How long has it been since you've been following WeGame? Over the past few years, I've often felt that it was a somewhat peculiar and awkward existence.
I still remember that in 2017, Tencent announced that TGP (Tencent Game Platform) would be upgraded to WeGame and began to introduce stand-alone games. At that time, WeGame attracted the attention of the industry. On the one hand, it shows an unusual temperament - the person in charge has said that WeGame does not have any KPIs in terms of revenue, and does not consider commercial interests for a while.
On the other hand, everyone sees it as a strong competitor to Steam. Foreign media Eurogamer once said, "WeGame has 200 million users in China, and Steam is a drop in the bucket compared to it." "Don't Starve, the first product introduced by WeGame, has really lived up to expectations, selling more than 1 million sales in the first month.
However, due to the lack of supply of terminal games, the overall domestic market developed towards mobile games, and the momentum of WeGame gradually calmed down. Many of its attempts, such as exploring overseas WeGame and Handheld WeGame, ended up failing in corners that everyone may not have noticed. In the eyes of more players, WeGame is still just a "League of Legends launcher", which does not seem to be fundamentally different from the TGP of the year.
But what you may not expect is that with the revival of PC online games in the past two years and the trend of multi-terminal mobile games, WeGame has found its own path - "to be the best platform for PC GaaS games". This has allowed their user activity to rise steadily for 3 consecutive years, and the user scale has covered 3/4 of PC players in China, and the MAU reached 61 million last summer, a new high in the past 4 years.
Vito, Director of Product and Publishing for WeGame, and Demon, Head of Product, told me that they had figured it out now: WeGame can't be Steam, and it doesn't need to be Steam. I'm curious about how their strategic shift has happened, and how they see the trend of multi-terminal GaaS games and mobile games. So, we have the following conversation:
(The content has been organized and adjusted)
01 You don't need to be Steam
Grape Jun: I feel like WeGame hasn't spoken to the public for a long time, and everyone's impression of you may still be on Chinese Steam.
Vito: A few years ago, when it came to WeGame, there were indeed a lot of people who ridiculed it like this. But in the past two years, we have clearly realized that WeGame cannot become Steam, and it does not need to become Steam.
Grape: Let's talk about this strategic change from the beginning, why did you invest so much resources in single-player games back then?
Vito: Subjectively speaking, there must be a certain love factor in starting to make a stand-alone game platform. Until now, most of our colleagues on the team have been solo players. Objectively, at that time, we judged that there was indeed an opportunity point, and it may be an outlet.
Around 2016, we found that there were more Chinese users of Steam, and everyone could access many games that they had never seen before, but from the perspective of the general public, there were still a large number of players who did not know about Steam. At that time, Steam still had a lot of thresholds, and the payment and network were not convenient. And it just so happens that TGP already has 70 or 80 million active users, but it has only provided Tencent's terminal games before, so we thought that since players like it, why not bring those high-quality overseas stand-alone machines to the players on the platform.
As a result, TGP upgraded to WeGame in 2017 and introduced its first product, Don't Starve, which exceeded all expectations - selling more than 1 million copies in its first month, considering that it has been sold on Steam for a long time. At that time, we were even more determined: it turned out that there was really such a big demand from users, and if we could introduce more overseas large-scale games, or even launch them at the same time, the effect might be even better.
Grape Jun: But I didn't expect that it would be more and more difficult to introduce the terminal game later.
Vito: On the one hand, it takes a long time to introduce it, and on the other hand, the domestic market has shifted from terminal games to mobile games, and there are fewer and fewer new content on the platform.
This stage from 2018 to 2021 was very painful, with WeGame users losing and the team under a lot of pressure. When there is enough content on the platform, even if we don't make money, as long as the users can continue to grow, the business model can still be established. But once the user declines, this is fatal for the platform product.
Grape Jun: So at that time, you were exploring overseas and mobile markets?
Vito: Yes, but it's all a passive expansion forced to survive, and when I see any fire, I plunge into it, and I don't think about it in detail enough. For example, what is our core competitiveness on mobile, and when we go to overseas markets, do overseas users really need a Steam? In retrospect, there have been a lot of facts that show that users don't need a new TapTap and Steam.
In addition, affected by the epidemic, the user scale of WeGame Internet cafes will also decline seriously in 2020, and the overall DAU will fall off a cliff.
Most Internet products, once they enter a downward cycle, are difficult to reverse. The biggest problem we faced at that time was how to make WeGame cross the cycle and rediscover its user value, and the last thing that came to mind was: insist on doing what we do best and better serve PC GaaS games.
