Zone Breakout" produced by Rubik's Cube
Rubik's Cube has undergone a series of industry transformations such as social games, browser games, and console games, and although it has never done a national hit like "Honor of Kings", it has maintained rapid growth in today's change cycle. Dark Zone Breakout attracted 8 million users on the first day of its public beta launch, and the number of registered users worldwide has exceeded 100 million, which is one of the few self-developed games developed by Tencent in recent years.
At the end of 2021, Tencent Game Cube Studio Group was established in Changbai Mountain. At the management meeting, a mid-level manager asked Enzo Zhang, president of the studio group, "What is the core competitiveness of the Rubik's Cube?" He said, "Not going to die. ”
More than 30 people, secretly set up a project to make two games
In August 2009, Zhang Hanjin, head of QQ's pet product department, came to Seattle to attend the Casual Connet global casual game developer conference.
Just a few months ago, Tencent Games completed its biggest reorganization since its establishment, consolidating multiple project teams that were originally scattered within the department into several self-developed studios. Tencent Games' original independent functional departments such as program development and art production have been dismantled and merged into various studios, thus forming a more flexible combat body. These studios can decide for themselves what games to make and how many people to hire. In Tencent Games, this is called having the "right to fire".
At that time, the game business had become Tencent's largest source of revenue. Tencent is also on the verge of overtaking Shanda as the industry hegemon to become China's largest gaming company. In order to further consolidate its advantages, Tencent, which started with the casual games "QQ Tang" and "QQ Speed", began to expand into medium-to-heavy self-developed PC online games, and the studio assumed the responsibility of expanding the territory.
After graduating from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2005, Zhang joined Tencent and participated in the production of the QQ Speed Project. In 2007, he was transferred to run QQ Pet. By the time of the reshuffle, users of this virtual pet community product were losing rapidly, so his team was only allowed to form the QQ Pet Products Department. Compared with the studio, the product department has much less authority, has no independent management rights, is only responsible for a specific product, and has to listen to the unified command of the business group in every move.
Fourteen years later, Zhang Hanjin has no memory of what was on display at the Casual Connet in Seattle, only the huge Zynga billboard that stretched from the airport to the venue. Zynga has only been around for two years and has been making more than $10 million a day by developing web social games such as chess and cards and stealing vegetables on the Facebook social network. What he thought was, "It turns out that this is the posture of the upstart debut." ”
Like Facebook, Tencent has a huge amount of traffic and social resources in China. However, the scale of China's web games was limited before, and the revenue of the entire web game market was only 10 billion to 20 billion yuan, which was not as good as the annual revenue of several leading PC online games.
Within Tencent Games, the main focus of the four major studios is also on PC online games: Linlang Sky Studio is developing "Dragon in the Sky Mobile Game", Wolong Studio is working on "Three Kingdoms", and Northern Lights Studio has "Legend of Xuanyuan". Quantum Studios' "God of War" was Tencent's largest investment since its inception at that time, and the team specially hired the animation company of "Avatar" to participate in the project, and the opening animation alone cost tens of millions of yuan.
At that time, the QQ Pet team did not have the independent permission to set up such a PC online game, but the explosion of Zynga and social games gave Zhang Hanjin a glimmer of hope, and this is also similar to their previous genes: QQ Pet is a gamified community.
In order to open up the situation, soon after Zhang Hanjin returned to China, the QQ Pet Products Department set up two project teams, the first group of only six people, the task is to develop a fighting social game "Q Pet Big Fight", and the other group is only 30 people, the goal is to produce a children's leisure community product "Rock Kingdom". Both of these are browser games that are much less difficult to make than PC games.
They didn't officially set up projects for two products. In order to save money and people, the underlying technology and resources of the two products are all reused from "QQ Pet". Since no one knew how to use a game development engine, they went straight to Flash, an animation design tool.
In order to understand children's preferences, Zhang Hanjin found Phoenix Publishing House, the national sales champion of non-teaching children's books, to learn Xi narrative skills and art style. During the Spring Festival in 2010, he spent five days at home writing a 40,000-word world view and a 40,000-word level design document for Rock Kingdom.
