In the past two years, "change" and "transformation" have become high-frequency words in the game industry.
Vice President of Sanqi Games He Yang said that they are going to launch a reform of All in diversified high-quality products. "There is no question of whether we are determined or not. This is a matter of life and death." Xishanju CEO Guo Weiwei said that before, the company only They know how to make a martial arts MMO, but in order to change they have established more than three two-dimensional projects, "they must step out." In 2019, Tencent executives invited the bosses of several studio groups to start a " The self-research capability upgrade meeting launched the third reform of the self-research business in 16 years.
’s traffic bonus has become less, users’ complaints about routines have increased, and “Genshin Impact” has ranked first in global revenue... Undercurrents are surging, and big ships are changing channels in the direction of "industrialization" and "differentiation", just for the sake of Despite the wind and waves, we still stand upright.
In this wave of transformation, who will be left behind? Who has a chance? Underneath the tide lies the deepest and most urgent hopes and worries of this generation of game companies.
Industrialization
In this era, "industrialization" has almost become a common keyword for large and medium-sized game companies. How important is
industrialization? Tencent Senior Vice President Ma Xiaoyi gave an example: They once took a scene of a certain 3A game, asked the best outsourcing company to estimate it, and found that its cost was US$200,000-250,000; but a mature 3A team But it may only cost 20,000 to 30,000 US dollars - which means a huge cost gap.
And this year, "Genshin Impact", which cost more than 100 million US dollars, has deepened the industry's understanding of this issue. Huang Yimeng, CEO of Xindong Network, believes that products such as " Shenxiandao" and "Dota Legend" once made the industry swallow poison pills, making everyone think that low-cost projects can also be successful; copying the high-cost model of "Genshin Impact" It is conducive to the development of the industry. Following his logical deduction, industrialization is the prerequisite for high costs.
"Genshin Impact"
In order to achieve industrialization, many companies are restructuring their R&D processes.
Take Sanqi Game as an example. Their previous hit " Eternal Era " hardly used the mid-to-high-end features of Unity 3D, while the recent "Douluo Dalu 3D" used PBR. In the words of producer Xiaofeng, they could make a map in more than a month before, but now it takes 4-6 months from original painting to model, scene objects and lighting adjustment.
Huang Yimeng said that Xindong co-founder Dai Yunjie’s corporate WeChat signature is “2D game planners use Excel to make games, and 3D game planners use engines to make games.” Because in the past few years, they discovered that the company had been using Excel to make games. The game is just beginning to learn how to use the engine.
The exciting "Torchlight: Infinite"
Affected by this, engine capabilities have become the pursuit of many companies. Vivi, a senior headhunter, said that the most in-demand programming positions are engine, UE4, TA and middle office. New leading companies such as Lilith, Folding Paper, MiHoYo and Xindong all have UE4 projects. Even IPs like "Miracle for All 2" also use UE4. You can imagine the popularity of the industry.
Even Tencent and NetEase , which are industrialized enough in the eyes of many people, are building more complex production pipelines through investment exchanges and self-built teams to catch up with overseas host manufacturers. For example, NetEase has established Sakura Studio, which focuses on console game development. Its person in charge is the former development director of Bandai Namco Studio; while Tencent's Photon is using UE4 to develop an open-world shooting game "Codename: SYN" , which targets PCs and consoles worldwide.
Photon's "Codename: SYN"
In order to ensure the efficiency of industrialization, game companies need to face endless details. Guo Weiwei said that Xishanju needs to ensure the orderly iteration of the production pipeline without reducing production. For this reason, the engine team and art team in their middle office have dedicated teams that are not responsible for production and are dedicated to running new processes. "So the investment in R&D is huge."
What's even more troublesome is that the cycle to achieve industrialization is also difficult to determine.Yao Runhao, CEO of Foldpaper Network, said that it took a whole year to adjust the 3D effects of " shining warm ": "Originally, the team said they could research this thing in one month, but after one month, they told you: life has fallen into a trap. Desperate, but it feels like I can still give it a try... If you are someone who particularly considers cost-effectiveness, how long would you say it takes to try? But we will always try our best to try again! Try. 》
In order to pursue industrialization, game companies are bound to pay a huge price. A CEO of a leading company said that they had disbanded a team with a cost of more than 50 million, and doubled the budget for new projects. In the end, they achieved the result of "not falling behind in R&D strength." Many projects have also introduced talents who have worked on console game teams such as "Red Dead Redemption" and "God of War". Their salaries are not difficult to imagine.