Grape: How did you derive this?
Vito: We've been doing publishing for the past few years. We found that Steam is very friendly to the backend service and automation access for copy-selling games, but it is not so convenient for GaaS games.
For example, if an online game wants to do a regional test with 2,000 people first, it is difficult for Steam to achieve a limited and accurate introduction, or a sub-regional test, which has to go through a series of cumbersome processes.
For example, when we released "Edge of Rebirth" on Steam last year, we encountered a bug and clicked the release button, but the game could not be downloaded on the Internet, so we could only write an email to customer service and wait a few hours for them to help solve it. For an online game, this is an operational accident, and you can imagine how anxious everyone was at that time.
It is undeniable that Steam is a very geeky platform, and its standardized process is particularly good, but this is obviously different from Chinese Internet products, and we are better at service.
After finding this differentiated direction, we feel that since WeGame itself is mostly online games, the road of stand-alone machines will not work, and there is no need to compete with Steam for products and users.
So around 2021, we began to develop in this direction, refactoring WeGame's underlying services to help GaaS games better access and operation on the platform. In fact, it is difficult for us to predict when the terminal game market will pick up, and the launch of "Ark of Destiny" and "Valorant" will bring such big changes. In fact, when you do the right thing, you will naturally be rewarded by the market, and when the opportunity comes, you can seize it immediately.
02 Serve the market demand
Grape: When did you realize that serving GaaS games was the right path?
Vito: When I connected to Final Fantasy 14, the first Tencent external online game. At that time, the "Final Fantasy 14" national server was in version 3.0, and the data was declining a bit, but it just so happened that Tencent and Shengqu were long-term partners, and after we found each other, we quickly hit it off. Later, version 4.0, the game was connected to WeGame, and the data was also raised.
Guild Wars 2 is the same. At that time, it was difficult for this product to operate in China, and at that time, European and American MMOs were generally not very popular in China, although now everyone has re-embraced this type, but if it can't get through that difficult cycle, the product may be gone. At that time, after Guild Wars 2 entered WeGame, the data more than doubled, and it still has a strong vitality to this day.
Grape Jun: Specifically, what role did WeGame play?
Vito: First of all, the user reach is very straightforward. As practitioners, we always think that there are so many good online games in the market, don't players know that? But in fact, even now, the information of the public players is still not so smooth.
Back then, manufacturers issued online games, and they needed to go to the media and portals to advertise, and now they also have to go to station B to post videos, and the number of millions of hits may be very high, but WeGame has tens of millions of users a month, and the download conversion can be completed within the platform, and the path is very short. Therefore, many games will find that they can still get so many potential users, and old online games like "Three Kingdoms" can still achieve good results in WeGame.
Demon: When we do reach, we also do splitting based on user attributes. For example, when promoting "Ark of Destiny", we will highlight the high quality of the game and the unique gameplay of the version to the MMO "veterans", and for non-MMO users, we will push the game's world view background, cool character appearance, or wonderful actual graphics, so that potential peripheral players can also be attracted.
For example, WeGame didn't have so many two-dimensional games in the past, but before the launch of "Calabichu" last year, we made a lot of attempts to create a two-dimensional atmosphere: for example, we made a virtual image for the character in the game area, and clicked on it to play the character's CV voice;
Now, WeGame's users have gradually diversified, and everyone is not just playing one game. Just like the concept of the main game and the secondary game of a mobile game, a content-based player, or a competitive player, may continue to play Valorant or League of Legends after they have consumed a version of the content. WeGame can facilitate the conversion of these players.
Grape Jun: Like reach, or hierarchical push, is it possible for many game platforms to do it, what are the advantages of WeGame in addition to the large number of users?
Demon: In addition to user reach and refined operations, we also have deep accumulation in PC scenario products and technical support:
On the one hand, it is the assistant function to serve a single game, which is the foundation of our life all the way from the TGP era.
Like many of the games launched this year, you can clearly feel the convenience brought by the assistant. For example, Valorant is a mix of shooting and skills, relatively hardcore, and the threshold for novices is high, so we have added skill explanation videos and map points in the hero selection and game loading interface, which is convenient for novices to get started quickly;
On the other hand, in terms of the underlying technology of the platform, we have made a lot of optimizations, such as account security, download updates, and so on. When a popular MMOARPG first launched last year, the game's customer service received up to 1,000 complaints a day due to user account theft, but after we upgraded our security policy several rounds, the negative feedback basically dropped by 90%. Of course, the confrontation with the black industry is still a long-term process.