A few months later, "Rock Kingdom" was launched, and the number of online users (PCU) on the computer side exceeded 1 million, making it Tencent's most popular browser game that year. On the other hand, the monthly income of "Q Pet Fight" is also approaching 30 million yuan, ranking among the top ten Tencent Games in terms of monthly income as an inconspicuous web game. At the end of the year, Tencent's General Office approved the QQ Pet Products Department to become a game studio and changed its name to Rubik's Cube Studio, and the main creators of QQ Show, Xia Lin (now the general manager of Tencent Interactive Entertainment's self-developed system management department), and Zhang Hanjin became the co-founders of the studio. Rubik's Cube has also become one of the few studios within Tencent Games that is known for developing web games and children's leisure communities.
Rubik's Cube Studio Group's 2010 online browser game "Q Pet Fight"
In 2010, Quantum Studio initiated the development of a large-scale PC online game "God of War"
At this point, the Rubik's Cube caught up with the best time of browser games. Around 2011, with the rapid popularization of the Internet, web games became the gateway for hundreds of millions of people to regain the fun of gaming on their computers. These games do not need to be installed, and the difficulty of making them is low, Huang Yimeng, CEO of Xindong Network, said in an interview with "LatePost", "Everyone is using the web page to pretend to make a game. In 2010, he took the original team of the download station VeryCD to set up XD Network to make web games, and once earned hundreds of millions of yuan a month.
The simpler the game, the greater the impact of traffic on the competition. Relying on the huge traffic of QQ and QQ space, the "Rock Kingdom" and "QQ Water Margin" produced by Rubik's Cube can be successful even if they do not use those extreme customer acquisition methods. By the end of 2012, Rubik's Cube, with a team of just over 100 people, had become the game studio with the highest profit margin per capita. But they soon found that with the advent of the mobile era, the successful experience accumulated by Rubik's Cube in the web game stage has become an obstacle to the development of the next era.
Kids Casual Community - Young Action Fighting - 2D Action - 3D Shooting
After doing this for several years, Zhang Hanjin suddenly realized that the oncoming wave of mobile games was essentially an asset migration.
In 2013, China Mobile's 4G network was rolled out, and smartphones became truly popular in China. In the following decade, mobile games followed the mobile hardware through Sony's 30-year gaming path.
The decade began with casual mobile games such as Temple Run and Fishing Master, which firmly dominated the game charts in the iOS and Android app stores. Tencent quickly launched eight games, supplemented by the dividends brought by the rise of WeChat, and stood out from the competition at the beginning.
After that, the long-popular MOBA game on the computer was moved to mobile phones by Chinese game companies, and "Honor of Kings" became an absolute national game, with nearly 100 million players commanding a hero to fight on a symmetrical map every day.
Strategy, role-playing, interactive fiction...... Mainstream gameplay on every PC and console has been moved to mobile phones by Chinese companies. Alibaba's "Three Kingdoms Strategy", NetEase's "Fantasy Journey to the West" mobile game and "Onmyoji", Paperfold's "Love and the Producer", ......
In these rounds of big waves, there are no star works in the Rubik's Cube.
At the beginning of the wave, Tencent reorganized its game department and quickly launched eight games, including "Cool Running Every Day", "Love Elimination", "National Plane War", "Flying Car Every Day" and "Chess Every Day", and quickly entered the mobile game industry through WeChat's exclusive promotion channel.
In the face of a highly certain opportunity, "the question is never whether to bet or not, but what to bet." Zhang Hanjin said. "We were like waiting in the station, first we looked up and saw where the bus was, then we looked again, and it seemed to be coming, and by the third time, the car was already speeding away, but we hadn't had time to get on the train. ”
Rubik's Cube is also transforming into a mobile game, but at this time, there is no front-end engine programmer in the studio, and no one will use the Cocos 2D engine, which is commonly used to develop mobile games. Because they have been making browser games for many years, they are Xi developing games directly on Flash, and developers don't even need to learn C++ programming.
