According to insiders, Tencent IEG held an online staff meeting yesterday (January 8).
At the meeting, in addition to Mark, Steven and other senior executives on the future prospects, Colin, Jerry, Enzo, Ethan and other studio owners also took the stage one by one to introduce their respective team's project plans for the next 1-5 years.
A Tencent employee said that Ma Xiaoyi, senior vice president of Tencent Group, mentioned at the meeting that the current task of IEG is to keep the fundamentals and test the waters through the replacement of new and old projects or new track products. The upcoming "White Thorn Corridor" falls into this category.
It is worth noting that Tencent Games has announced a new management mechanism: the Spring Bamboo Shoot Plan - to promote the establishment of more small and medium-sized projects.
The mechanism has two incentives:
1. Increase investment in new opportunities, new ways to play, and potential vertical games;
2. Encourage the growth of young talents, and give more incentives according to product performance.
It can be seen that the Spring Bamboo Shoot Plan aims to optimize IEG's product reserve structure in the future, and it is also an attempt to motivate talents.
An acquaintance close to Tencent Games mentioned that Tencent had previously bet too much resources on high-return large products and achieved some results, but large projects also had problems such as high cost and long cycle.
Now, on the basis of the previous large projects, IEG has added the tactic of running in small steps, using more small and medium-sized projects to seize market opportunities. If the product achieves excellent results after the launch, the company will give additional bonuses and commendations.
In the past two years, there has been a change in the industry: everyone is looking for a direction with lower cost and more market demand.
Previously, everyone was working on some high-cost big projects.
As far as the project is concerned, XD CEO Huang Yimeng once sighed: "Now the R&D cost in Shanghai is really very high, and it is normal for each project to be 100 million a month - 100 million in one year and 200 million in two years, but if you think about it, how can the current project be completed in two years?"
Gu Yu, deputy general manager of Tencent's NExT Studios, predicted in the middle of the year that in the future, the project R&D cost of more than 1 billion yuan will no longer be big news. As a result, in less than half a year, the 1 billion project stood up in a queue.
According to NetEase's official announcement, the "Against the Water and Cold Mobile Game" that has been launched, the "Condor Shooting" that has obtained the version number, and the "Seven Days World", which has just announced the launch plan within the year, have all smashed or are expected to invest more than 1 billion yuan;
Part of the high cost comes from manpower. Previously, many teams thought that as long as they spent money to grab high-end talents, they could make good games. This also sparked a talent war in the previous two years. Compared with overseas, the salary level of the domestic game industry has been raised too high.
Game development is also a burning business. In order to buy cognition, the team has to spend money on team training and pipeline construction. A producer from a major factory told me that he had a budget book in hand, and when the project reached the stage of rollout, as soon as the team was expanded, he watched the numbers soar, which made people panic.
The other part comes from the challenge. Tingyu, the producer of "Against the Water and Cold Mobile Game", mentioned that it is normal for the project to be increased - sometimes, seeing that something in the market is popular with players, I want to make it myself, but as a result, I have to increase it in a year or two as soon as I do it.
Especially after the success of Genshin Impact and the open world, many people felt that they could do it, and then invested more...... This is to spend tens of millions of dollars.
Taking 10,000 steps back, even if you don't invest blindly, you will experience a very painful investment in building your own pipeline and facing the challenges of the market. A producer from a major factory mentioned that in order to introduce the pipelines and tools of 3A products, they had to spend 5 times or 10 times the time to debug, which was "very painful".
Pinching your fingers, now is the node where these 1 billion projects have appeared, and it is also the time when those large-scale investment projects are quietly cut.
A well-known company in Beijing, a single product has run through billions of turnovers, and it has predicted the trend of industry transformation early. I set up about 10 UE items in one go, shooting, female-oriented, MOBA...... It cost a small 10000000000000 before and after, and now the projects are almost all cut.
A Shanghai middle factory has previously opened a number of two-dimensional game R&D lines, and some projects have to be designed against "Genshin Impact". Now that many projects have been cut, the company has experienced 2-3 rounds of employee layoffs within a year, and another round of optimization list has been issued at the end of the past year. The project that benchmarked the design and was barely launched has also fallen out of the list and will not be found again.
The closer perception is undoubtedly light years of morning and night. Even after years of experimentation, the company finally got the results of "Crystal Nucleus", but they still lost patience and chose to gradually withdraw from the market.
One argument is that money is not a problem, but that the domestic game industry is growing too fast, and everyone is actually not ready for these big projects.
On the one hand, there is team management. Gu Yu mentioned earlier that large projects need large-scale talent support. But not everyone is miHoYo, "miHoYo can manage a team of thousands of people, that's a miracle, I really admire this ability...... Our limit, in fact, is to manage two or three hundred people at the same time. ”
On the other hand, there are market opportunities. Gu Yu believes that the market order of the previous era has collapsed, and what will be successful in the next era? No one knows the bottom of their hearts, so every team is busy groping. But nowadays, the cost of involution is too high, and none of the projects are easy, and most of them have been cut.
A friend who specializes in game investment told me that they no longer look at ambitious projects, especially those teams that claim to do how good the quality is, "These are essentially to fight a resource war, but miHoYo is there for them, who are you going to spend resources with?"
So now, the industry may also be squeezing into the bubble that was expanded by the original boom and returning to a stage of exploration.
CP, the producer of the mobile game "Counter War", believes that it will be a good choice to find a direction with lower cost and more market demand. "The game industry just needs a lot of investment, trial and error, and it will get healthier and healthier. In the end, everyone will settle down and do what they are best at and what they want to do the most. In fact, every genre has opportunities, and the key is what the creative team wants to do, whether it can be done, and this determines the ultimate success or failure. ”
Perhaps, the spring bamboo shoot plan released by Tencent Games now is a return to similar exploration.