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But can throwing money solve the problem? It's hard to say. In the words of Wang Yi, CEO of Zilong Games, "Money is just a guarantee. It also involves the creator's aesthetics, professional skills, project management capabilities and related middle-end construction. If the foundation is not enough, no matter how much money you have, it will not translate into quality. Because you don’t have the ability to digest money. "
The cost is high, the effect is difficult to guarantee, and the cycle is difficult to determine... However, the production pipelines of friendly companies have been changing with each passing day. More than one practitioner told me that "Genshin Impact" has caused a lot of trouble to their boss. Big impact. No matter how difficult the process is, game companies must bite the bullet and catch up with the tide of the times. This is the fate of the industrial age.
Differentiation
If the transformation to "industrialization" is easy to understand, then the transformation to "differentiation" is a more complicated topic. Why does
pursue differentiation? The reason is simple: the new generation of players no longer buy into the old art style, content expression and gameplay routines.
As Yedao Games CEO Bao Weiwei said, “middle-class players” are now taking control of the discourse. “They have good income and cultural level, don’t like particularly low-level games, and pursue a certain aesthetic taste... You can start from TapTap’s list This trend can be seen in the products on the Internet.” So in every aspect, game companies are thinking about how to make differences. At the beginning of
, the two-dimensional + high investment represented the understanding of differentiated art by most traditional companies - just look at the quality of the original paintings of "Flowers in the Mirror of Mountains and Seas", "The Interpreter of Gods" and "Three Kingdoms Fantasy Continent". There are even rumors that a well-established R&D company in Beijing offers an annual salary of tens of millions to the art director of its two-dimensional project.
"The Interpreter of Gods"
In order to keep up with the pace of this wave of transformation, the art center of Sanqi Games began to change in 2017. They split the original painting into two teams: design and painting. They will also regularly find paintings, models, We hold weekly meetings on special effects and scenes to conduct preliminary research on the art style of virtual projects. The original painting below is the product of four painters.
And this year, "Hundred Scenes of Jiangnan" made the industry discover the importance of stylization. However, Yedao CEO Bao Weiwei said that there are too few artists who can create differentiated art styles: "Many old artists who have worked for more than 5-6 years have been taken too far by the routines of MMOs, cards and legends. Drawing an MMO , they can find a lot of references; but if they draw a small town in the south of the Yangtze River, they may not be able to create something.” It seems that if they want to transform in this direction, it may take more time.
In addition to art, many companies are also pursuing differentiation in content expression, that is, twisting a series of designs such as art, character design, plot, and UI into one rope, allowing it to enter the underlying structure of the game and become the core charm.
Tencent has been accumulating “World Building” internally, which is the ability to build a real and perceptible world. To this end, they gathered resources such as domestic and foreign university professors, historians and mechanical experts, established a knowledge base, and found mentors to provide relevant training.
Li Xue, the copywriting team leader of NetEase's "One Dream Jianghu", said in the sharing that they will use the standards of film and television dramas to require plot creation. For example, the story must have the succession and transition of emotional rhythms, a clear climax design, and triggers. The idea and theme of empathy or thinking.
However, for medium-sized companies, resources and methodologies are secondary. The lack of talents is the biggest problem, because there are too few designers with deep experience. A senior practitioner told me that when communicating with Hai Mao, the producer of "Arknights", he was almost dizzy with the various works and proper nouns: "With this amount of knowledge, I feel that I have to make up for the work Too many."
In addition to appearance and content, many companies are also exploring differentiated gameplay. To give just a few examples, Changyou has made "Sea of Dawn", Dianhun has made "My Knight", and NetEase is making a stealth confrontation game with a spy movie theme... Even traditional MMO manufacturers often have to take Only by creating a sandbox/development world can you show yourself off.
In order to ensure that differentiated projects can be produced, many companies are also changing their project establishment and project management processes. Two years ago, a Youzu executive once said that if the product cannot achieve 30% differentiation, the product cannot be launched. Almost all bosses are thinking about the possibility of encouraging innovation from the bottom up.
General Manager of Tencent’s Self-Research System Management Department Charlene once told me that if the studio group is willing to try a gameplay that is not available on the market and passes the review, the company can bear the research and development costs of the project. For example, IGN's 8.5-point " infinite rule " is a beneficiary of this policy called Creative Review.
"Infinite Rules"
Guo Weiwei said at the beginning of the year that Xishanju will not only determine the direction for each studio, but also regularly holds entrepreneurial competitions within the company. If the proposal wins, the company will give it to up to 10 people, and it will take about 2 months to incubate. If it is valuable, the project will be officially approved.
Among all systems, bonus distribution is the biggest pain point of differentiated projects. According to the CEO of a company, if the differentiation projects are allocated too much, members of the revenue pillar team will definitely have objections; if the differentiation projects are allocated too little, no one is willing to take the risk.
In order to solve this problem, Sanqi Games no longer sets profit as the first KPI. Instead, it allows management to set incentives based on product creativity, category development and other indicators, and encourages each project with good revenue to establish differences. oriented projects; for some key projects in Xindong, we try to give the profits to research and development in advance to improve everyone’s basic treatment. Of course, more bosses are still afraid to make changes easily and try to observe the effects of reforms in other companies first.