In order to survive, Rubik's Cube quickly mobilized everyone, recruited new engineers and programmers at the same time, and set up three project teams to develop three games simultaneously.
"If you are still thinking about how to practice the basic skills at this time, it is unreasonable, we need to get in the car first. Zhang Hanjin recalled the decision at that time. Rubik's Cube immediately hired mobile game development staff and gave the team a dead order, "No matter what, it can't be slower than developing a web game." In seven months, Rubik's Cube "Water Margin for All" and "Farm for All" and other games were launched, becoming Tencent's second batch of mobile games.
Casual games soon became out of the mainstream. In 2014, Lilith, which was founded less than a year ago, broke out of the siege of Tencent's "Tiantian" and "All People" group army with a "Dota Legend", and topped the App Store best-selling list for 87 days and ranked in the top 10 best-selling list for 212 days. Immediately afterwards, NetEase's mobile game versions of "Brawl Westward Journey" and "Fantasy Westward Journey" were launched successively, and the mobile game competition entered the second stage with dizzying momentum - a high-quality game that competes for industrialization ability and makes medium and heavy gameplay.
It was also in this year that Tencent Games' self-developed system was reorganized on a large scale again. Several existing studios were spun off and merged, and finally formed four major studio groups led by TiMi, Photon, Rubik's Cube, and Northern Lights.
The studio group is given greater autonomy – accounting independently and being self-financed. They also become more like a startup, and the team that develops a successful product will reap the same benefits as a startup. But if you lose money, the studio group will also bear the cost.
All of them, except for the Rubik's Cube, have experience in developing PC games. TiMi Studio Group has taken the lead in the development of medium-to-heavy mobile games such as "QQ Speed Racer Game", "Dragon in the Sky Mobile Game" and "Honor of Kings".
Rubik's Cube wanted to find its own heavy products after relying on "Rock Kingdom". In the conference room, the team listed all the major game tracks and then sifted down one by one. 3D was the first to be excluded because no one in the studio would do it, followed by SLG (strategy games) because it was more of a test of understanding of values and traffic than a team preference. Eventually, they circled the path of "action".
The action genre is relatively easy to pick up, with 2D and 3D as well as versatility, and many of the more mainstream game genres require action design and implementation capabilities, such as shooting and role-playing (RPG). Soon, the Rubik's Xi was changed from Zynga to CAPCOM, a Japanese company known in the game industry as "Action Tenzun".
When the first web-based action game "Mecha Whirlwind" was established, the Rubik's Cube team started by buying tutorials to learn how to use the engine Xi, and dismantled similar games frame by frame to study what action is and what are in-frame special effects. Two months later, half of the core team was gone, and after a few months, the other half was gone. Most people don't believe that a studio that started out as a web game can get through this path.
The pressure from the group is not small. "From top to bottom, they think that we are making web games and young products, so why do you want to do martial arts?" Zhang Hanjin found a way to change the original design of the game, changing "Mecha Whirlwind" into a young action game, and the result was, "Young users don't know how to play martial arts, and people who play fighting think it's too naïve." In the end, the game fell into the uninhabited market.
"You can compromise, but you just can't afford not to do it. Zhang Hanjin said. Every start-up game team goes through a genetic fork, "If you don't take this first step, you won't even have two strokes, and if you leave, you can at least take a hand." "Mecha Whirlwind was a failure, but it allowed the team to build up the engineering capabilities of an action game.
In 2016, the Rubik's Cube finally waited for its chance. Its first mobile action game, Naruto, was launched, which was also its first medium-core mobile game and third fighting game. With the blessing of well-known IP, platform traffic and innovative gameplay, the game was a great success on the first day of registered users, and it also became the highest revenue game since the establishment of the Rubik's Cube, a record that has been held to this day.
But the culmination of the game's Great Migration came in the same year that Naruto Mobile was launched, and Rubik's Cube had no chance to compete at all.