Vito: There's a two-dimensional shooter game that was very active that day after an update. When I asked, I found out that the update package was very large, with 5 G, but in fact, it was just daily maintenance, and there was no major update of the content, so the user experience was naturally not very good. This is because the R&D team is not so advanced in bag technology, and later we helped to optimize it, which basically helped them reduce the volume of the package by 2/3.
Grape Jun: But in the eyes of many people, WeGame is more about helping Tencent games do customization services. Including the products on the current platform, Tencent Games is still the mainstay. Does this mean that WeGame is now more of an in-house support department?
Vito: It's actually a market-based choice. Regardless of Tencent's internal or external projects, we have a model of in-depth cooperation, depending on the needs of the project and the cooperation model: some projects need us to assist in large-scale distribution and promotion, as well as provide various auxiliary functions to help them achieve better service results, and some products may only need to be launched on WeGame for basic access.
As for the games on WeGame, most of them are Tencent, I think it's too normal, after all, if you look at the domestic terminal game market, Tencent still accounts for a large part, and we will naturally give priority to this part of the users. Of course, we do not exclude other companies' products from accessing WeGame, like more and more mobile game teams have begun to make multi-terminal products in recent years, and we also welcome them to enter WeGame.
In fact, this is also a trend. In the past few years, there may still be some mustard between manufacturers and platforms, but now everyone will find that instead of isolating users from their head products, it is better to keep users on the platform and circulate with each other.
A while ago, we communicated with the DNF operation team and found that they can still maintain growth; one phenomenon is that although DNF players may be lost for a period of time, as long as they remain on the platform, after a period of major version updates, players can easily be pulled back when they see the version information pushed in the appropriate scenario of the platform; The faster and more direct it is delivered to the user, the easier it is to recall the user.
Therefore, in the past two years, whether it is internal or external to Tencent, few people have said that it is Tencent Games that has made WeGame, or WeGame has made Tencent Games. Essentially, content and platform are in a symbiotic relationship.
03 The recovery of terminal games is inevitable
Grape: GaaS is a topic that has been talked about in the industry in recent years, what do you think of this trend?
Vito: We can't say which direction will be right in the end, but it's interesting how the market has changed over the past two years.
In the past, everyone made a triple-A game, smashed hundreds of millions of dollars, and only saw players for five or six years, once the sales were not good, it was not a product problem, and the whole company might be gone. Even if it's as strong as CDPR, Cyberpunk 2077 almost got the company into trouble.
And when the development cost rises with the quality of the game, the price of the game will naturally become more and more expensive, which can't be helped, if it is not sold so expensive, it may not be able to return to the cost. But it's not necessarily a long-lasting business model.
Therefore, many overseas manufacturers are now exploring or embracing GaaS, such as the "Call of Duty" series, and "Destiny 2" is getting better and better after Steam changed to F2P service games. Because if a 3A quality product can make a trial version to meet users in two or three years, and quickly test iterative adjustments, it will be more controllable and safer. And whether its business model is to sell copies, DLC, or in-app purchases, it is essentially selling services.
Therefore, around 2020, our team has repeatedly emphasized that everyone should no longer distinguish between stand-alone and online games, but see whether it is a GaaS product.
Grape Jun: Do you think the terminal game market will have great potential in the future?
Demon: We've done some research and analysis before, and we found that the recovery of the PC market is a clear trend. On the one hand, the lack of offline Internet café scenes caused by the objective reasons of the epidemic in previous years is gradually recovering. On the other hand, if we look at the proportion of the version number and user scale of mobile games in the first two years, it is obvious that the PC market is more lacking in new content, so as long as new content is available, the PC market will naturally rebound.
Of course, I don't think it's easy to say how high the ceiling is. But the needs of PC users have not changed, which is why many old products can be operated for many years. Moreover, the current trend of multi-terminal mobile games is also attracting a new generation of users. For example, Genshin Impact players will find that the PC experience is so good.
Vito: Now the differentiation of mobile games is obvious, either they are getting more and more mild, like the full explosion of mini games last year, or they are becoming more and more serious, "terminal games", and the investment is similar to that of terminal games. At this stage, you will find that mobile phones are still more suitable for casual games, after all, most people have to use mobile phones to deal with miscellaneous things, and it is difficult to use them to play immersive heavy games all the time.
As a result, heavy mobile game manufacturers have found that users have a better experience on the PC side and can better present the quality of their products, and more and more heavy mobile games have begun to be multi-terminal, and then promote mobile game players to buy PC devices, and these users are not traditional "terminal game users".