To be honest, even after so many efforts, most companies have not yet come up with differentiated products that have particularly good results. But the thoughts of Dianhun Network CEO Yu Xiaoliang should be the consensus of the industry: "There are too many products on the market that can be figured out in 10 minutes, and users have begun to hate these things... In 3-5 years, the world of creative games will be , If you start the layout now, it will be over. "Who will be left behind in the transformation of
? Who has a chance?
There is no doubt that the game companies that have survived to this day have seen the direction of the tide. Everyone is stepping out of their comfort zone and looking for ways to transform.
But the problem is that in this changing situation, Tencent and NetEase have the capital to keep up with the times; companies such as MiHoYo and Lilith have taken advantage of the situation to rise; medium-sized companies like Eagle Point and Celadon have also begun to segment the market, leaving The window of opportunity for traditional game companies may not be too many.
What is even more elusive is that the logic of capital’s judgment on game stocks is also changing, which may also accelerate the process of some companies falling behind.
Out of the emphasis on industrialization, capital increasingly values a company's R&D capabilities rather than pure revenue and profits. A well-known fund manager once said on Weibo that a major company ranks among the top companies in terms of profit and market value in the domestic gaming industry, but has never independently produced and operated a blockbuster mobile game. In the middle of the year, the list performance and reputation of one of their IP masterpieces were not as good as expected, so the funds lost confidence and "ran away like crazy", and its stock price also embarked on a journey of halving.
At the same time, companies such as Bilibili and Xindong have also made capital aware of the power of Generation Z stories. Under this logic, every time an established company launches a differentiated new product (such as the two-dimensional version) , the stock price will fluctuate; and every time the reputation of these products collapses, the stock price will plummet again - you should be able to think of many examples .
Schematic diagram of stock price fluctuations after a company's new product has a reputation crisis. Of course, correlation does not mean causation.
For established manufacturers, awareness and speed are the biggest thresholds for transformation. Tan Yanfeng, vice president of Shengqu Games, once told Putaojun that from a personal perspective, he was worried that Shengqu could not keep up with changes in the industry. "In the next few years, the main users will be those born after 2000. The first thing I worry about is turning a blind eye to this change, and the second thing is seeing the inability to change." This may be because they have made several two-dimensional models and acquired The reason is Rui Luo, the developer of "Komori Life".
"Komori Life" OP
For traffic-based companies, if they want to achieve industrialization and differentiation, they must show greater determination to get rid of inertia. For example, the CEO of a South China company believes that a volume-buying company does not have the genes for R&D. Even if it spends several hundred million, it will be difficult to transform quickly: "In R&D, I invest 10 million today and get tens of millions in three years; but volume-buying is It’s short and fast. I invested 1 million today and will get back 500,000 tomorrow. I can’t even wait for the payment the day after tomorrow.”
For those companies that have already made great achievements in differentiation, if they want to achieve greater success, they still have to do it. There are some thorny issues to solve, such as payment. Thunder Games has been paying attention to the Roguelike category since 2017. CEO Zhai Jian said that the team has been thinking about the combination of differentiation and commercialization, but he still feels that "in terms of commercial design, our understanding may be at the elementary school level."
Transformation On the road, people inevitably feel anxious and hesitant. To borrow the words of Gao Liandun, the president of iDreamSky, many game companies were born in an era of stasis. According to experience before 2012, as long as you are smart enough to find users who have never played games, you can make a lot of money; and if you start a business in 2016, you will make fun games from the beginning, and there is no need to consider changes.
Sometimes I have a feeling: Of course we have built this building very high and successfully, but it will become more and more difficult to build it higher. Now you ask me to build a new building, and I need to spend more time.
Everyone knows that the industry is at a point of change, but in this era of chaos, "Black Myth: Wukong" can be highly sought after, and the Legend of Big Wings is also making money fiercely. The mortal world is turbid and the water is flowing, and it is hard to tell who can take advantage of the situation to soar up, and who looks decent on the outside, but is actually struggling desperately.
In 2005, "Home Computers and Games" published an interview with Yao Xiaoguang. At that time, he was still in Shanda and Tianmei had not yet been born. However, the remarks at the end of that article are very suitable to become a footnote of this era:
When we, the immature ones, join the immature Chinese game research and development industry, no one can say that we are successful. The only thing we can do is to redouble our efforts. . We are all second- and third-grade elementary school students. Even if we are somewhat famous in China, even if we have been developing for 5 or 6 years, we are still elementary school students. It’s just that some are in second grade, some are in third grade, and some are still in preschool. Everyone is studying, and we are not qualified to compare or show off. The only thing you can do is study hard, accumulate more, and strive to graduate early.