In March 2017, South Korea's Krafton (Chinese known as Kuijiang Group, formerly known as game studio Blue Hole) opened beta for the shooter PC game PUBG and became popular around the world. One of its settlement lines, "Eat Chicken", has become synonymous with all games with similar gameplay in China.
This is a track that Tencent has been optimistic about for a long time, having experienced the prototype of similar gameplay on the ArmA engine in 2013, "DayZ", and invested in Dean Hall, the developer of the mode. Since then, Tencent has cooperated with a number of tactical survival shooter products and teams such as "H1Z1".
However, in July of this year, NetEase took the lead in launching its own "Chicken" mobile game "Wilderness Action" in China, a few months before "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" ended testing and was officially released. By the end of the year, Wilderness Action had 20 million daily active users.
Tencent worries that with the arrival of the winter holiday and the Spring Festival, the number of players of "Wilderness Action" may double again, and it will become a national game that can compete with "Honor of Kings". Tencent accelerated its cooperation with Krafton, a company in which it invested, and won the rights to develop the mobile game of PUBG. Ren Yuxin, COO of Tencent and president of Tencent Interactive Entertainment Group (IEG), issued a hard order: a high-quality "chicken" game must be made before the Spring Festival.
At this time, there are only three months left before the Spring Festival, which is almost an impossible task. Between launching on time and fully restoring the original, Tencent chooses both. In order to increase the chances of success, multiple teams proposed and developed at the same time.
In this race that cannot be lost, only two of Tencent's four studio groups have enough technology to participate. Zhang Hanjin saw that TiMi and Photon were already using the most advanced Unreal Engine 4 at the time, which was used more for PC games at the time, such as Square Enix's Final Fantasy VII Remake and Bandai Namco's Tekken 7. This is also the first time that new technologies such as the large map of 8000 meters × 8000 meters, brand new PGC generation have appeared in mobile games.
For the first time, PUBG MOBILE uses the 8000-meter × 8000-meter map on a mobile game
A Tencent Games executive said, "They are like two rapid marches racing in the dark, although neither can see the other, but they can hear each other's footsteps, and everyone's spirit is highly tense." Three months later, PUBG MOBILE went live as scheduled, quickly surpassing Wilderness Ops.
This is a typical "Tencent-style" victory: find a universal way to play, quickly make a game with good quality with strong execution and engineering capabilities when the time is ripe, and finally promote it through the huge traffic and social relationship chain of WeChat and QQ, all three are indispensable.
"Chicken War" shocked onlookers Zhang Hanjin far more than at any other moment. In front of him was a great opportunity that was incomparably certain. But this time, he and his Rubik's Cube were not even qualified to play. Until this moment, he realized: he was crushed.
"It's like practicing kung fu at home every day, and suddenly one day you find that everyone outside is using machine guns. At this point, your first reaction will not be why I didn't win this time, but you will start to suspect that I will probably not be able to beat 10,000 times. Zhang Hanjin said.
"Dark Zone Breakout" is also a breakthrough of the Rubik's Cube
Before the "Chicken War", the largest project that the Rubik's Cube had was only a few dozen people. Each project can bring everyone together every morning to meet and synchronize the progress of the project, without the need for complex project management tools and methodologies. Photon did the first edition of PUBG MOBILE and organized a team of more than 300 people in three shifts. Activision Blizzard assembled a team of more than 3,000 people to develop the Call of Duty franchise, the benchmark for shooter games, hiring Hollywood stars to play villains, having former Special Forces soldiers record combat moves, and recording live guns at the shooting range.
Although he has no foundation, Zhang Hanjin feels that he must do shooting games. "We are a big factory, and we should be the number one category. It just so happened that the Rubik's Cube team also gathered a group of producers who love shooting games.
Rubik's Cube's first 3D shooter game, Ace Warrior, was released at the end of 2019, and after only one month of launch, the number of users has fallen off a cliff. Subsequently, the 3D fighting game "One Man Under the Mobile Game" based on the IP of the same name also suffered Waterloo. The entire studio is almost supported by a single game of Naruto mobile games. Feeling that the transformation was hopeless, the core backbone of many projects of the Rubik's Cube team was transferred or resigned, and there were rumors that the studio was going to be disbanded.