Therefore, various factors are superimposed, and the recovery of the PC market is an inevitable result. Of course, no one could have predicted when it would happen until then.
Grape Jun: Do you encounter difficulties in introducing those multi-terminal products?
Vito: Definitely. Especially the new generation of manufacturers who have not been exposed to the PC side, they do not particularly know PC users, and they know little about WeGame. When we talked about cooperation in the past, they would have an inherent understanding that connected us to the mobile game channel, which is of course to be expected, after all, in the mobile game industry, the relationship between content and channel is very complex.
But we never define WeGame as a traffic store, but as a service-oriented platform, which is fundamentally different from a mobile game store:
Users of mobile game stores are more "served", users learn about the game from various content platforms, and then actively or "passively" download it through the store, which requires the project itself to have a large number of market brand promotion in the early stage or buy after launch;
In addition, users will not open the mobile game store every day and download a game, and within a certain period of time, the user will disconnect the "link" with the store;
WeGame users will log in to the platform every day, making it easier to get in touch with "new games", which can cooperate with the project to carry out brand promotion and content dissemination earlier, and even target core user testing and polishing, and at the same time, users are strongly "linked" with the platform during the entire life cycle of playing games, so that the platform can provide games with services for the full life cycle, including underlying technology, game assistants, communities, content, and commercial scene access outside the game, etc.;
It is difficult to pitch these things directly to the other party during business communication, because it is easy to become a "content and channel" inertial negotiation mode during business talks, such as "Sword and Fairy World" in cooperation with CMGE ,Actually, by chance,At a friend's dinner, we talked about the performance of the second game on WeGame,After they understood,Immediately pulled up the technical and publishing team and held a conference with us,The two sides have a strong resonance and trust in the PC side of the distribution and technical level,This two-way choice is the best。
Demon: Soon you will see more and more "new generation" multi-terminal products on WeGame, by the way, I also shout, recently (January 12) real-time multi-dimensional combat RPG game "White Thorn Corridor" launched on WeGame, I hope you will support a lot.
04 Make products, don't impose value
Grape Jun: In this update, WeGame released a sentence "WeGame More, let's be more fun together", which is equivalent to a brand upgrade?
Vito: In my personal opinion, I don't really want to define it as a brand upgrade, it just represents an iteration of the product, the iteration of layout design and functions, and the iteration makes users have a deeper impression at the same time; WeGame users like online games, so we use "More", hoping to connect them, and some sections and functions may be launched in the future, so that players can meet friends on it, brush or play games together. For another example, we recently held the "Tencent End Game Carnival" online, and together with Tencent's major end games, we will send benefits to everyone at the end of the year, so that you can play games with your friends more happily.
Secondly, I want to have a milestone that gives the team some self-affirmation, drives and guides everyone to the next stage, and sometimes does the same when doing product iterations. But that's not to say that we're going to be hyped up about how WeGame is, and I don't think we need to emphasize that to our users anymore.
Looking back now, we used to do a lot of things with enthusiasm, such as wanting to become China's Steam, or proposing "never share", saying that we would take more responsibility to help China's independent game industry. Of course, these are our intentions, but the user may not need to know these things, he thinks the product is easy to use and votes with his hands, and if he thinks it is bad, he votes with his feet, and you say that no matter how much it works, it will not work. Essentially, what we're proposing is definitely based on the platform's own demand for content, and there's no need to impose value on it.
Grape-kun: Once you impose value, it becomes very tiring.
Vito: So now that we've figured it out, WeGame doesn't need to be Steam, it doesn't have to be anything, we're just going to be ourselves and serve GaaS games well.
In fact, making a product is nothing more than expressing oneself, serving users, and keeping up with the company's strategy, and when these three values are realized, we don't care much about what others think. So in the past two years, the team has also relaxed and focused a lot.
Grape: In this way, it seems that the path you have found is really rare.
Vito: In the past two months, Tencent's values, including Pony Ma, have been repeatedly mentioned. My understanding is that when we are making plans, it is not that everyone else is doing this thing, and it is right to do it successfully, and we can't force it to do it and then use traffic to push it up.
Most of the truly meaningful products have their own core intrinsic value, and only in this way can they cross the cycle. I think the same is true of WeGame, we have gone through the stage of being a Chinese Steam, and after returning to our own value, we will find that the road is much smoother.
In the future, we will focus more on how to better provide value for the "new generation of content and users" on the basis of serving the existing content and users under the trend of multi-terminal games.