In this context, Rubik's Cube launched its third impact on the shooting category - "Dark Zone Breakout" was established and developed as scheduled in 2019. This is an extremely niche and hardcore tactical gambling shooter with extremely niche gameplay.
The Rubik's Cube, which has experienced many failures, has a new production methodology. The biggest change occurs in the project approval process, and if each project of the Rubik's Cube wants to be successfully approved, it must be able to answer three questions clearly: first, who are the core users, second, whether these core users can be reached, and third, whether the team has the ability to make the game.
"Past experience has taught us that niche is not scary, at least the goal is clear. What I'm most afraid of is that I want everything as soon as I come up. Eric said. He is the head of business management for the Rubik's Cube Studio Group, overseeing the project initiation, budgeting and process of all projects.
Rubik's Cube dispatched the best teams from its subordinate studios to do "Dark Zone Breakout", "Everyone is highly nervous, they have to make a small report every week, a big report every two weeks, and the boss will discuss every product link in detail." Zhang Bo, head of human resources of the Rubik's Cube Studio Group, told LatePost.
The project was able to start because of a series of previous failures.
Before the launch of Dark Zone Breakout, Rubik's Cube had already accumulated 3D action capabilities through the shooting game "Ace Warrior" and the action game "Under One Man". Before Ace Warrior, Rubik's Cube also made the 2D shooter Indie Line. None of them were successful, but Zhang Hanjin came to the conclusion that engineering growth can be independent of the success of game projects. The success of a game is often related to timing, but without engineering skills, the timing will not be seized.
In 2018, Tencent took a stake in the French game giant Ubisoft and organized various game studios to study Xi at Ubisoft. Experts from various functional teams of the Rubik's Cube went to stay for more than a week.
There, they began to learn how Xi set up a modern game development organization. At that time, the Rubik's Cube team saw one of Ubisoft's most prominent management methods, the "two-line supervisor" model - the game's producer is responsible for R&D, engineering, and technology, and the creative director is responsible for the plot and design, and the two people are like producers and directors, not subordinate to each other, and report directly to management. Ubisoft's idea is that no one is omnipotent, especially when a project team grows larger and larger, even reaching hundreds of people, and the professional division of labor becomes extremely important.
That's why many of Ubisoft's games don't just come from one studio, but from their own studios and a number of affiliated studios. The main studio leads the project and is responsible for the core modules, while the subordinate studios are responsible for a separate pipeline according to their strengths, such as the Singapore team for the naval battle module, the Shanghai team for the in-game animal module, and so on.
After returning to China, Rubik's Cube set up a project management center independent of all front-line project teams, which controls the process, budget and other links of each project in a unified manner, and the person in charge reports directly to Zhang Hanjin. In contrast, most studios' project management teams are closed on a specific project, with the person in charge reporting to the game producer. The purpose of this is to maintain the engineering management level of all projects at a roughly equivalent level, and second, to strengthen the central management, "only when the rules are set, under this framework, the top management will be relieved to fully release and stimulate the creativity of the team." A Rubik's Cube project manager told LatePost.
The original gameplay and art style of Dark Zone Breakout were borrowed from Russian studio Battlestate's Escape from Tarkov. This is not a category that Tencent's mainstream R&D system would consider in the past: the gameplay is hardcore, trying to simulate tactical shooting, there is no crosshair on the screen when the player runs forward, and Tencent's ace product CF can even be automatically aimed; As a result, players need to assess what equipment they should bring with them and how much they should risk to get supplies before entering each round.
Before the launch of Dark Zone Breakout, the project team reported the progress and demo (the initial version) several times, but because the gameplay was so niche and complex, "sometimes you could see the confusion in their eyes." Said one participant.
In Dark Zone Breakout, the player runs forward without a crosshair on the screen
It's not a logical business choice either. If PUBG has the potential to be a national game on PC, tens of millions of people log in every day. Escape from Tarkov has always been a niche game, with only a few hundred thousand players online.
Onrry, the producer of Dark Zone Breakout, told LatePost that he chose this direction because he liked it, and secondly, because the core members of the team wanted to make a tactical shooter that was highly immersive and brought more flow. Under these two criteria, they have eliminated the traditional shooter and fantasy style models.
When doing early player research, the Rubik's Cube research team used the "ease of use" criterion to evaluate its potential, and the results were quite negative. Most reviews agree that the game is too "hardcore". The Dark Zone Breakout team questioned, "If every game is played like a chicken or a MOBA, then of course it's easy to learn, but does that prove that the game has a lot of potential?"
Later, it was proposed to simplify the models of various guns and bullets in the game, as well as the types of body armor and protective gear, so as to reduce the cost of learning Xi players. After some discussion, the production team still stuck with the original setting, keeping the original setting to make it more fun for players who delve into it - the game includes 80 guns in 7 categories, more than 1,000 modification accessories, body armor, helmets, bomb hangers and other equipment.
Tencent's previous games will also ensure a certain level of complexity, such as "Honor of Kings" at first, in order to lower the threshold, adjusted 5 VS 5 to 3 VS 3, but finally changed back, because players felt that it was too lacking in depth after playing. But it is the first time that Tencent has done a game with such a high threshold for entry as "Dark Zone Breakout".
Before its launch, Dark Zone Breakout was tested for a year, with hundreds of thousands of users pouring in every day, and the team had to maintain three versions at the same time, which was costly and extremely patient. This broke Tencent's previous record for game testing time and changed the long-standing testing methodology at this cutting-edge. "With new users, we needed more people to be able to play earlier, and then tell us the real sound, and we tested it for a year as it was. The producer of "Dark Zone Breakout" explained.
The turning point came on the day of the game's official open beta, when 8 million new users suddenly poured in, "the group promptly set up a group for the main creative team and asked them what resources they needed." Said the above-mentioned person. This is a long-awaited victory for Tencent, a company that has not had a game with its own IP set such a record as soon as it was launched.
This game is a real breakthrough for the Rubik's Cube. With the launch of the overseas version of "Arena Breakout", Rubik's Cube has accumulated hundreds of millions of registered users around the world, and has changed from a children's leisure community product and a "Naruto" mobile game fighting game to a mainstream team that can participate in the competition of shooting games.
The success of Dark Zone Breakout has caused a lot of discussion at Tencent Games, "It is considered a more pure product-style victory and innovation." A Tencent game person said.
"How much success is success?"
Tencent's main revenue and profits come from games, but it is still an Internet company, not a game company like Ubisoft and Activision Blizzard. For a long time, all its mechanisms and organizations have pursued the success of the game from uncertain creative competition to definite system competition: through the agency release of massive games, rapid traffic realization; through investment or acquisition of top teams in the industry at home and abroad, obtain the top game IP or the most popular gameplay, and then adapt it into mobile games; and finally rely on WeChat and QQ to reach every Chinese to fully promote.
According to the 2022 data of China's game industry released by the Game Working Committee of the China Audio and Digital Association, the actual sales revenue of China's game market fell by more than 10% year-on-year, and the actual sales revenue of the mobile game market fell by more than 14% year-on-year. After the industry entered the era of stock, the opportunity for someone to pay for a random game no longer exists.
After hundreds of millions of players experience the wave of national games, they also have higher requirements for games. More and more fields that were once considered niche are emerging, such as two-dimensional and female-oriented games. These games attract players more through story, content than gameplay, and the Chinese game industry seems to be about to become what the European and American game industry looks like – an unstable IP and content creation business. The reputation and player base that have been accumulated over the years of success can be severely damaged by a single failure. "Diablo 4", "Cyberpunk 2077", and "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3" are all works that mainstream game companies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in for several years, but have a poor reputation after launch.
Douyin, which has 700 million daily active users, and Bilibili, which has 100 million daily active users, has given game companies more sources of traffic. A NetEase source told "LatePots" that the success of "Egg Boy Party" and "Street Basketball" is largely due to the team's understanding of Douyin's traffic. It is understood that the number of daily active users of "Egg Boy Party" can reach 30 million on the weekend, second only to Tencent's "Glory of Kings" and "Peace Elite", and it is also the first big DAU game with daily lives of more than 10 million since the establishment of NetEase.
In the new industry landscape, the game companies that can stand out have similar characteristics - they grow up in an environment with limited resources, they can't pursue big opportunities and certainty, and they can't cast a wide net and only invest in a limited number of tracks. But it is precisely because of this that they realize the importance of accumulation and learn to reconcile with failure earlier.
Typical example is miHoYo, which has made three games since 2013: "Honkai Impact School", "Honkai Impact School 2" and "Honkai Impact 3", and finally accumulated technology, management experience and funds to make "Genshin Impact" and "Honkai: Star Dome Railway". In this process, miHoYo was once forced to terminate its listing because its profitability was questioned.
The same goes for the Rubik's Cube. In the era of mobile games, it has no successful IP and gameplay to inherit, because the team started as a browser game, so all the technology needs to be accumulated from zero to one, and even when competing for Tencent's internal traffic, it has never had an advantage.
"At the right time, and there are enough resources and capacity reserves, this kind of is too hard to find. Zhang Hanjin said.
After missing the "Chicken" battle, Zhang Hanjin did an in-depth review with the team, and he believes that everything starts with admitting defeat. At that time, the basic plate of the Rubik's Cube was: if you lose, you lose, but fortunately, you didn't lose it all. The remaining two ways out are: first, although new opportunities do not know when they will appear, the Rubik's Cube can and must prepare engineering capabilities in advance, and second, it is possible to break through only by doing more radical and cutting-edge things.
Based on these two points, the team must give up the so-called success rate and stable ROI, even if a project ultimately fails because of the aggressive gameplay, as long as it can improve the team's industrialization ability, the Rubik's Cube must invest without hesitation. Later, "Ace Warrior" and "Under One Man" were unsuccessful, but they gave Rubik's Cube the engineering ability to make large-scale 3D mobile games.
"The path is planned, the difficulties are thought of in advance, and even the amount of investment in new product research and development is based on the premise that the product in operation can bear the breakeven, and the current situation is a matter of coming early and coming late. Zhang Hanjin told "LatePost".
The success of the Rubik's Cube also has its own peculiarities – always being out of the spotlight. 6 years after the "Naruto" mobile game, the Rubik's Cube experienced many failures before finally making "Dark Zone Breakout".
A Tencent game person who has participated in the report of the general office many times told "LatePost" that the situation of the Rubik's Cube has been very difficult for several years, and several failed products have been made in a row, but none of them have been seriously challenged at the general office meeting. Conversely, stronger teams are more stressed. "The boss is not comparing absolute values, but expectations. ”
"When nothing was done, the company still gave the most critical time. I can only convince myself that the boss still has expectations for the Rubik's Cube, and what is rare is to give time. Zhang Hanjin said. What he does is to ensure that the entire group of studios does not lose money, and to gain rare freedom in large companies through exploration and trial and error at a manageable cost.
The self-financing of each studio group allows Tencent Games to compete in the market internally, avoiding the bureaucratic decisions that are common in large companies and affecting game creativity. However, such a strong result orientation has led to employees being willing to work on more stable and profitable projects, such as developing and releasing a game that has a successful precedent. "It's easy to understand that you are willing to go to "Honor of Kings" instead of innovation, after all, innovation is a highly uncertain thing. A Tencent game person said. Employees who make innovative products are also often worried about how big they have to do to make their careers recognized under the glory of "Honor of Kings" and "Peace Elite", and whether there is such an opportunity today.
At the beginning of this year, at the staff meeting of Tencent's Interactive Entertainment Group (IEG), Zhang Hanjin asked himself: "How successful is success?" It seems that this is also what most people in the game industry want to ask.
Title image source: "Pixel Wars"